Does Money Matter? An Empirical Investigation

This paper uses a simultaneous-equations model of the new consensus macroeconomic model to examine whether the inclusion of the money stock in the aggregate demand function improves the statistical fit of the model. The results indicate that the consensus model is accurate for the U.S. in that the inclusion of money does not increase the predictive power of the model. However, the results reveal that the estimated coefficients are more robust when money is included as an instrumental variable in the simultaneous equations consensus modelConsensus Macro Model; Monetary Policy; Phillips Curve; Taylor Rule

(WP 2010-09) Does Money Matter? An Empirical Investigation

This paper uses a simultaneous-equations model of the new consensus macroeconomic model to examine whether the inclusion of the money stock in the aggregate demand function improves the statistical fit of the model. The results indicate that the consensus model is accurate for the U.S. in that the inclusion of money does not increase the predictive power of the model. However, the results reveal that the estimated coefficients are more robust when money is included as an instrumental variable in the simultaneous equations consensus model

Calculating Non-adiabatic Pressure Perturbations during Multi-field Inflation

Isocurvature perturbations naturally occur in models of inflation consisting of more than one scalar field. In this paper we calculate the spectrum of isocurvature perturbations generated at the end of inflation for three different inflationary models consisting of two canonical scalar fields. The amount of non-adiabatic pressure present at the end of inflation can have observational consequences through the generation of vorticity and subsequently the sourcing of B-mode polarisation. We compare two different definitions of isocurvature perturbations and show how these quantities evolve in different ways during inflation. Our results are calculated using the open source Pyflation numerical package which is available to download.Comment: v2: Typos fixed, references and comments added; v1: 8 pages, 10 figures, software available to download at http://pyflation.ianhuston.ne

Barn Owl (Tyto alba) Food Habits in West-Central Arkansas

This study was conducted on Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge in west-central Arkansas to investigate the food habits of the common barn owl (Tyto alba). Three hundred thirty-eight pellets were collected from four barn owl nest boxes yielding the remains of 1003 individual prey items. Hispid cotton rats (Sigmodon hispidus) were eaten most frequently, comprising 46.8% of the diet by frequency. Results of this study are compared with those from other Arkansas ecoregions to assess regional variation in the diet of this endangered species

XatA, an AT-1 autotransporter important for the virulence of Xylella fastidiosa Temecula1.

Xylella fastidiosa Temecula1 is the causative agent of Pierce's disease of grapevine, which is spread by xylem-feeding insects. An important feature of the infection cycle is the ability of X. fastidiosa to colonize and interact with two distinct environments, the xylem of susceptible plants and the insect foregut. Here, we describe our characterization of XatA, the X. fastidiosa autotransporter protein encoded by PD0528. XatA, which is classified as an AT-1 (classical) autotransporter, has a C-terminal β-barrel domain and a passenger domain composed of six tandem repeats of approximately 50 amino acids. Localization studies indicate that XatA is present in both the outer membrane and membrane vesicles and its passenger domain can be found in the supernatant. Moreover, XatA is important for X. fastidiosa autoaggregation and biofilm formation based on mutational analysis and the discovery that Escherichia coli expressing XatA acquire these traits. The xatA mutant also shows a significant decrease in Pierce's disease symptoms when inoculated into grapevines. Finally, X. fastidiosa homologs to XatA, which can be divided into three distinct groups based on synteny, form a single, well-supported clade, suggesting that they arose from a common ancestor

A Comparison of Predictions for SM Higgs Boson Production at the LHC

This paper describes a comparison of most of the available predictions for the cross section and transverse momentum distribution for a 125 GeV mass Higgs at the LHC, including those from the PYTHIA and HERWIG parton shower Monte Carlos and from four resummation calculations.Comment: 7 pages, submitted to proceedings of the Workshop on Physics at TeV Colliders, Les Houches 200

kt Effects in Direct-Photon Production

We discuss the phenomenology of initial-state parton-kt broadening in direct-photon production and related processes in hadron collisions. After a brief summary of the theoretical basis for a Gaussian-smearing approach, we present a systematic study of recent results on fixed-target and collider direct-photon production, using complementary data on diphoton and pion production to provide empirical guidance on the required amount of kt broadening. This approach provides a consistent description of the observed pattern of deviation of next-to-leading order QCD calculations relative to the direct-photon data, and accounts for the shape and normalization difference between fixed-order perturbative calculations and the data. We also discuss the uncertainties in this phenomenological approach, the implications of these results on the extraction of the gluon distribution of the nucleon, and the comparison of our findings to recent related work.Comment: LaTeX, uses revtex and epsf, 37 pages, 15 figure

Collider Inclusive Jet Data and the Gluon Distribution

Inclusive jet production data are important for constraining the gluon distribution in the global QCD analysis of parton distribution functions. With the addition of recent CDF and D0 Run II jet data, we study a number of issues that play a role in determining the up-to-date gluon distribution and its uncertainty, and produce a new set of parton distributions that make use of that data. We present in detail the general procedures used to study the compatibility between new data sets and the previous body of data used in a global fit. We introduce a new method in which the Hessian matrix for uncertainties is ``rediagonalized'' to obtain eigenvector sets that conveniently characterize the uncertainty of a particular observable.Comment: Published versio