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

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

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)

Open mouth operations: a Swiss case study

Financial markets ; 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

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

ON METAPHOR: Reciprocity and Immunity

My reading of David Napier's article foregrounds or highlights (1) a key scientific “discovery” or observation; (2) the history of shifting high level metaphors as key new biological mechanisms are apprehended; (3) three key contemporary problems in immunological biology identified by Napier (transplantation, tumor immunology, autoimmune diseases); and (4) the ways in which popular culture takes up new scientific terminologies as folk “philosophemes” or cultural components for apprehending sociocultural change

The lightness of existence and the origami of “French” anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux, and their so-called ontological turn

Latour turns to Wittgensteinian or Lyotardian language games, and Silversteinian deixis and metapragmatics, as formal means of distinquishing modern European discursive categories and institutions, each defined by three criteria: the right pre-position, discontinuity from other language games, and felicity conditions. Double-click and the snake of knowledge are metaphorical reminders to not efface the labor of invention and maintenance. In lectures on Gaia, Latour turns toward a Durkheimian politics of the Anthropocene. Descola charts Siberian and North American groups on a north–south historical gradient from animism to analogism, and Amazonian cultural groups as animist transformational sets, reviving a human geography tradition, connecting to Latour’s project through wide-mesh networking of human–nonhuman cosmo-logical modes and relations, and contesting Viveiros de Castro’s uniform Amazonian predation cosmology and multinaturalism–uniculturalism, supporting the earlier work on contrastive Amazonian linguistics. We need not celebrate “humanity as technological detour,” but focus on the “peopling of technologies.

Urban Mahabharata

In Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (Fordham, 2015), we listen with Das to ordinary ethics in challenged lives of poverty, illness, and family relations; and in three registers of (a) advocacy, (b) moral engagement, and (c) acknowledgement of the inherent uncertainties in the very fabric of living these lives, including hers and ours. In this article, I take up the text of Affliction, and comment on moral engagements and sparks of references to the Mahabharata and other traditional, especially Muslim, modes of ethical thought. This commentary can be read as what in Islamic scholarship often are called ‘hashiye’, marginal notes on the main text. I conclude by discussing a mosaic of coverage and gaps in the contemporary ethics of Indian health care and its anthropologies