Optimal Contracts for Central Bankers and Public Debt Policy

We consider how the second-best allocation corresponding to an optimal rule under the policy commitment of a central bank and a fiscal authority with a consolidated government budget constraint can be achieved, even though these authorities are unable to commit themselves to their optimal policies and ignore the strategic interaction between their policies. Our results show that the best practical institutional arrangement is to have an instrument-independent central bank that controls the money supply to determine the rate of inflation and commits itself to an inflation target that depends on fiscal variables.