Roundtable: Copyright Issues and Issues Beyond Copyright

"What we’ve decided to do as our format for this presentation is: we have a number of scenarios that people have suggested of things that have actually come across their desks in the course of doing what they do. And we thought we would just go through these quickly and talk about the issues that they raise—a sort of issue-spotting exercise—and try to offer some guidance about maybe how to deal with those issues as well. We’re going to start by talking about a number of things other than copyright. We’ve had a lot of discussion today about copyright and we may get to some more copyright here if we have time, but I’m going to start by talking about a number of noncopyright issues in the areas of privacy, defamation, things like that that very often come up in the context both of sound and audiovisual materials, but also in the case of text and photographs and so on.

Money in monetary policy design: monetary cross-checking in the New-Keynesian model

In the New-Keynesian model, optimal interest rate policy under uncertainty is formulated without reference to monetary aggregates as long as certain standard assumptions on the distributions of unobservables are satisfied. The model has been criticized for failing to explain common trends in money growth and inflation, and that therefore money should be used as a cross-check in policy formulation (see Lucas (2007)). We show that the New-Keynesian model can explain such trends if one allows for the possibility of persistent central bank misperceptions. Such misperceptions motivate the search for policies that include additional robustness checks. In earlier work, we proposed an interest rate rule that is near-optimal in normal times but includes a cross-check with monetary information. In case of unusual monetary trends, interest rates are adjusted. In this paper, we show in detail how to derive the appropriate magnitude of the interest rate adjustment following a significant cross-check with monetary information, when the New-Keynesian model is the central bank’s preferred model. The cross-check is shown to be effective in offsetting persistent deviations of inflation due to central bank misperceptions. Keywords: Monetary Policy, New-Keynesian Model, Money, Quantity Theory, European Central Bank, Policy Under Uncertaint

Friedman's Money Supply Rule vs. Optimal Interest Rate Policy

Using New Keynesian models, we compare Friedman's k-percent money supply rule to optimal interest rate setting, with respect to determinacy, stability under learning and optimality.We first review the recent literature.Open-loop interest rate rules are subject to indeterminacy and instability problems, but a properly chosen expectations-based rule yields determinacy and stability under learning, and implements optimal policy.We then show that Friedman's rule also can generate equilibria that are determinate and stable under learning.However, in computing the mean quadratic welfare loss, we find that for calibrated models Friedman's rule performs poorly compared to the optimal interest rate rule

Search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu channel in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

A search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu decay channel, where l = e or mu, in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is presented. The data were collected at the LHC, with the CMS detector, and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 4.6 inverse femtobarns. No significant excess is observed above the background expectation, and upper limits are set on the Higgs boson production cross section. The presence of the standard model Higgs boson with a mass in the 270-440 GeV range is excluded at 95% confidence level.Comment: Submitted to JHE

Combined search for the quarks of a sequential fourth generation

Results are presented from a search for a fourth generation of quarks produced singly or in pairs in a data set corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5 inverse femtobarns recorded by the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2011. A novel strategy has been developed for a combined search for quarks of the up and down type in decay channels with at least one isolated muon or electron. Limits on the mass of the fourth-generation quarks and the relevant Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix elements are derived in the context of a simple extension of the standard model with a sequential fourth generation of fermions. The existence of mass-degenerate fourth-generation quarks with masses below 685 GeV is excluded at 95% confidence level for minimal off-diagonal mixing between the third- and the fourth-generation quarks. With a mass difference of 25 GeV between the quark masses, the obtained limit on the masses of the fourth-generation quarks shifts by about +/- 20 GeV. These results significantly reduce the allowed parameter space for a fourth generation of fermions.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO