National Appointments to Multinational Monetary Policy Making: A Role Conflict?

Territorial appointees to an independent central bank (e.g. District Federal Reserve Banks’ presidents, Governors of national central banks at the ECB’s Governing Council) are liable to confront a “role conflict” stemming from a duality of loyalties and allegiances - to the home regional territory to which they owe the appointment and to the central bank to which they are appointed. This essay examines the issue of two “principals” for a given “agent”, within the framework of a “common agency” model in European monetary policymaking. Territorial appointees cannot afford being unresponsive to their country-specific monetary preferences – as dictated by idiosyncratic social and economic structures, political orientations, cultural factors, and other determinants. Local preferences may conflict with the central bank’s mandated objectives, its social and political environment, the constellation of institutions gravitating in its orbit, which shape a given mindset and culture to which the territorial appointees are also prone to conform.monetary policy, central bank council

Connectivity Properties of Factorization Posets in Generated Groups

We consider three notions of connectivity and their interactions in partially ordered sets coming from reduced factorizations of an element in a generated group. While one form of connectivity essentially reflects the connectivity of the poset diagram, the other two are a bit more involved: Hurwitz-connectivity has its origins in algebraic geometry, and shellability in topology. We propose a framework to study these connectivity properties in a uniform way. Our main tool is a certain linear order of the generators that is compatible with the chosen element.Comment: 35 pages, 17 figures. Comments are very welcome. Final versio

Correlated hopping of bosonic atoms induced by optical lattices

In this work we analyze a particular setup with ultracold atoms trapped in state-dependent lattices. We show that any asymmetry in the contact interaction translates into one of two classes of correlated hopping. After deriving the effective lattice Hamiltonian for the atoms, we obtain analytically and numerically the different phases and quantum phase transitions. We find for weak correlated hopping both Mott insulators and charge density waves, while for stronger correlated hopping the system transitions into a pair superfluid. We demonstrate that this phase exists for a wide range of interaction asymmetries and has interesting correlation properties that differentiate it from an ordinary atomic Bose-Einstein condensate.Comment: 24 pages with 9 figures, to appear in New Journal of Physic