The FOMC in 1996: "watchful waiting"

In light of recent research findings, Michael J. Dueker and Andreas M. Fischer review the 1996 policy posture of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the monetary policymaking body of the Federal Reserve System. They find several areas in which the FOMC's policy positions were consistent with the conclusions of recent research studies, whether or not these studies directly influenced the Committee's thinking. In general, the authors conclude that the FOMC intended to ensure that inflation was contained near 3 percent in 1996 but did not intend to bring down the trend rate of inflation that year.Federal Open Market Committee ; Inflation (Finance) ; Monetary policy - United States ; Consumer price indexes

Open mouth operations: a Swiss case study

Financial markets ; Switzerland

A guide to nominal feedback rules and their use for monetary policy

If price stability is to be sustained, monetary policy actions will inevitably resemble - in the long run - the prescriptions from nominal feedback rules, which are designed to achieve price stability. This property means that monetary policy might be well described by a nominal feedback rule in a low-inflation country such as Switzerland. In this article, Michael J. Dueker an Andreas M. Fischer provide a general description of nominal feedback rules and use one rule - with time-varying parameters - to model Swiss monetary policy actions. The authors explain how this indicator model can presage a buildup of inflationary pressures before they become obvious through other traditional policy indicators.Monetary policy ; Switzerland

Fixing Swiss potholes: the importance of improvements

This note sheds new light on the dynamic properties of maintenance and repair and examines the behavior of an additional form of capital spending-that of improvements. The analysis examines a unique long-run data set on Swiss road spending.Capital

Do inflation targeters outperform non-targeters?

Ten years of empirical studies of inflation targeting have not uncovered clear evidence that monetary policy that incorporates formal targets imparts better inflation performance. The authors survey the literature and find that the "no difference" verdict concerning inflation targeting has been robust to a wide range of countries and methods of analysis, starting with a study by Dueker and Fischer (1996a). The authors present updated Markov-switching estimates from the original Dueker and Fischer (1996a) article and show that their early conclusions about inflation targeting among early adopters have not been overturned with an additional decade of data. These findings to date do not rule out the possibility, however, that formal inflation targets could prove pivotal if the global environment of disinflation were to reverse course.Inflation (Finance)

The Community Structure of R&D Cooperation in Europe. Evidence from a social network perspective

The focus of this paper is on pre-competitive R&D cooperation across Europe, as captured by R&D joint ventures funded by the European Commission in the time period 1998-2002, within the 5th Framework Program. The cooperations in this Framework Program give rise to a bipartite network with 72,745 network edges between 25,839 actors (representing organizations that include firms, universities, research organizations and public agencies) and 9,490 R&D projects. With this construction, participating actors are linked only through joint projects. In this paper we describe the community identification problem based on the concept of modularity, and use the recently introduced label-propagation algorithm to identify communities in the network, and differentiate the identified communities by developing community-specific profiles using social network analysis and geographic visualization techniques. We expect the results to enrich our picture of the European Research Area by providing new insights into the global and local structures of R&D cooperation across Europe

What Are Kinship Terminologies, and Why Do We Care? A Computational Approach to Analyzing Symbolic Domains

Kinship is a fundamental feature and basis of human societies. We describe a set of computational tools and services, the Kinship Algebra Modeler, and the logic that underlies these. These were developed to improve how we understand both the fundamental facts of kinship, and how people use kinship as a resource in their lives. Mathematical formalism applied to cultural concepts is more than an exercise in model building, as it provides a way to represent and explore logical consistency and implications. The logic underlying kinship is explored here through the kin term computations made by users of a terminology when computing the kinship relation one person has to another by referring to a third person for whom each has a kin term relationship. Kinship Algebra Modeler provides a set of tools, services and an architecture to explore kinship terminologies and their properties in an accessible manner