Authors: Gauti Eggertsson and Eric Le Borgne

We propose a theory to explain why, and under what circumstances, a politician delegates policy tasks to a technocrat in an independent institution, and analyze under what conditions delegation is optimal for society. Our theory builds on Holmström's hidden effort principal-agent model. The election pressures faced by politicians, together with the absence of such pressures for technocrats, give rise to a dynamic incentive structure that formalizes two rationales for delegation, one advanced in the eighteenth century by Alexander Hamilton and the other in a 1998 work by Blinder. Delegation trades off the cost of having a possibly incompetent technocrat with a long-term job contract against the benefit of having a technocrat who (i) invests more effort into the specialized policy task and (ii) is better insulated from shifts in public opinion. A natural application of our framework leads to a new theory of central bank independence.