Inflation Targeting: The British Experience

This lecture describes the United Kingdom's experience with inflation targeting. It provides a historical perspective to the introduction of inflation targeting, discusses the concept of inflation targets, and compares an inflation targeting regime with money supply and exchange rate targeting regimes. It is noteworthy that inflation targeting is based on the assumption that low inflation is the proper objective of monetary policy. A significant portion of the lecture covers the issue of the measurement of inflation. It discusses whether asset prices should be taken into account in the inflation measure and looks in particular at the experience of Japan in the late 1980s. It also considers sources of imperfection in traditional measures. It concludes that monetary policy will have to be conducted by reference to estimated price indexes that fall short of the conceptual ideal but does not regard this as seriously undermining an inflation targeting regime. The lecture goes on to discuss the issues of (1) having a target band for inflation or not, (2) the difficulty in forecasting inflation, and (3) the time horizon over which monetary policy should aim. The lecture highlights the important role that openness and transparency play in achieving credibility in monetary policy. It highlights the five devices that are now in use in the United Kingdom, and notes some of the benefits emerging from the open and transparent nature of the United Kingdom approach. It concludes by warning that inflation targeting does not promise to make monetary policy easy but does have the positive virtue of directing attention to many technical issues that need to be resolved in conducting monetary policy.Inflation, Targeting, British

Inflation measurement and inflation targets: the UK experience

Inflation (Finance) ; Monetary policy - Great Britain ; Great Britain

Implementing Monetary Policy

The purpose of the paper is to discuss how monetary policy decisions made by the board or monetary policy committee of a central bank can be implemented. It distinguishes between the polar extremes of direct and indirect methods of implementation, and explains why indirect methods are generally preferred. It describes the circumstances in which various elements of a central bank’s balance sheet can grow very quickly, threatening to cause the growth rate of central bank money to rise to levels inconsistent with the objectives of monetary policy, and discusses what offsetting measures the central bank can take to contain the growth of central bank money. It describes in detail how open market operations can be conducted, and discusses techniques of intervention in foreign exchange markets. Finally, it reviews the usefulness of direct controls of instruments of monetary policy, and discusses the conditions in which such controls might be needed and how they can best be designed.Monetary Policy

Numerical study of resistivity of model disordered three-dimensional metals

We calculate the zero-temperature resistivity of model 3-dimensional disordered metals described by tight-binding Hamiltonians. Two different mechanisms of disorder are considered: diagonal and off-diagonal. The non-equilibrium Green function formalism provides a Landauer-type formula for the conductance of arbitrary mesoscopic systems. We use this formula to calculate the resistance of finite-size disordered samples of different lengths. The resistance averaged over disorder configurations is linear in sample length and resistivity is found from the coefficient of proportionality. Two structures are considered: (1) a simple cubic lattice with one s-orbital per site, (2) a simple cubic lattice with two d-orbitals. For small values of the disorder strength, our results agree with those obtained from the Boltzmann equation. Large off-diagonal disorder causes the resistivity to saturate, whereas increasing diagonal disorder causes the resistivity to increase faster than the Boltzmann result. The crossover toward localization starts when the Boltzmann mean free path relative to the lattice constant has a value between 0.5 and 2.0 and is strongly model dependent.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Digital Compilation of Submerged Lands Sediment Textures, Sediment Geochemistry, and Washover Areas of the Texas Coast

This report summarizes the methods used by the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) to produce electronic files of sample locations, sediment textures, and geochemical analyses for about 6,700 sediment samples collected from the Submerged Lands of Texas, including all coastal bays, estuaries, lagoons, and the inner continental shelf extending 10.3 mi into the Gulf of Mexico. Active washover areas and other potential sites of oil invasion along the Texas Gulf shore were also mapped and digitized for inclusion in the Texas Natural Resources Inventory (NRI) ARC/INFO geographic information system (GIS). The major categories of the NRI program addressed by this project include 1.2a2 (sediment metals), 1.2a9 (sediment grain size), 1.2a10 (sediment total organic carbon), 1.7e (sediment percent sand), and 2.6e(c) (morphology of washover areas). The primary results of the project were electronic files containing the locations and attributes of surficial sediments and washover areas of the following seven coastal regions: Beaumont-Port Arthur (Sabine Lake), Houston Galveston (Galveston Bay), Bay City-Freeport, Port Lavaca (Matagorda Bay), Corpus Christi (Corpus Christi Bay), Kingsville (upper Laguna Madre), and Brownsville-Harlingen (lower Laguna Madre). These seven regions cover the entire Texas coast and include all of the NRI highest priority areas.Bureau of Economic Geolog

Government Created Medical Practice Guidelines: The Opening of Pandora\u27s Box

The fact-specific holding “Summary judgment was improper in an insured\u27s claim against its insurer for the denial of treatment through a utilization review process because neither Wyoming law nor the insurance contract provided an administrative remedy requiring exhaustion.

Government Created Medical Practice Guidelines: The Opening of Pandora\u27s Box

This article will discuss the background and creation of medical practice guidelines in part II. Next, we will define and discuss in Part III the two primary types of medical practice guidelines: privately created guidelines and government created guidelines. In Part IV, we will compare and contract the current medical practice guidelines programs in operation. Finally, we will recommend in section V that a medical practice guidelines program offering an affirmative defense to complying physicians should be implemented on the state level

Sex Ratio Assessment Of Endangered Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle Foraging Populations: Validation Of A Testosterone ELISA For Juvenile Sex Determination

Currently all species of sea turtles are listed as threatened or endangered with extinction under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. In order to effectively construct management approaches we need as much information on various sea turtle populations as possible including demography, genetic origin, and critical habitat. One demographic piece of data that is lacking is the sex ratio of turtle populations in foraging habitats, as this information is integral in determining overall population abundance. Because secondary sex characteristics (i.e. males have longer tails) are not evident until turtles start to reach sexual maturity, the sex of juvenile turtles cannot be easily determined externally. The least invasive way to determine the sex of juvenile turtles is through hormone analysis (testosterone) of the blood plasma. There are several methods for determining hormone concentration in turtle plasma; we used enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA), which are the most cost effective and user friendly technique available. The testosterone ELISA has recently been validated for use with green sea turtle Chelonia mydas plasma but has yet to be validated for the other sea turtle species. My project focused on the endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle Lepidochelys kempii that is only found in the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Atlantic seaboard. We validated the ELISA testosterone technique through demonstrating ‘parallelism’ to prove that the assay is measuring the same antigen (i.e. testosterone) in the plasma extracts and the standard controls (provided in the testosterone assay kit). We then determined the sex of approximately 140 juvenile turtles

Voluntary Environmental Regulation in Developing Countries: Mexico's Clean Industry Program

Because conventional command-and-control environmental regulation often performs poorly in developing countries, policymakers are increasingly experimenting with alternatives, including voluntary regulatory programs. Research in industrialized countries suggests that such programs are sometimes ineffective because they mainly attract relatively clean participants free-riding on unrelated pollution control investments. We use plant-level data on more than 100,000 facilities to analyze the Clean Industry Program, Mexico’s flagship voluntary regulatory initiative. We seek to identify the drivers of participation and to determine whether the program improves participants’ environmental performance. Using data from the program’s first decade, we find that plants recently fined by environmental regulators were more likely to participate, but that after graduating from the program, participants were not fined at a substantially lower rate than nonparticipants. These results suggest that although the Clean Industry Program attracted dirty plants under pressure from regulators, it did not have a large, lasting impact on their environmental performance.voluntary environmental regulation, duration analysis, propensity score matching, Mexico