We report on real-time control of balloon inflation inside porcine arteries. In a first step, experiments were done in a coronary artery of an excised heart. In a second step, experiments were done in a beating heart setup providing conditions very close to in vivo conditions without the complications. A programmable syringe pump was used to inflate a compliant balloon in arteries, while intrav...

www.philadelphiafed.org to the financial instruments that help guard savings from being eroded by inflation.1 Also, households and firms often write contracts that are stated in dollar amounts (nominal terms). A worker may, for example, sign a contract to work over the upcoming year for a fixed dollar amount. If inflation turns out to be higher than what was expected at the time the contract wa...

Several countries are concurrently experiencing historically low inflation rates and ageing populations. Is there a connection, as recently suggested by some senior central bankers? We undertake a comprehensive test of this hypothesis in a panel of 22 countries over the 1955–2010 period. We find a stable and significant correlation between demography and low-frequency inflation. In particular, ...

It is a pleasure to comment on the paper by César Calderón and Klaus SchmidtHebbel. Typically, when economists ask the question ‘what drives inflation?’, explanations turn to monetary factors. The problem of inflation control is naturally encapsulated in the new Keynesian models such as that described in Woodford (2003) and Galí (2008). An important contribution of César and Klaus’s paper is th...

We study the low frequency comovements in unemployment, inflation and the federal funds rate in the U.S. From 1970 through 1979 all three series trended up together; after 1979 they all trended down. The conventional explanation for the buildup of inflation in the 1970s is that the Fed reacted to an increase in the natural rate of unemployment by conducting an overly passive monetary policy. We...

UNLABELLED The mechanism of tourniquet-induced arterial pressure increase is not known. We investigated the effect of preoperative ketamine on tourniquet-induced arterial pressure and heart rate changes in 85 patients undergoing knee surgery with a tourniquet under general anesthesia. Patients were randomly assigned into three groups; Large Ketamine (n = 28; ketamine 1.0 mg/kg), Small Ketamine ...

Between 1999 and 2006, there were two episodes during which inflation in the Rent index in the CPI diverged markedly from inflation in the index for Owner’s Equivalent Rent (OER); early in 2007, these series began to diverge again. Such divergence often prompts many to question CPI methods. A key difference between these two series is that OER indexes are based upon rents which have received a ...

The aim of this study is to examine the nonlinear effects of fiscal and monetary policies on inflation during 1990:3 to 2013:1 based on threshold model. First lag of the liquidity growth is recognized as threshold variable with threshold value estimated at 6.37 percent. In low liquidity growth, the results indicate that inflation expectations and the lagged liquidity growth are the most importa...