801 research outputs found
The euro and the European Central Bank
The formation of a monetary union by 11 European countries has received a lot of notice from the press since January 1, 1999, when the union's common currency, the euro, was officially introduced. To facilitate adoption of a single currency, these same countries have established a central bank that sets a common monetary policy for the members of the monetary union. In this article, Jeff Wrase gives some background on the European monetary union, outlines the procedure for introduction of the euro, and describes the workings of the European Central Bank. He also compares and contrasts the operations of the ECB with those of our own central bank, the Federal Reserve System.Euro ; European Central Bank
Emergence of Spontaneously Broken Supersymmetry on an Anti-D3-Brane in KKLT dS Vacua
The KKLT construction of de Sitter vacua includes an uplifting term coming
from an anti-D3-brane. Here we show how this term can arise via spontaneous
breaking of supersymmetry, based on the emergence of a nilpotent chiral
supermultiplet on the world-volume of the anti-D3-brane. We establish and use
the fact that both the DBI as well as the WZ term, with account of
orientifolding, acquire a form of the Volkov-Akulov action. For an O3
orientifold involution of we demonstrate the cancellation
between the fermionic parts of the DBI and WZ term for the D3-brane action. For
the anti-D3-brane we show that the DBI action and the WZ action combine and
lead to the emergence of the goldstino multiplet which is responsible for
spontaneous breaking of supersymmetry. This provides a string theoretic
explanation for the supersymmetric uplifting term in the KKLT effective
supergravity model supplemented by a nilpotent chiral multiplet.Comment: 17 pages; v2: added clarifying comments and a referenc
Inflation-indexed bonds: how do they work?
In January 1997, the United States Treasury, after years of debate, issued its first inflation-indexed bonds. These securities differ from conventional bonds in that principal and interest payments are linked to a price index. Thus, the purchasing power of an investor's savings is protected from inflation. This article provides a simple description of the Treasury's new offering and discusses why indexed bonds may be useful to investors, the Treasury, and policymakersInflation-indexed bonds ; Government securities ; Indexation (Economics)
The interplay between home production and business activity.
Jeff Wrase explores this influence and discusses the potential gains from incorporating household decisions about allocating resources between the home and the marketplace into models used to forecast and account for changes in economic conditions.Production (Economic theory)
Is the Fed being swept out of (monetary) control?
What are "reserves," and why do banks hold them? What are "sweep accounts," and how do they work? What’s the relationship between the two? And what’s the Fed’s role in all of this? In this article, Jeff Wrase considers the effect sweep accounts have had on the market for bank reserves and on the Fed’s job of managing reserves in the banking system. He also looks at changes the Federal Reserve has made to keep the federal funds rate from becoming too volatile as the use of sweep accounts spreadsBank reserves ; Monetary policy - United States
Comments on M representations and geometries
We show using string dualities that Mathieu moonshine controls Gromov-Witten
invariants and periods of the holomorphic 3-form for certain
manifolds. We also discuss how the period vectors appear in flux
compactifications on these manifolds and work out the connection between
the sporadic group M and the Yukawa couplings in four dimensional
theories that arise from heterotic string theory compactifications on these
manifolds.Comment: 27 pages, v2: minor additions, published versio
Exchange rates, monetary policy regimes, and beliefs
The authors investigate an international monetary business-cycle model in which agents face monetary policy processes that incorporate regime shifts. In any given period agents cannot directly observe the policy regime, but instead form beliefs that are updated via Bayesian learning. As a result, expectation adjustment displays inertia that adds persistence to the effects of monetary shocks. Monetary policy process for the U.S. and an aggregate of OECD countries are estimated using Hamilton's Markov-switching model. The authors then solve and calibrate a version of the model and examine its quantitative properties.Foreign exchange rates ; Monetary policy
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