We report the first study of Fourier-frequency-dependent coherence and phase/time lags at optical wavelengths of cataclysmic variables (MV Lyr and LU Cam) displaying typical flickering variability in white light. Observations were performed on the William Herschel Telescope using ULTRACAM. Light curves for both systems have been obtained with the SDSS filters u′, g′ and r′ simultaneously with c...

We present a revised analysis of the photometric reverberation mapping campaign narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy PKS 0558-504 carried out with Swift Observatory during 2008--2010. Previously, Gliozzi et al.\ found using Discrete Correlation Function (DCF) method that short-wavelength continuum variations lagged behind at longer wavelengths, opposite trend expected for thermal reprocessing X-rays by...

Central banks like the Bank of England or the Bundesbank have highlighted recently that the supply of currency is achieved not by means of printing and spending but by means of credit. This clarification raises further issues. This article addresses the issue of seigniorage and optimal inflation. So far approaches to seigniorage and optimal inflation are still based on the assumption of a curre...

Inflation increased to 4 per cent in January following record price rises in food, clothing and furniture; petrol prices are hovering around an all-time peak, heating costs are rising and the hike in VAT is expected to push inflation up further.

A different approach for extracting expectations concentrates merely on reading financial data – without the underpinning of a comprehensive economic model. Prices of financial instruments can reveal some expectations. And innovative products are widening the scope of this approach. Inflationlinked swaps, for example, allow the computation of an inflation curve similar to the yield curve, provi...

In this paper we consider the influence of transplanckian physics on the CMBR anisotropies produced by inflation. We consider a simple toy model that allows for analytic calculations and argue on general grounds, based on ambiguities in the definition of the adiabatic vacuum, that effects are expected with a magnitude of the order of H/Λ, where H is the Hubble constant during inflation and Λ th...

The Polish Government, in 1977, inaugurated a new pension program that made old-age and invalidity benefits available for the first time to most farmers in that country. The evolution and eventual failure of that program were closely intertwined with a growing national economic crisis, manifested in widespread popular unrest and culminating in emergence of the Solidarity movement. The farmers' ...

Following a suggestion by Gasperini and Veneziano, that String Cosmology can be reconciled with Inflation and, hence, with the Standard Big Bang, we display an analytical solution which possesses four interesting properties: (1) it is non-singular; (2) it distinguishes the dynamics of the external scale factor, a(t), from that of the internal one, b(t); (3) it exhibits a non-monotonic behavior ...

A number of authors have developed varied indices for measuring central bank independence with the aim of determining whether there is any association between central bank independence and inflation rates. Most analyses focused on industrialized countries, although more recently the interest has shifted to the emerging and less developed countries. The general trust of the results of these stud...

We demonstrate the existence of chaos in realistic models of two-field inflation. The chaotic motion takes place after the end of inflation, when the fields are free to oscillate and their motion is only lightly damped by the expansion of the universe. We then investigate whether the presence of chaos affects the predictions of two-field models, and show that chaos enhances the production of to...