Comparing Different Central Bank Targets

In this paper we analyze different target regimes for a central bank. First, we determine the main macroeconomic variables under inflationtargeting and nominal income targeting in the context of a Mundell–Flemmingtwo country model. We then investigate under which conditions onetarget regime is superior to another if supply or demand shocks occur.The main result of this paper is that there exists a unique boundary for theweight on employment in the objective function of the centralbank. If the actual weight is smaller than this bound, inflation targetingis superior to nominal income targeting. For a weight larger than thisbound, nominal income targeting causes a smaller loss. For the two extremecases of the weight, namely zero or infinity one target regime coincideswith the loss-minimizing solution: inflation targeting for a weight of zeroand nominal income targeting for a weight of infinity.