Monetary Regimes as Insurance Schemes. Old Wine in New Bottles?

This paper applies the tools of insurance economics to address the trade-off between commitment and flexibility arising in monetary policy. Monetary regimes are considered as alternative insurance policies designed to stabilize output. This approach provides a simple and straightforward reinterpretation of some seminal contributions to the literature on time inconsistency--such as the desirability of monetary policy delegation to an independent conservative central banker--and it accounts for some novel results deriving from informational asymmetries about the central banker's degree of conservatism. Copyright 1998 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd and The Victoria University of Manchester