Cooperative Design for Central Banks versus Cooperative Implementation of Monetary Policy

The game‐theoretic literature on monetary policy in open economies has traditionally concluded that central banks should implement monetary policy in a cooperative fashion. This paper considers an alternative mechanism for internalizing the external effects: in the first stage, governments cooperatively design central banks’ objective functions; in the second stage, central banks implement monetary policy without cooperation. Although this regime lacks flexibility to deal with asymmetric shocks, it presents important advantages in relation to the former scenario: first, it enjoys more credibility; second, it entails lower coordination and information costs; and finally, it hampers unilateral manipulation of central banks’ objectives.