Can the Fed be a payment system innovator?

Competition ; Payment systems

Inflation and unemployment: a layperson's guide to the Phillips curve

Inflation (Finance) ; Unemployment ; Phillips curve

Takeovers and stock price volatility

An examination of the relation between takeovers and stock price volatility. The analysis focuses on the Martingale (efficient markets) Model of stock price behavior and an alternative view in which stock prices reflect values to participants in a market for corporate control. This paper includes a mathematical treatment of the subject.Stock - Prices

Now how large is the safety net?

According to estimates done by researchers at the Richmond Fed, the federal financial safety net covered $25 trillion in liabilities, or 59 percent of all financial liabilities, at the end of 2008. Such expansion of the safety net has weakened market discipline and contributed to instability in the financial sector. Instead of attempting to address the "too big to fail" problem by breaking up large firms, for instance, policymakers ought to focus on credibly scaling back the safety net and making its boundaries transparent.Financial markets

The Fed's entry into check clearing reconsidered

Check collection systems ; Federal Reserve System

Cooling Radiation and the Lyman-alpha Luminosity of Forming Galaxies

We examine the cooling radiation from forming galaxies in hydrodynamic simulations of the LCDM model (cold dark matter with a cosmological constant), focusing on the Ly-alpha line luminosities of high-redshift systems. Primordial composition gas condenses within dark matter potential wells, forming objects with masses and sizes comparable to the luminous regions of observed galaxies. As expected, the energy radiated in this process is comparable to the gravitational binding energy of the baryons, and the total cooling luminosity of the galaxy population peaks at z ~= 2. However, in contrast to the classical picture of gas cooling from the \sim 10^6 K virial temperature of a typical dark matter halo, we find that most of the cooling radiation is emitted by gas with T < 20,000 K. As a consequence, roughly 50% of this cooling radiation emerges in the Ly-alpha line. While a galaxy's cooling luminosity is usually smaller than the ionizing continuum luminosity of its young stars, the two are comparable in the most massive systems, and the cooling radiation is produced at larger radii, where the Ly-alpha photons are less likely to be extinguished by dust. We suggest, in particular, that cooling radiation could explain the two large (\sim 100 kpc), luminous (L_{Ly-alpha} \sim 10^{44} erg s^{-1}) ``blobs'' of Ly-alpha emission found in Steidel et al.'s (1999) narrow band survey of a z = 3 proto-cluster. Our simulations predict objects of the observed luminosity at about the right space density, and radiative transfer effects can account for the observed sizes and line widths. We discuss observable tests of this hypothesis for the nature of the Ly-alpha blobs, and we present predictions for the contribution of cooling radiation to the Ly-alpha luminosity function of galaxies as a function of redshift.Comment: Submitted to ApJ. 28 pages including 9 PS figures. Version with color figures available at http://donald.astro.umass.edu/~fardal/papers/cooling/cooling.htm

The Immune Response to Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 Infection in Susceptible Mice is a Major Cause of CNS Pathology Resulting in Fatal Encephalitis

This study was undertaken to investigate possible immune mechanisms in fatal HSV-1 encephalitis (HSE) after HSV-1 corneal inoculation. Susceptible 129S6 (129) but not resistant C57BL/6 (B6) mice developed intense focal inflammatory brainstem lesions of primarily F4/80+ macrophages and Gr-1+ neutrophils detectable by MRI as early as day 6 post infection (PI). Depletion of macrophages and neutrophils significantly enhanced survival of infected 129 mice. Immunodeficient B6 (IL-7R-/-Kitw41/w41) mice lacking adaptive cells (B6-E mice) transplanted with 129 bone marrow showed significantly accelerated fatal HSE compared to B6-E mice transplanted with B6 marrow or control non-transplanted B6-E mice. In contrast, there was no difference in ocular viral shedding in B6-E mice transplanted with 129 bone marrow or B6 bone marrow. Acyclovir treatment of 129 mice beginning day 4 PI (24 h after HSV-1 first reaches the brain stem) reduced nervous system viral titers to undetectable levels but did not alter brainstem inflammation or mortality. We conclude that fatal HSE in 129 mice results from widespread damage in the brainstem caused by destructive inflammatory responses initiated early in infection by massive infiltration of innate cells

Quantum Fermion Hair

It is shown that the Dirac operator in the background of a magnetic %Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole and a Euclidean vortex possesses normalizable zero modes in theories containing superconducting cosmic strings. One consequence of these zero modes is the presence of a fermion condensate around magnetically charged black holes which violates global quantum numbers.Comment: 16pp (harvmac (l)) and 2 figs.(not included

Fermion Production in the Background of Minkowski Space Classical Solutions in Spontaneously Broken Gauge Theory

We investigate fermion production in the background of Minkowski space solutions to the equations of motion of $SU(2)$ gauge theory spontaneously broken via the Higgs mechanism. First, we attempt to evaluate the topological charge $Q$ of the solutions. We find that for solutions $Q$ is not well-defined as an integral over all space-time. Solutions can profitably be characterized by the (integer-valued) change in Higgs winding number $\Delta N_H$. We show that solutions which dissipate at early and late times and which have nonzero $\Delta N_H$ must have at least the sphaleron energy. We show that if we couple a quantized massive chiral fermion to a classical background given by a solution, the number of fermions produced is $\Delta N_H$, and is not related to $Q$.Comment: Version to be published. Argument showing that the topological charge of solutions is undefined has been strengthened and clarified. Conclusions unchange