Hybrid Inflation Targeting Regimes1

This paper uses a DSGE model to examine whether including the exchange rate explicitly in the central bank’s policy reaction function can improve macroeconomic performance. It is found that including an element of exchange rate smoothing in the policy reaction function is helpful both for financially robust advanced economies and for financially vulnerable emerging economies in handling risk premium shocks. As long as the weight placed on exchange rate smoothing is relatively small, the effects on inflation and output volatility in the event of demand and cost-push shocks are minimal. Financially vulnerable emerging economies are especially likely to benefit from some exchange rate smoothing because of the perverse impact of exchange rate movements on activity.Inflation targeting, monetary policy, exchange rate

Mind the Social Gap: Women's Status and Narrative Strategies Against Patriarchal Violence in Tamil Nadu

Treballs Finals del Grau d'Estudis Anglesos, Facultat de Filologia, Universitat de Barcelona. Curs: 2022-2023. Tutora: Isabel Alonso-Breto[eng] This paper examines patriarchal violence against women in Tamil Nadu, South India, by comparing the cases of two women of substantially different social and educational backgrounds: one is the urbanite protagonist of Meena Kandasamy's novel «When I Hit You» (2017); the second, a woman from a small village in a rural area near Chennai. Critical discussions, relevant findings and my own experience as an observer are combined in order to establish if social status plays a role in determining the chances of overcoming abuse. To discuss this idea, the research contextualises the abuse within the frame of subalternity, patriarchy and caste. Then it analyses the forms and actors of violence, outlines the resources available for the victims and proposes one technique of expressive writing as a healing tool. Results suggest that higher status does not necessarily provide protection from being abused but certainly contributes to overcoming the abuse and possessing more solid tools for healing. Keywords: patriarchal violence, Tamil Nadu, Meena Kandasamy, expressive writing as healing[spa] Este artículo examina la violencia patriarcal contra las mujeres en Tamil Nadu, en el sur de la India, comparando los casos de dos mujeres de estatus y bagajes educativos sustancialmente distintos: una es la protagonista de la novela de Meena Kandasamy, «When I Hit You» (2017); la otra, una mujer de una pequeña localidad en una zona rural cerca de Chennai. Se combinan discusiones críticas con estadísticas y mi propia experiencia como observador para estudiar si el estatus social tiene un papel determinante en las probabilidades de salir de una situación de maltrato. Para corroborar esta idea, se contextualiza la violencia contra la mujer en el marco de la subalternidad, el patriarcado y el sistema de castas. A continuación, se describen recursos para las víctimas y se propone una técnica de escritura expresiva como herramienta curativa. Los resultados sugieren que un estatus más alto no evita necesariamente ser víctima de maltrato pero sí contribuye a superarlo y a tener herramientas más sólidas para la sanación. Palabras clave: violencia patriarcal, Tamil Nadu, Meena Kandasamy, escritura expresiva para la curació

Understanding trade pathways to target biosecurity surveillance

Increasing trends in global trade make it extremely difficult to prevent the entry of all potential invasive species (IS). Establishing early detection strategies thus becomes an important part of the continuum used to reduce the introduction of invasive species. One part necessary to ensure the success of these strategies is the determination of priority survey areas based on invasion pressure. We used a pathway-centred conceptual model of pest invasion to address these questions: what role does global trade play in invasion pressure of plant ecosystems and how could an understanding of this role be used to enhance early detection strategies? We concluded that the relative level of invasion pressure for destination ecosystems can be influenced by the intensity of pathway usage (import volume and frequency), the number and type of pathways with a similar destination, and the number of different ecological regions that serve as the source for imports to the same destination. As these factors increase, pressure typically intensifies because of increasing a) propagule pressure, b) likelihood of transporting pests with higher intrinsic invasion potential, and c) likelihood of transporting pests into ecosystems with higher invasibility. We used maritime containerized imports of live plants into the contiguous U.S. as a case study to illustrate the practical implications of the model to determine hotspot areas of relative invasion pressure for agricultural and forest ecosystems (two ecosystems with high potential invasibility). Our results illustrated the importance of how a pathway-centred model could be used to highlight potential target areas for early detection strategies for IS. Many of the hotspots in agricultural and forest ecosystems were within major U.S. metropolitan areas. Invasion ecologists can utilize pathway-centred conceptual models to a) better understand the role of human-mediated pathways in pest establishment, b) enhance current methodologies for IS risk analysis, and c) develop strategies for IS early detection-rapid response programs

Constructing topological models by symmetrization: A PEPS study

Symmetrization of topologically ordered wavefunctions is a powerful method for constructing new topological models. Here, we study wavefunctions obtained by symmetrizing quantum double models of a group $G$ in the Projected Entangled Pair States (PEPS) formalism. We show that symmetrization naturally gives rise to a larger symmetry group $\tilde G$ which is always non-abelian. We prove that by symmetrizing on sufficiently large blocks, one can always construct wavefunctions in the same phase as the double model of $\tilde G$. In order to understand the effect of symmetrization on smaller patches, we carry out numerical studies for the toric code model, where we find strong evidence that symmetrizing on individual spins gives rise to a critical model which is at the phase transitions of two inequivalent toric codes, obtained by anyon condensation from the double model of $\tilde G$.Comment: 10 pages. v2: accepted versio

MPI+X: task-based parallelization and dynamic load balance of finite element assembly

The main computing tasks of a finite element code(FE) for solving partial differential equations (PDE's) are the algebraic system assembly and the iterative solver. This work focuses on the first task, in the context of a hybrid MPI+X paradigm. Although we will describe algorithms in the FE context, a similar strategy can be straightforwardly applied to other discretization methods, like the finite volume method. The matrix assembly consists of a loop over the elements of the MPI partition to compute element matrices and right-hand sides and their assemblies in the local system to each MPI partition. In a MPI+X hybrid parallelism context, X has consisted traditionally of loop parallelism using OpenMP. Several strategies have been proposed in the literature to implement this loop parallelism, like coloring or substructuring techniques to circumvent the race condition that appears when assembling the element system into the local system. The main drawback of the first technique is the decrease of the IPC due to bad spatial locality. The second technique avoids this issue but requires extensive changes in the implementation, which can be cumbersome when several element loops should be treated. We propose an alternative, based on the task parallelism of the element loop using some extensions to the OpenMP programming model. The taskification of the assembly solves both aforementioned problems. In addition, dynamic load balance will be applied using the DLB library, especially efficient in the presence of hybrid meshes, where the relative costs of the different elements is impossible to estimate a priori. This paper presents the proposed methodology, its implementation and its validation through the solution of large computational mechanics problems up to 16k cores