3,725 research outputs found
Forecasting Food Price Inflation in Developing Countries with Inflation Targeting Regimes: the Colombian Case
Many developing countries are adopting inflation targeting regimes to guide monetary policy decisions. In such countries the share of food in the consumption basket is high and policy makers often employ total inflation (as opposed to core inflation) to set inflationary targets. Therefore, central banks need to develop reliable models to forecast food inflation. Our literature review suggests that little has been done in the construction of models to forecast short-run food inflation in developing countries. We develop a model to improve short-run food inflation forecasts in Colombia. The model disaggregates food items according to economic theory and employs Flexible Least Squares given the presence of structural changes in the inflation series. We compare the performance of this new model to current models employed by the central bank. Next, we apply econometric methods to combine forecasts from alternative models and test whether such combination outperforms individual models. Our results indicate that forecasts can be improved by classifying food basket items according to unprocessed, processed and food away from home and by employing forecast combination techniques.Food Inflation, Time Series,
Brans-Dicke wormholes in nonvacuum spacetime
Analytical wormhole solutions in Brans-Dicke theory in the presence of matter
are presented. It is shown that the wormhole throat must not be necessarily
threaded with exotic matter.Comment: Minor corrections, to be published in Phys. Rev.
Radiation from a uniformly accelerated charge in the outskirts of a wormhole throat
Using traversable wormholes as theoretical background, we revisit a deep
question of general relativity: Does a uniformly accelerated charged particle
radiate? We particularize to the recently proposed gravitational \v{C}erenkov
radiation, that happens when the spatial part of the Ricci tensor is negative.
If , the matter threading the gravitational
field violates the weak energy condition. In this case, the effective
refractive index for light is bigger than 1, i.e. particles propagates, in that
medium, faster than photons. This leads to a violation of the equivalence
principle.Comment: 6 pages revtex, 1 eps figure. To be published in Modern Physics
Letters
Hierarchy of Floquet gaps and edge states for driven honeycomb lattices
Electromagnetic driving in a honeycomb lattice can induce gaps and
topological edge states with a structure of increasing complexity as the
frequency of the driving lowers. While the high frequency case is the most
simple to analyze we focus on the multiple photon processes allowed in the low
frequency regime to unveil the hierarchy of Floquet edge-states. In the case of
low intensities an analytical approach allows us to derive effective
Hamiltonians and address the topological character of each gap in a
constructive manner. At high intensities we obtain the net number of edge
states, given by the winding number, with a numerical calculation of the Chern
numbers of each Floquet band. Using these methods, we find a hierarchy that
resembles that of a Russian nesting doll. This hierarchy classifies the gaps
and the associated edge states in different orders according to the
electron-photon coupling strength. For large driving intensities, we rely on
the numerical calculation of the winding number, illustrated in a map of
topological phase transitions. The hierarchy unveiled with the low energy
effective Hamiltonians, alongside with the map of topological phase transitions
discloses the complexity of the Floquet band structure in the low frequency
regime. The proposed method for obtaining the effective Hamiltonian can be
easily adapted to other Dirac Hamiltonians of two dimensional materials and
even the surface of a 3D topological insulator.Comment: Phys. Rev. A 91, 04362
Inelastic Quantum Transport and Peierls-like Mechanism in Carbon Nanotubes
We report on a theoretical study of inelastic quantum transport in
carbon nanotubes. By using a many-body description of the electron-phonon
interaction in Fock space, a novel mechanism involving optical phonon emission
(absorption) is shown to induce an unprecedented energy gap opening at half the
phonon energy, , above (below) the charge neutrality point.
This mechanism, which is prevented by Pauli blocking at low bias voltages, is
activated at bias voltages in the order of .Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
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