T he consumer price index (CPI) measures the prices urban consumers pay for a representative basket of goods and services. The CPI is one of the most important measures of inflation. The prices of many products and services are directly linked to changes in the CPI. For instance, when the CPI increases, Social Security benefits and wages stated in labor contracts may rise as well. Forecasting f...

There have been two broad theories of inflation, namely the demand-pull theory of inflation (that is nowadays mainly the monetary theory of inflation) and the cost-push theory of inflation. The mainstream macroeconomics views inflation as a monetary phenomenon in the long run. Iran has experienced double-digit rates of inflation for about four decades. Our main aim is an explanation for the lon...

We point out that, if quantum field renormalization is taken into account and the counterterms are evaluated at the Hubble-radius crossing time or few e-foldings after it, the predictions of slow-roll inflation for both the scalar and the tensorial power spectrum change significantly. This leads to a change in the consistency condition that relates the tensor-to-scalar amplitude ratio with spec...

Spacetime singularities have been discovered which are physically much weaker than those predicted by the classical singularity theorems. Geodesics evolve through them and they only display infinities in the derivatives of their curvature invariants. So far, these singularities have appeared to require rather exotic and unphysical matter for their occurrence. Here we show that a large class of ...

The essential reason that a 100-percent-reserve gold standard should be the ultimate goal of monetary reform is that it would secure the economic system against the evils both of inflation and of deflation–depression. In addition, it would be consistent with the fundamental moral–political principle of the absence of the initiation of physical force and thus the positive presence of individual ...

We perform a numerical investigation of the fields evolution in the supersymmetric inflationary model based on radiative corrections. Supergravity corrections are also included. We find that, out of all the examined initial data, only about 10% give an adequate amount of inflation and can be considered as ”natural”. Moreover, these successful initial conditions appear scattered and more or less...

Our major conclusions are as follows: (1) If inflation rates remain high, then the yield curve will tend to slope upward more steeply than in the past (or slope downward less steeply when the yield curve is inverted). (2) This yield curve situation will lead firms to shorten the average maturities of their liabilities, even though this will expose them to greater risks of earnings fluctuations ...

The paper extends the literature on financial development, inflation, and growth by using the idea that both the rates of return on physical and human capital affect growth. This leads to the introduction of the investment rate into the model, as a proxy for the return to physical capital, along with the inflation rate as a variable affecting the return to human capital. As a result financial d...