Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/152772 
Year of Publication: 
2004
Series/Report no.: 
ECB Working Paper No. 338
Publisher: 
European Central Bank (ECB), Frankfurt a. M.
Abstract: 
How much discretion should the monetary authority have in setting its policy? This question is analyzed in an economy with an agreed-upon social welfare function that depends on the randomly fluctuating state of the economy. The monetary authority has private information about that state. In the model, well-designed rules trade off society’s desire to give the monetary authority discretion to react to its private information against society’s need to guard against the time inconsistency problem arising from the temptation to stimulate the economy with unexpected inflation. Although this dynamic mechanism design problem seems complex, society can implement the optimal policy simply by legislating an inflation cap that specifies the highest allowable inflation rate. The more severe the time inconsistency problem, the more tightly the cap constrains policy and the smaller is the degree of discretion. As this problem becomes sufficiently severe, the optimal degree of discretion is none.
Subjects: 
inflation caps
inflation targets
optimal monetary policy
Rules vs discretion
time inconsistency
JEL: 
E5
E6
E52
E58
E61
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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