Real Return Bonds, Inflation Expectations, and the Break-Even Inflation Rate

According to the Fisher hypothesis, the gap between Canadian nominal and Real Return Bond yields (or break-even inflation rate) should be a good measure of inflation expectations. The authors find that this measure was higher, on average, and more variable than survey measures of inflation expectations between 1992 and 2003. They examine whether risk premiums and distortions embedded in this interest rate gap can account for these facts. Their results indicate that distortions were likely an important reason for the high level and variation of this measure over much of the 1990s. There is little evidence that the distortions examined were as important between 2000 and 2003, but the high level of the break-even inflation rate in 2004 may be evidence of their return. Given the potential distortions, and the difficulty in identifying them, the authors conclude that it is premature to consider this measure a reliable gauge of monetary policy credibility. In addition, it is not as useful as competing tools for short- and medium-term inflation forecasting.Interest rates; Inflation and prices; Market structure and pricing

Review of 'Reading by Moonlight' by Brenda Walker.

Review of 'Reading by Moonlight' by Brenda Walker

Real Return Bonds: Monetary Policy Credibility and Short-Term Inflation Forecasting

The break-even inflation rate (BEIR) is calculated by comparing the yields on conventional and Real Return Bonds. Defined as the average rate of inflation that equates the expected returns on these two bonds, the BEIR has the potential to contain useful information about long-run inflation expectations. Yet the BEIR has been higher, on average, and more variable than survey measures of inflation expectations, which may be explained by the effects of premiums and distortions embedded in the BEIR. Because of the difficulty in accounting for these distortions, the BEIR should not be given a large weight as a measure of long-run inflation expectations at this time. However, as the Real Return Bond market continues to develop, the BEIR should become a more useful indicator of inflation expectations. At present, it demonstrates no clear advantage over survey measures and even past inflation rates in forecasting near-term inflation.

Addressing Challenging Place Recognition Tasks using Generative Adversarial Networks

Place recognition is an essential component of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM). Under severe appearance change, reliable place recognition is a difficult perception task since the same place is perceptually very different in the morning, at night, or over different seasons. This work addresses place recognition as a domain translation task. Using a pair of coupled Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), we show that it is possible to generate the appearance of one domain (such as summer) from another (such as winter) without requiring image-to-image correspondences across the domains. Mapping between domains is learned from sets of images in each domain without knowing the instance-to-instance correspondence by enforcing a cyclic consistency constraint. In the process, meaningful feature spaces are learned for each domain, the distances in which can be used for the task of place recognition. Experiments show that learned features correspond to visual similarity and can be effectively used for place recognition across seasons.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 201

Spectroscopic characterisation of novel materials for semiconductor device applications

The thesis uses surface science techniques to characterise the chemical composition and electronic properties of a range of carbon containing materials which have application in advanced semiconductor fabrication. The initial focus was on investigating the properties ofcarbon-doped oxide (CDO) which is a low dielectric constant material and a leading candidate to replace silicon dioxide (SiOz) as an interlayer dielectric (ILD) in microprocessor fabrication. The work then progresses to determine the optimum experimental conditions required to etch thin films of this material, while retaining the chemical composition, in an industrial fluorocarbon-based plasma etching (FBPE) system. This study was preceded by an investigation of how the chemical composition of a thin fluorocarbon films which forms on a surface in the plasma etcher depends on the C4Fs/Ar/Oz gas feed ratios and the power levels used in the processing. These studies were benchmarked by undertaking baseline studies of the plasma processing of conventional Si02 inter layer dielectric material. The chemical composition of the fluorocarbon films and the CDO layers were analysed using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Synchrotron radiation based x-ray absorption spectroscopy GAS) and x-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) as well as resonant soft X-ray emission spectroscopy (RSXE) have been used to provide information on the valence band and conduction band state of both the CDO layers and the fluorocarbon films. The final part of the thesis consists of the measurement of the electronic structure of thin films of the organic semiconductor tetraphenylporphyrin (TPP) and metal TPP. The carbon and nitrogen partial density of states for both the valence and conduction band electronic structure has been determined, as well as core level spectra. Good agreement was found between the experimental measurements of the valence and conduction bands, and the results of density functional theory calculations