The first part of this paper outlines the concept of democratic accountability of central banks, and compares the legal accountability of the ECB with some other central banks (Bank of Canada, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System). In the second part, we present a theory...

In a comment on our recent paper in this journal, Beetsma and Jensen claim that Propositions 3 and 4 of our paper are incorrect due to minor computational mistakes. In this reply we give the correct propositions and show that our results still stand. Our conclusion is that central bank...

Some central banks have a reputation for being secretive. A justification for that behavior thatwe find in the literature is that being transparent about its operations and beliefs hinders the central bank in achieving the best outcome. In other words, a central bank needs flexibility and...

This paper develops a graphical method to determine the optimal degree of central bank conservativeness in an open economy. Unlike Rogoff (1985), the upper and lower bounds of the interval containing the optimal degree of conservativeness are expressed in terms of the structural parameters of...

The implications of uncertain policy preferences for the targeting and contracting approaches to monetary policy are investigated. It is shown that, in the presence of uncertain preferences, a linear incentive contract in the sense of Walsh performs better than an explicit inflation target as...

The first part of this paper outlines the concept of democratic accountability of central banks, and compares the legal accountability of the ECB with some other central banks (Bank of Canada, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System). In the second part, we present a theory...