This paper investigates the changing relationship between employment and real output in the U.S. economy from 1948 to 2010 both at the aggregate level and at some major industry-grouping levels of disaggregation. Real output is conventionally measured as value added corrected for price inflation, but there are some industries in which no independent measure of value added is possible and existi...

We address some issues of topological defect inflation. (1) We clarify the causal structure of an inflating magnetic monopole. The spacetime diagram shows explicitly that this model is free from the “graceful exit” problem, while the monopole itself undergoes “eternal inflation”. (2) We extend the study of inflating topological defects to Brans-Dicke gravity. Contrary to the case of Einstein gr...

I review some aspects of obtaining inflation from string theory, in particular braneantibrane inflation within the framework of KKLMMT, and racetrack inflation. Further, I discuss recent work on the problem of reheating after brane-antibrane annihilation, and possible distinctive features of production of cosmic string and brane defects at this time.

We consider instant preheating as the mechanism for generating the curvature perturbation at the end of chaotic inflation. Then we examine if inflation could be driven by a Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) flat direction or a sneutrino. Our simple mechanism relaxes some serious constraints that appeared in past studies, making inflation driven by a MSSM flat direction or a sneutrino...

We would like to thank Adam Cagliarini and Ben McLean for superb research assistance, and participants at the conference for their comments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Monetary policy affects both real variables, such as employment, unemployment and output, and nominal variables, such as nominal interest and inflation rates. For close to a decade, the principal focus of monetary policy has been on inflation. During a recession, or when one appears imminent, the state of real variables such as GDP growth has been a paramount consideration, but at other times, ...

Medium-term price stability is widely accepted as the appropriate ultimate goal for monetary policy. This reflects two ideas. The first is that high rates of inflation distort decision-making, ultimately leading to slower economic growth. The second is that monetary policy is the most effective instrument in influencing medium-term inflation outcomes. By pursuing a strategy that ensures that in...

Has the macroeconomic policy "regime" changed in the United States in the last few years? If so, has t h s change had an effect on macroeconomic relationships, and, in particular, on the relationshp between inflation and unemployment? These two questions have been on the minds of most macroeconomists since the October 1979 switch from interest rates to reserves as an intermediate target for the...

Inflationary cosmologies, regarded as dynamical systems, have rather simple asymptotic behavior, insofar as the cosmic baldness principle holds. Nevertheless, in the early stages of an inflationary process, the dynamical behavior may be very complex. In this paper, we show how even a simple inflationary scenario, based on Linde’s “chaotic inflation” proposal, manifests nontrivial dynamical effe...

In spite of the success of the inflationary Universe scenario [1] in solving some of the mysteries of standard cosmology and of providing a mechanism which explains the origin of density fluctuations on cosmological scales, a mechanism which to date has passed all of the observational challenges, we still do not have a convincing realization of inflation based on fundamental physics. Moreover, ...