Oil Shocks: How Destabilizing are they?

This note examines Prabhat Patnaik's argument that the contemporary international financial system crucially requires the stability of oil prices in terms of the dollar. By comparing the macroeconomic impact of recent oil shocks to those of the 1970s, it argues that sharp changes in the dollar price of oil need not necessarily lead to instability.oil price, inflation, recession, dollar

6d dual conformal symmetry and minimal volumes in AdS

The S-matrix of a theory often exhibits symmetries which are not manifest from the viewpoint of its Lagrangian. For instance, powerful constraints on scattering amplitudes are imposed by the dual conformal symmetry of planar 4d N=4N=4 super Yang-Mills theory and the ABJM theory. Motivated by this, we investigate the consequences of dual conformal symmetry in six dimensions, which may provide useful insight into the worldvolume theory of M5-branes (if it enjoys such a symmetry). We find that 6d dual conformal symmetry uniquely fixes the integrand of the one-loop 4-point amplitude, and its structure suggests a Lagrangian with more than two derivatives. On integrating out the loop momentum in 6 − 2ϵ dimensions, the result is very similar to the corresponding amplitude of N=4N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. We confirm this result holographically by generalizing the Alday-Maldacena solution for a minimal area string in Anti-de Sitter space to a minimal volume M2-brane ending on a pillow-shaped surface in the boundary whose seams correspond to a null-polygon. This involves careful treatment of a prefactor which diverges as 1/ϵ, and we comment on its possible interpretation. We also study 2-loop 4-point integrands with 6d dual conformal symmetry and speculate on the existence of an all-loop formula for the 4-point amplitude

Oil Shocks: How Destabilizing are they?

This note examines Prabhat Patnaik's argument that the contemporary international financial system crucially requires the stability of oil prices in terms of the dollar. By comparing the macroeconomic impact of recent oil shocks to those of the 1970s, it argues that sharp changes in the dollar price of oil need not necessarily lead to instability

Price stickiness and exchange-rate pass-through: some evidence from Indian online retail

We use daily data for a period of 219 days on the price of imported books from an online retailer based in India in order to study price stickiness and exchange-rate pass-through. The price changes in our sample are a mixture of idiosyncratic and synchronized price changes. Exchange rate pass-through is found to exist but is imperfect

Price stickiness and exchange-rate pass-through: some evidence from Indian online retail

We use daily data for a period of 219 days on the price of imported books from an online retailer based in India in order to study price stickiness and exchange-rate pass-through. The price changes in our sample are a mixture of idiosyncratic and synchronized price changes. Exchange rate pass-through is found to exist but is imperfect