This paper considers the contacting approach to central banking in the context of a simple common agency model. The recent literature on optimal contracts suggests that the political principal of the central bank can design the appropriate incentive schemes that remedy for time-inconsistency...

Approaching monetary policy as a principal agent problem provides a useful framework for interpreting alternative delegation schemes. In this paper, we consider the effectiveness of central banker incentive schemes when the principal delegates monetary policy through contracts but remains...

We reconsider the optimal central banker contract derived in Walsh (1995). We show that if the government"s objective function places weight (value) on the cost of the contract, then the optimal inflation contract does not completely neutralize the inflation bias. Furthermore, the more concerned...