Motivated by recent findings on the cyclical movement of both health and health spending, we construct a general equilibrium model that distinguishes health care demand from the demand for other goods. Using this model, we are able to generate inflation dynamics and cyclicality of health that match the US data. When the model is subjected to an expansionary monetary policy shock, it yields diff...

A prominent policy issue of the 1970s and one that seems certain to dominate the early 1980s is the appropriate response to a prevailing high rate of inflation. The view that there is a long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment, widely accepted at the end of the sixties, is now held by only a small minority of economists. It is still widely believed, however, that there is a short-r...

We inspect how inflation target announcements are instrumental in building central bank credibility and shaping the public’s inflation expectations. Investigating the role of announcements in two early adopters of inflation targeting by using a time varying credibility measure, we find that both the accuracy and the frequency of inflation announcements have a positive impact on how much attenti...

We explore the dynamics of assisted quintessence, where more than one scalar field is present with the same potential. For potentials with tracking solutions, the fields naturally approach the same values — in the context of inflation this leads to the assisted inflation phenomenon where several fields can cooperate to drive a period of inflation though none is able to individually. For exponen...

We analyze a sequence of short transient sound waves, called "crackles," which are associated with explosive openings of airways during lung inflation. The distribution of time intervals between consecutive crackles Delta(t) shows two regimes of power law behavior. We develop an avalanche model which fits the data over five decades of Delta(t). We find that the regime for large Delta(t) is rela...

We investigate the dynamics of inflation models driven by multiple, decoupled scalar fields and calculate the Hubble parameter and the amplitude of the lightest field at the end of inflation which may be responsible for interesting, or possibly dangerous cosmological consequences after inflation. The results are very simple and similar to those of the single field inflation, mainly depend on th...

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...

The use of under-resolved models in ensemble data assimilation schemes leads to two kinds of model errors: truncation errors associated with discretization of the large-scale dynamics, and errors associated with interactions with subgrid scales. Multiplicative and additive covariance inflation can be used to account for model errors in ensemble Kalman filters, but they do not reduce the model e...

In the context of inflationary models with a pre-inflationary stage, in which the Einstein equations are obeyed, the weak energy condition is satisfied, and spacetime topology is trivial, we argue that homogeneity on super-Hubble scales must be assumed as an initial condition. Models in which inflation arises from field dynamics in a Friedman-Robertson-Walker background fall into this class but...

This paper reports on the findings of Evans, Guse, and Honkapohja (2007) concerning the global economic dynamics under learning in a New Keynesian model in which the interest rate rule is subject to the zero lower bound. Under normal monetary and fiscal policy, the intended steady state is locally but not globally stable. Large pessimistic shocks to expectations can lead to deflationary spirals...