We investigate the range of inflationary universe models driven by scalar fields possessing a general interaction potential of the form V (φ) = V0φ n exp(−λφm). Power-law, de Sitter and intermediate inflationary universes emerge as special cases together with several new varieties of inflation. Analysing the behaviour of these models at the extrema of φ we derive sufficient constraints on the m...

The local level model with stochastic volatility, recently proposed for U.S. by Stock and Watson (Why Has U.S. Inflation Become Harder to Forecast?, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Supplement to Vol. 39, No. 1, February 2007), provides a simple yet sufficiently rich framework for characterizing the evolution of the main stylized facts concerning the U.S. inflation. The model decomposes in...

We calculate the NAIRU for the U.S. in a framework where inflation and the unemployment rate can respond to each other. The NAIRU is defined as the component of the actual unemployment rate that is uncorrelated with inflation in the long run. Using a structural VAR approach, the NAIRU and core inflation can be estimated simultaneously. Our estimation results show that the NAIRU falls dramatical...

On October 6, 1979, the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve System embarked on an aggressive policy to lower the inflation rate, which then stood near 12 percent. That effort succeeded: By the mid-1980s, the rate of change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was reduced to less than 4 percent on a three-year moving-average basis, as shown in figure 1. The commonly reported measur...

In closed or open economy models with complete markets, targeting core inflation enables monetary policy to maximize welfare by replicating the flexible price equilibrium. We analyze this result in the context of developing economies, where a large proportion of households are credit constrained and the share of food expenditures in total consumption expenditures is high. We develop an open eco...

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...