In remarks made before the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's 1996 symposium, Achieving Price Stability, Mr. King discussed how quickly a central bank should reduce inflation to its desired level following an inflationary episode. He argued that a central bank is unlikely to wish to move...

This paper uses Whiteman's(1986) frequency-domain optimization methodology to parameterize the precommitment period in a standard rational expectations policy design model. This allows researchers to adopt an empirical approach to the time consistency issue. That is, the operative commitment...