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increased inflation - fighting credibility that such an appointment brings. the public is certainly more likely to believe an inflation hawk when he promises to contain inflation because they understand that, as someone who is intrinsically averse to inflation, he is unlikely to renege on his commitment. as increased credibility allows the central bank to achieve low inflation at a smaller cost than a non - credible central bank can, the president may well find, somewhat paradoxically, that he prefers the economic outcomes achieved under the hawkish central banker to those that could have been obtained under a central banker with views closer to his own and those of the public. in focusing on three landmark papers i necessarily ignore what has become an enormous literature on credibility and monetary policy. walsh ( 2003, chap. 8 ) provides an excellent overview. rogoff ( 1987 ) was an important early survey of the “ first generation ” of models of credibility in the context of central banking. in another noteworthy paper, calvo ( 1978 ) made a number of points similar to those developed by kydland and prescott. the extension of the kydland - prescott “ inflation bias ” by barro and gordon ( 1983a ) has proved highly influential. rogoff was my graduate school classmate at m. i. t., and i recently asked him for his recollections about the origins of the conservative central banker. here ( from a personal e - mail ) is part of his response : [ t ] he paper was mainly written at the board in 1982... it came out as an imf working paper in february 1983 ( i was visiting there ), and then the same version came out as an international finance discussion paper [ at the board of governors ] in september 1983... the original version of the paper... featured inflation targeting. much like the published paper, i suggested that having an independent central bank can be a solution to the time consistency [ that is, credibility ] problem if we give the bank an intermediate target and some ( unspecified ) incentive to hit the target... i had the conservative central banker idea in there as well, as one practical way to ensure the central bank placed a high weight on inflation. larry summers, my editor at the [ quarterly journal of economics ], urged me to move that idea up to the front section and place inflation targeting second. this, of course, is how the paper ended up. [ regarding the fed ], dale henderson and matt canzoneri liked