By the end of the Great Moderation, over two dozen central banks were formal inflation targeters, and others, such as the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the Swiss National Bank behaved essentially as inflation targeters even though they were resistant to identifying themselves...

In a standard New Keynesian model, a myopic central bank concerned with stabilizing inflation and changes in the output gap will implement a policy under discretion that replicates the optimal, timeless perspective, precommitment policy. By stabilizing output gap changes, the central bank...