32,343 research outputs found
Preparedness, crisis management and policy change : EMU at the critical juncture of 2008-2013
Focusing on the role of the European Central Bank during the recent banking and sovereign debt crisis in the euro area, this article contributes to the literature on ideational and institu-tional change at critical junctures. In line with recent calls to take the temporal dimension of political change seriously, the article argues that in the context of explosive economic crises a phase of emergency crisis management precedes the phase of purposeful institution building. What happens during this phase is crucial, for in spite of their improvised charac-ter emergency crisis management measures create their own path dependencies. This, how-ever, raises the question of why crisis managers act the way they do. While it is true that crisis managers act as bricoleurs who use whichever tools they find at their disposal, the question of why certain tools are available rather than others calls for a historicisation of crisis management. The article therefore introduces the variable of preparedness, which measures the extent to which the pre-crisis policy paradigm was prepared for the occur-rence of, in this case, the combination of a systemic banking crisis and a sovereign debt cri-sis. The empirical section then compares pre-crisis contingency planning and in-crisis contingency acting, revealing several inconsistencies in the pre-crisis crisis paradigm. The analysis matters for our understanding of political change because these inconsistencies caused the ECB to assume a dominant position in the euro area during the emergency phase of the crisis. This windfall gain in power for the ECB has already begun to shape the future ideational and institutional order of the euro area
Against Amnesia: Re-Imagining Central Banking
The purpose of the present paper is to identify and challenge contemporary adherence to the core of the prevailing monetary policy consensus. This consensus consists of what we call the holy trinity of the inflation targeting paradigm: price stability as the primary goal of the central bank; central bank independence as the institutional arrangement; and the short-term interest rate as the operational target. Drawing on the literature on the history and political economy of central banking, we argue that the inability to think beyond this holy trinity stems from a severe case of collective institutional amnesia and comes at a heavy cost. We highlight that monetary policy can be deployed towards social purposes other than controlling inflation, in institutional configurations other than isolation from the rest of the government and with instruments other than interest rate manipulation. One central message is that whereas central banks are commonly portrayed as commanding only one instrument, in reality they have a battery of instruments at their disposal. We should think of central banking not as a hammer – a tool to hit inflation where it rears its ugly head – but as a Swiss army knife – a multi-purpose tool with many instruments. Doing so will help overcome the collective amnesia that stands in the way of an enlightened debate about how the power of central banking can – and perhaps should – be harnessed in the pursuit of collective social goals.1 Introduction 2 The Holy Trinity 3 Historical Specificity 3.1 Pre-War 3.2 Post-War, Pre-Inflation 3.3 Holy Trinity 3.4 Shoring up the Holy Trinity: The Tinbergen Rule 4 Beyond the Tinbergen Rule: A Swiss Army Knife Theory of Central Banking 4.1 Lender of Last Resort 4.2 Financial Market-Shaping I: Monetary Policy Implementation 4.3 Financial Market-Shaping II: Monetary Policy Transmission 5 Conclusion Reference
On polynomial submersions of degree and the real Jacobian conjecture in
The main result of this paper is the following version of the real Jacobian
conjecture: "Let be a polynomial map with nowhere zero
Jacobian determinant. If the degree of is less than or equal to , then
is injective". Assume that two polynomial maps from to are
equivalent when they are the same up to affine changes of coordinates in the
source and in the target. We completely classify the polynomial submersions of
degree with at least one disconnected level set up to this equivalence,
obtaining four classes. Then, analyzing the half-Reeb components of the
foliation induced by a representative of each of these classes, we prove
there is not a polynomial such that the Jacobian determinant of the map
is nowhere zero. Recalling that the real Jacobian conjecture is true
for maps when all the level sets of are connected, we conclude
the proof of the main result
The Kinematic and Spatial Deployment of Compact, Isolated High-Velocity Clouds
We have identified a class of high-velocity clouds which are compact and
apparently isolated. The clouds are compact in that they have angular sizes
less than 2 degrees FWHM. They are isolated in that they are separated from
neighboring emission by expanses where no emission is seen to the detection
limit of the available data. Candidates for inclusion in this class were
extracted from the Leiden/Dwingeloo HI survey of Hartmann & Burton and from the
Wakker & van Woerden catalogue of high-velocity clouds. The candidates were
subject to independent confirmation using either the 25-meter telescope in
Dwingeloo or the 140-foot telescope in Green Bank. We argue that the resulting
list, even if incomplete, is sufficiently representative of the ensemble of
compact, isolated HVCs - CHVCs - that the characteristics of their disposition
on the sky, and of their kinematics, are revealing of some physical aspects of
the class. The CHVCs are in fact distributed quite uniformly across the sky. A
global search for the reference frame which minimizes the velocity dispersion
of the ensemble returns the Local Group Standard of Rest with high confidence.
The CHVCs are not stationary with respect to this reference frame but have a
mean infall velocity of 100 km/s. These properties are strongly suggestive of a
population which has as yet had little interaction with the more massive Local
Group members. At a typical distance of about 1 Mpc these objects would have
sizes of about 15 kpc and gas masses, M_HI, of a few times 10^7 M_Sun,
corresponding to those of (sub-)dwarf galaxies. (abridged)Comment: 13 page LaTeX, requires aa.cls and rotate.sty, 5 GIF figures.
Accepted for publication in A&
Subthreshold photoproduction of charm
Charm photoproduction rates off nuclei below the nucleon threshold are
estimated using the phenomenologically known structure functions both for x>1
and x<1. The rates rapidly fall below the threshold from values of the order 10
pb for Pb close to the threshold (at 7.5 GeV) down to values of the order 1 pb
at 6 GeV.Comment: 11 p[ages, 7 figure
Dependence of boundary lubrication on the misfit angle between the sliding surfaces
Using molecular dynamics based on Langevin equations with a coordinate- and
velocity-dependent damping coefficient, we study the frictional properties of a
thin layer of "soft" lubricant (where the interaction within the lubricant is
weaker than the lubricant-substrate interaction) confined between two solids.
At low driving velocities the system demonstrates stick-slip motion. The
lubricant may or may not be melted during sliding, thus exhibiting either the
"liquid sliding" (LS) or the "layer over layer sliding" (LoLS) regimes. The
LoLS regime mainly operates at low sliding velocities. We investigate the
dependence of friction properties on the misfit angle between the sliding
surfaces and calculate the distribution of static frictional thresholds for a
contact of polycrystalline surfaces.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figure
Volume Dependence of the Pion Mass from Renormalization Group Flows
We investigate finite volume effects on the pion mass and the pion decay
constant with renormalization group (RG) methods in the framework of a
phenomenological model for QCD. An understanding of such effects is important
in order to interpret results from lattice QCD and extrapolate reliably from
finite lattice volumes to infinite volume.
We consider the quark-meson-model in a finite Euclidean 3+1 dimensional
volume. In order to break chiral symmetry in the finite volume, we introduce a
small current quark mass. In the corresponding effective potential for the
meson fields, the chiral O(4)-symmetry is broken explicitly, and the sigma and
pion fields are treated individually. Using the proper-time renormalization
group, we derive renormalization group flow equations in the finite volume and
solve these equations in the approximation of a constant expectation value.
We calculate the volume dependence of pion mass and pion decay constant and
compare our results with recent results from chiral perturbation theory in
finite volume.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, talk given at "Hadronic Physics 2004 - Joint
meeting Heidelberg-Liege-Paris-Rostock", to appear in the proceedings, AIP
conference serie
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