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 adopt mechanism design to study the long-run consequences of inflation on aggregate output, trade, and welfare. Our theory captures multiple channels for individuals to respond to the inflation tax: search intensity (the intensive margin), market participation (the extensive margin), and substitution between money and a higher return asset. To determine the terms of trade in pairwise meeting...

A decade ago, in July 1990, the Australian economy had just entered a severe recession. Real GDP slowed in the first half of 1990, and then began to fall in the second half of the year. The rate of unemployment in mid 1990 was around 63/4 per cent but rose sharply in the following year. The rate of inflation was around 6 per cent, but was about to decline quickly, to levels not seen since the e...

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...