Sticky Wages, Incomplete Pass-Through and Inflation Targeting: What is the Right Index to Target?

This paper studies strict monetary policy rules in a small open economy with Inflation Targeting, incomplete pass-through and rigid nominal wages. The paper shows that, when nominal wages are fully flexible and pass-through is low to moderate, the monetary authority should target the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rather than the Domestic Price Index (DPI). When pass-through is high, an economy with high degrees of nominal wage rigidity and wage indexation should either target the CPI or fully stabilise nominal wages. These results suggest that, by committing to a common monetary policy in a common-currency area, some countries may not be following the right monetary policy rules.Monetary policy rules; Inflation targeting ; Exchange rate pass-through; Nominal wage rigidity; Open economy.

A Robust Solution Procedure for Hyperelastic Solids with Large Boundary Deformation

Compressible Mooney-Rivlin theory has been used to model hyperelastic solids, such as rubber and porous polymers, and more recently for the modeling of soft tissues for biomedical tissues, undergoing large elastic deformations. We propose a solution procedure for Lagrangian finite element discretization of a static nonlinear compressible Mooney-Rivlin hyperelastic solid. We consider the case in which the boundary condition is a large prescribed deformation, so that mesh tangling becomes an obstacle for straightforward algorithms. Our solution procedure involves a largely geometric procedure to untangle the mesh: solution of a sequence of linear systems to obtain initial guesses for interior nodal positions for which no element is inverted. After the mesh is untangled, we take Newton iterations to converge to a mechanical equilibrium. The Newton iterations are safeguarded by a line search similar to one used in optimization. Our computational results indicate that the algorithm is up to 70 times faster than a straightforward Newton continuation procedure and is also more robust (i.e., able to tolerate much larger deformations). For a few extremely large deformations, the deformed mesh could only be computed through the use of an expensive Newton continuation method while using a tight convergence tolerance and taking very small steps.Comment: Revision of earlier version of paper. Submitted for publication in Engineering with Computers on 9 September 2010. Accepted for publication on 20 May 2011. Published online 11 June 2011. The final publication is available at http://www.springerlink.co

Relationship of sea level muon charge ratio to primary composition including nuclear target effects

The discrepancy between the muon charge ratio observed at low energies and that calculated using pp data is removed by including nuclear target effects. Calculations at high energies show that the primary iron spectrum is expected to change slope from 2 to 2.2 to 2.4 to 2.5 for energies approx. 4 x 10 to the 3 GeV/nucleon if scaling features continue to the highest energies