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...

The paper shows that Liquidity Deflation, a liquidity-drainage mechanism associated with Safe Asset Shortage, helps to rationalize supply-side liquidity trap and involuntary unemployment under wage/price flexibility, especially in economies that suffered massive liquidity destruction, like advanced economies in the wake of the Lehman crisis. Moreover, Liquidity Deflation is shown to imply defla...

Temple (2002) empirically challenges Romer’s (1993) negative opennessinflation relation on empirical grounds. This article links economic openness to the slopes of aggregate supply (AS) and aggregate demand (AD) to explain why the openness-inflation relation can be ambiguous. Starting with a widely used assumption initiated by Romer (1993) that more open economies face greater output inflation ...

This paper uses a structurally estimated macroeconometric model, denoted the MC model, to evaluate inflation targeting in the United States. Various interest rate rules are tried with differing weights on inflation and output, and various optimal control problems are solved using differing weights on inflation and output targets. Price-level targeting is also considered. The results show that 1...

New Keynesian Phillips curves are widely used in macroeconomic policy models to simulate the inflation consequences of alternative monetary policies. The purely forward-looking inflation specification is appealing, because it is based on a model of optimal pricing behaviour. However, based on empirical evidence, the standard view is that there is considerable persistence in inflation. Consequen...

This paper uses a structurally estimated macroeconometric model, denoted the MC model, to evaluate inflation targeting in the United States. Various interest rate rules are tried with differing weights on inflation and output, and various optimal control problems are solved using differing weights on inflation and output targets. Price-level targeting is also considered. The results show that 1...