Total Unit Costs, Marginal Costs and the New Keynesian Phillips Curve

This paper considers the role of non-labor unit costs in estimating the new Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC). We show that the theory-based marginal cost of a firm is a function of both labor and non-labor unit costs including, capital costs, net interest payments and production taxes. Using data on labor costs and non-labor payments in nonfarm GDP for the US, that closely match our theory-based model, we construct a total unit cost that we use as a proxy for marginal cost. We show that adding non-labor unit costs to the familiar unit labor costs improves the existing empirical support for the role of real marginal cost as the driving variable in the NKPC and of expectations-based inflation persistence. Total unit costs also imply a duration of fixed nominal contracts that is closer to those suggested by firm-level surveys than that implied by labor unit costs.

Seeing Shapes in Clouds: On the Performance-Cost trade-off for Heterogeneous Infrastructure-as-a-Service

In the near future FPGAs will be available by the hour, however this new Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) usage mode presents both an opportunity and a challenge: The opportunity is that programmers can potentially trade resources for performance on a much larger scale, for much shorter periods of time than before. The challenge is in finding and traversing the trade-off for heterogeneous IaaS that guarantees increased resources result in the greatest possible increased performance. Such a trade-off is Pareto optimal. The Pareto optimal trade-off for clusters of heterogeneous resources can be found by solving multiple, multi-objective optimisation problems, resulting in an optimal allocation of tasks to the available platforms. Solving these optimisation programs can be done using simple heuristic approaches or formal Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) techniques. When pricing 128 financial options using a Monte Carlo algorithm upon a heterogeneous cluster of Multicore CPU, GPU and FPGA platforms, the MILP approach produces a trade-off that is up to 110% faster than a heuristic approach, and over 50% cheaper. These results suggest that high quality performance-resource trade-offs of heterogeneous IaaS are best realised through a formal optimisation approach.Comment: Presented at Second International Workshop on FPGAs for Software Programmers (FSP 2015) (arXiv:1508.06320

Henri Temianka Correspondence; (wayne)

This collection contains material pertaining to the life, career, and activities of Henri Temianka, violin virtuoso, conductor, music teacher, and author. Materials include correspondence, concert programs and flyers, music scores, photographs, and books.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/temianka_correspondence/3002/thumbnail.jp