Argentina's Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies after the Convertibility Regime Collapse

This paper offers a comprehensive look at how Argentina managed a remarkable economic recovery from its collapse in 2001. The authors show how the Argentine government's policy of targeting a stable and competitive real exchange rate was crucial to the country's economic recovery. They also analyze the various sources of aggregate demand and government revenue in different phases of the expansion. In addition to the crucial role of the exchange rate, the authors look at other policies -- such as an export tax, capital controls, and the default on much of the country's sovereign debt -- which were met with disapproval by many economists and other commentators but played an important role in the recovery

A Concise History of Exchange Rate Regimes in Latin America

The paper analyzes exchange rate regimes implemented by the major Latin American countries since the Second World War, with special attention on the period of the second globalization process beginning in the 1970s. The analysis follows a historical narrative aiming to provide an understanding of the domestic and external circumstances in which various regimes were adopted. A simple conceptual framework is developed in order to emphasize how the exchange rate regime may affect key nominal and real variables in a small open economy. After an overview of the main trends followed by the major countries in the region over the last 60 years, the paper focuses on regimes that were implemented 1) with stabilization purposes (nominal anchors) and 2) with the aim of targeting the level of the real exchange rate. These two sections analyze in greater detail some experiences illustrating the pros and cons of both strategies. The paper closes with an assessment about exchange rate experiences in Latin America. JEL Categories: F41, N16, F31Latin America, exchange rate regimes, real exchange rate, inflation targeting.

The Argentinian Debt: History, Default, and Restructuring

We believe that the study of the Argentinean foreign debt needs no justification. For almost three decades, Argentina's foreign debt was continuously one of the main concerns of economic policy. Yet, both the record amount of the defaulted debt and the novel characteristics of its restructuring may be sufficient reasons to include an analysis of Argentina in a selection of studies about sovereign debt. Therefore, the processes that led to the default of the debt and its subsequent restructuring constitute one of the main focuses of this work. However, the Argentinean case also presents other aspects that demand attention, our analysis takes these into account as well. The Argentinean experience is often used as an example of general arguments that take the country as a notable particular case. The rhetoric power of the example precisely comes from its supposedly well-known characteristics, yet sometimes these characteristics appear exempt of solid proofs. Many are second hand references and in some cases not even that but the mere mentioning of a "consensual image". Thus we are motivated to take a close look at what happened in Argentina. This work is in part a polemic against some of those references that we consider fallacious. Each reference involves certain facts that we examine and try to explain. Our criticism also reaches the general plausibility of the argument that falsely takes the Argentinean case as an example. We think that the plausibility of an argument is strongly questioned when the argument is proved false in the case serving as its notable example

Learning without feedback: Fixed random learning signals allow for feedforward training of deep neural networks

While the backpropagation of error algorithm enables deep neural network training, it implies (i) bidirectional synaptic weight transport and (ii) update locking until the forward and backward passes are completed. Not only do these constraints preclude biological plausibility, but they also hinder the development of low-cost adaptive smart sensors at the edge, as they severely constrain memory accesses and entail buffering overhead. In this work, we show that the one-hot-encoded labels provided in supervised classification problems, denoted as targets, can be viewed as a proxy for the error sign. Therefore, their fixed random projections enable a layerwise feedforward training of the hidden layers, thus solving the weight transport and update locking problems while relaxing the computational and memory requirements. Based on these observations, we propose the direct random target projection (DRTP) algorithm and demonstrate that it provides a tradeoff between accuracy and computational cost that is suitable for adaptive edge computing devices.Comment: This document is the paper as accepted for publication in the Frontiers in Neuroscience journal, the fully-edited paper is available at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.62989

Communication: Truncated non-bonded potentials can yield unphysical behavior in molecular dynamics simulations of interfaces

Non-bonded potentials are included in most force fields and therefore widely used in classical molecular dynamics simulations of materials and interfacial phenomena. It is commonplace to truncate these potentials for computational efficiency based on the assumption that errors are negligible for reasonable cutoffs or compensated for by adjusting other interaction parameters. Arising from a metadynamics study of the wetting transition of water on a solid substrate, we find that the influence of the cutoff is unexpectedly strong and can change the character of the wetting transition from continuous to first order by creating artificial metastable wetting states. Common cutoff corrections such as the use of a force switching function, a shifted potential, or a shifted force do not avoid this. Such a qualitative difference urges caution and suggests that using truncated non-bonded potentials can induce unphysical behavior that cannot be fully accounted for by adjusting other interaction parameters

The self-referential method for linear rigid bodies : application to hard and Lennard-Jones dumbbells

The self-referential (SR) method incorporating thermodynamic integration (TI) [Sweatman et al., J. Chem. Phys. 128, 064102 (2008)] is extended to treat systems of rigid linear bodies. The method is then applied to obtain the canonical ensemble Helmholtz free energy of the alpha-N2 and plastic face centered cubic phases of systems of hard and Lennard-Jones dumbbells using Monte Carlo simulations. Generally good agreement with reference literature data is obtained, which indicates that the SR-TI method is potentially very general and robust

Thermalization of an anisotropic granular particle

We investigate the dynamics of a needle in a two-dimensional bath composed of thermalized point particles. Collisions between the needle and points are inelastic and characterized by a normal restitution coefficient $\alpha<1$. By using the Enskog-Boltzmann equation, we obtain analytical expressions for the translational and rotational granular temperatures of the needle and show that these are, in general, different from the bath temperature. The translational temperature always exceeds the rotational one, though the difference decreases with increasing moment of inertia. The predictions of the theory are in very good agreement with numerical simulations of the model.Comment: 7 pages, 6 Figures, submitted to PRE. Revised version (Fig1, Fig5 and Fig6 corrected + minor typos

Absence of simulation evidence for critical depletion in slit-pores

Recent Monte Carlo simulation studies of a Lennard-Jones fluid confined to a mesoscopic slit-pore have reported evidence for ``critical depletion'' in the pore local number density near the liquid-vapour critical point. In this note we demonstrate that the observed depletion effect is in fact a simulation artifact arising from small systematic errors associated with the use of long range corrections for the potential truncation. Owing to the large near-critical compressibility, these errors lead to significant changes in the pore local number density. We suggest ways of avoiding similar problems in future studies of confined fluids.Comment: 4 pages Revtex. Submitted to J. Chem. Phy

The tail of the contact force distribution in static granular materials

We numerically study the distribution P(f) of contact forces in frictionless bead packs, by averaging over the ensemble of all possible force network configurations. We resort to umbrella sampling to resolve the asymptotic decay of P(f) for large f, and determine P(f) down to values of order 10^{-45} for ordered and disordered systems in two and three dimensions. Our findings unambiguously show that, in the ensemble approach, the force distributions decay much faster than exponentially: P(f) ~ exp(-f^{\alpha}), with alpha \approx 2.0 for 2D systems, and alpha \approx 1.7 for 3D systems.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.