The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’ The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the determinants of inflation in the United States, Japan, the euro area and the United Kingdom, focusing on the role of resource utilisation, inflation expectations, inflation persistence and imported inflation. It also includes a cross-sectional...

The balance of outstanding student loan debt has risen sharply in the United States since 2008. At the same time, economic prospects for young graduates have worsened, leading to an increase in defaults on student loans. The trend is already having visible repercussions on the US economy;...

On 11-12 May 2011, SUERF and the Belgian Financial Forum, in association with the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) organized the 29th SUERF Colloquium “New Paradigms in Money and Finance?” All the papers in the present SUERF Study are based on...

The author reviews the book Information Technology and the American Growth Resurgence by Dale Jorgenson, Mun Ho, and Kevin Stiroh, which provides a detailed analysis of the remarkable rebound in productivity and output growth in the last decade. He notes that the book can be considered a...

This work is a PhD dissertation, written at the Department of Economics, McGill University. The thesis offers a new framework for inflation as a process of restructuring. Contrary to existing theories of inflation, which tend to take structure and institutions as given for the purpose of...

The world is first known inflation-indexed bonds were issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1780 during the Revolutionary War. These bonds were invented to deal with severe wartime inflation and with angry discontent among soldiers in the U.S. Army with the decline in purchasing power...

This paper presents a new measure of underlying inflation: component-smoothed inflation. It approaches the problem of determining underlying inflation from a different direction than previous methods. Rather than excluding or trimming out volatile CPI items, it smoothes components of the CPI...

This paper uses data for Australia, the United States, Japan and the euro area to examine the relative performance of the headline CPI, exclusion-based ‘cores’, and trimmed means as measures of underlying inflation. Overall, we find that trimmed means tend to outperform headline and...

The author summarizes the report’s methods, findings, and recommendations, and then reviews the comments and criticisms that appeared soon after the report was issued. Changes in CPI methodology are also summarized and assessed, as is recent research on related issues. Based on recent...