The Cosmological Constant

This is a review of the physics and cosmology of the cosmological constant. Focusing on recent developments, I present a pedagogical overview of cosmology in the presence of a cosmological constant, observational constraints on its magnitude, and the physics of a small (and potentially nonzero) vacuum energy.Comment: 50 pages. Submitted to Living Reviews in Relativity (http://www.livingreviews.org/), December 199

Monetary policy rules in theory and in practice: evidence from the UK and the US

Given the large amount of interaction between research on monetary policy and its practice, this article examines whether some simple monetary policy rules that have been proposed in the academic literature, part of which has originated from within central banks, provide a reasonable characterization of actual policy in the United Kingdom and the United States. The article finds the simple rule that describes best the actual US monetary policy is a speed limit rule with dynamics, whilst for the UK it is a forward-looking rule. The simpler dynamics in the UK's monetary policy rule are reflective of the lower persistence of inflation as a result of its policy of inflation targeting.

Testing the credit view with pooled data: dynamic links among state bank health, investment-oriented bank loans, and economic performance

R11, E59,