The Impact of the Federal Reserve Bank's Open Market Operations

The Federal Reserve Bank has the ability to change the money supply and to shape the expectations of market participants through their open market operations. These operations may amount to 20% of the day's volume and are concentrated during the half hour known as `Fed Time'. Using previously unavailable data on open market operations, our paper provides the first comprehensive examination of the impact of the Federal Reserve Bank's trading on both fixed income instruments and foreign currencies. Our results detail a dramatic increase in volatility during Fed Time. Surprisingly, the Fed Time volatility is higher on days when open market operations are absent. In addition, little systematic differences in market impact are observed for reserve-draining versus reserve-adding operations. These results suggest that the financial markets correctly anticipate the purpose of open market operations but are unable to forecast the timing of the operations.

Debt and Equity Yields: 1926-80

The study is divided into four broad parts, beginning with an exploratory analysis of the data on expost returns on corporate equities and bonds for the 1926-80 period. In Part 2, we estimate the relationships between one-month expost returns on corporate bonds and equities andvariations in Treasury bill rates, economic activity, and other variables.The major other variable is unanticipated changes in new issue coupon rates on long-term Treasury bonds. Parts 3 and 4 contain econometric investigations of the determinants of one-month Treasury bill rates and unanticipated changes in long-term Treasury coupon rates, respectively. These parts extend the analysis of Part 2 by explaining variables that determine expost corporate bond and equity returns and provide evidence on the determination of new-issue yields on short- and long-term default-free debt. The last three parts ofthe study report econometric results based on data from the 1953-83 period.A number of important issues are addressed in the econometric parts of the paper. These include: the validity of the Modigliani-Cohn valuation-error hypothesis, the measurement of Merton's "excess return on the market", the relationship between real new-issue debt rates and real economic activity, and the usefulness of the Livingston survey data in explaining financial returns.

Cryogenic Characterization of 180 nm CMOS Technology at 100 mK

Conventional CMOS technology operated at cryogenic conditions has recently attracted interest for its uses in low-noise electronics. We present one of the first characterizations of 180 nm CMOS technology at a temperature of 100 mK, extracting I/V characteristics, threshold voltages, and transconductance values, as well as observing their temperature dependence. We find that CMOS devices remain fully operational down to these temperatures, although we observe hysteresis effects in some devices. The measurements described in this paper can be used to inform the future design of CMOS devices intended to be operated in this deep cryogenic regime

TimbreTron: A WaveNet(CycleGAN(CQT(Audio))) Pipeline for Musical Timbre Transfer

In this work, we address the problem of musical timbre transfer, where the goal is to manipulate the timbre of a sound sample from one instrument to match another instrument while preserving other musical content, such as pitch, rhythm, and loudness. In principle, one could apply image-based style transfer techniques to a time-frequency representation of an audio signal, but this depends on having a representation that allows independent manipulation of timbre as well as high-quality waveform generation. We introduce TimbreTron, a method for musical timbre transfer which applies "image" domain style transfer to a time-frequency representation of the audio signal, and then produces a high-quality waveform using a conditional WaveNet synthesizer. We show that the Constant Q Transform (CQT) representation is particularly well-suited to convolutional architectures due to its approximate pitch equivariance. Based on human perceptual evaluations, we confirmed that TimbreTron recognizably transferred the timbre while otherwise preserving the musical content, for both monophonic and polyphonic samples.Comment: 17 pages, published as a conference paper at ICLR 201