Price-Level Targeting–A Real Alternative to Inflation Targeting?

This paper reviews price-level targeting in the light of current theoretical knowledge and past practical experience. The authors discuss progress in the economic debate on this issue, starting with the traditional arguments discussed in the early 1990s and ending with the most recent literature from the beginning of the new millennium. They devote special attention to the issues of the zero interest rate bound, time consistency, and communication. Practical experience from Sweden in the 1930s and Czechoslovakia in the first few years after WWI is used to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of price-level targeting. Finally, the similarities of price-level and inflation developments with hypothetical outcomes under price-level targeting are investigated in selected inflation-targeting countries.price-level targeting, deflation, zero bound, communication, time inconsistency

Perception is Always Right: The CNB’s Monetary Policy in the Media

In this paper we analyze the favorableness and extent of the media coverage of the CNB’s monetary policy decisions in the period of 2002–-2007. We identify the factors explaining the variance in these two dimensions using an extensive set of articles published in the four most relevant Czech daily broadsheets immediately after monetary policy meetings. We take account of parameters of the CNB’s actual monetary policy decisions and related communication as well as variables characterizing the general economic environment that prevailed at the times of the individual meetings. The most appealing results are that those CNB’s decisions that surprise financial markets are − if needed − not negatively perceived by the media and that the media welcomes interest rate changes. Therefore, from the media coverage point of view, there is no need for too much smoothing. Simultaneously, our analyses shed some light on how the media tends to report on (economic) events in general.Communication, media, monetary policy, newspapers.

Price-Level Targeting - A Real Alternative to Inflation Targeting?

This paper reviews price-level targeting in the light of current theoretical knowledge and past practical experience. We discuss progress in the economic debate on this issue, starting with the traditional arguments discussed in the early 1990s, moving to Svensson’s seminal paper in the late 1990s and ending with the most recent literature from the beginning of the new millennium. We devote special attention to the issues of the zero interest rate bound, time consistency and communication. Practical experience from Sweden in the 1930s and Czechoslovakia in the first few years after WWI is used to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of price-level targeting. Finally, the similarities of price-level and inflation developments with hypothetical outcomes under price-level targeting are investigated in selected inflation-targeting countries.Communication, deflation, price-level targeting, time inconsistency, zero bound.

Rigorous Calculations of Non-Abelian Statistics in the Kitaev Honeycomb Model

We develop a rigorous and highly accurate technique for calculation of the Berry phase in systems with a quadratic Hamiltonian within the context of the Kitaev honeycomb lattice model. The method is based on the recently found solution of the model which uses the Jordan-Wigner-type fermionization in an exact effective spin-hardcore boson representation. We specifically simulate the braiding of two non-Abelian vortices (anyons) in a four vortex system characterized by a two-fold degenerate ground state. The result of the braiding is the non-Abelian Berry matrix which is in excellent agreement with the predictions of the effective field theory. The most precise results of our simulation are characterized by an error on the order of $10^{-5}$ or lower. We observe exponential decay of the error with the distance between vortices, studied in the range from one to nine plaquettes. We also study its correlation with the involved energy gaps and provide preliminary analysis of the relevant adiabaticity conditions. The work allows to investigate the Berry phase in other lattice models including the Yao-Kivelson model and particularly the square-octagon model. It also opens the possibility of studying the Berry phase under non-adiabatic and other effects which may constitute important sources of errors in topological quantum computation.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figures, 3 appendice

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements