Forecasting ECB monetary policy: accuracy is (still) a matter of geography

Monetary policy in the euro area is conducted within a multi-country, multicultural, and multi-lingual context involving multiple central banking traditions. How does this heterogeneity affect the ability of economic agents to understand and to anticipate monetary policy by the ECB? Using a database of surveys of professional ECB policy forecasters in 24 countries, we find remarkable differences in forecast accuracy, and show that they are partly related to geography and clustering around informational hubs, as well as to country-specific economic conditions and traditions of independent central banking in the past. In large part this heterogeneity can be traced to differences in forecasting models. While some systematic differences between analysts have been transitional and are indicative of learning, others are more persistent. JEL Classification: E52, E58, G14ECB, forecast, geography, heterogeneity, History, monetary policy

Geography or skills: what explains Fed Wachters' forecast accuracy of US monetary policy?

The paper shows that there is a substantial degree of heterogeneity in the ability of Fed watchers to forecast US monetary policy decisions. Based on a novel database for 268 professional forecasters since 1999, the average forecast error of FOMC decisions varies 5 to 10 basis points between the best and worstperformers across the sample. This heterogeneity is found to be related to both the skills of analysts - such as their educational and employment backgrounds - and to geography. In particular, forecasters located in regions which experience more idiosyncratic economic conditions perform worse in anticipating monetary policy. This evidence is indicative that limited attention and heterogeneous priors are present even for anticipating important events such as monetary policy decisions. Moreover, the paper shows that such heterogeneity is economically important as it leads to greater financial market volatility after FOMC meetings. Finally, policy-makers are not impotent in influencing such heterogeneity as Fed communication is found to affect forecast accuracy significantly. --Monetary policy,forecast,Federal Reserve,FOMC,geography,skills,heterogeneity,survey data,communication,United States.

The Same-Sign Dilepton Signature of RPV/MFV SUSY

The lack of observation of superpartners at the Large Hadron Collider so far has led to a renewed interest in supersymmetric models with R-parity violation (RPV). In particular, imposing the Minimal Flavor Violation (MFV) hypothesis on a general RPV model leads to a realistic and predictive framework. Naturalness suggests that stops and gluinos should appear at or below the TeV mass scale. We consider a simplified model with these two particles and MFV couplings. The model predicts a significant rate of events with same-sign dileptons and b-jets. We re-analyze a recent CMS search in this channel and show that the current lower bound on the gluino mass is about 800 GeV at 95% confidence level, with only a weak dependence on the stop mass as long as the gluino can decay to an on-shell top-stop pair. We also discuss how this search can be further optimized for the RPV/MFV scenario, using the fact that MFV stop decays often result in jets with large invariant mass. With the proposed improvements, we estimate that gluino masses of up to about 1.4 TeV can be probed at the 14 TeV LHC with a 100 fb^-1 data set.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures; v2: References adde

SUSY Production Cross Sections

We summarize the status of next-to-leading order perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD) calculations of the cross sections for the production of squarks, gluinos, neutralinos, charginos, and sleptons as a function of the produced sparticle masses in proton-antiproton collisions at the hadronic center-of-mass energy 2 TeV.Comment: 7 pages, latex, plus one .eps figure; subgroup summary for the SUGRA working group of the Fermilab workshop Physics at Run II -- Supersymmetry/Higg

Erratum: Next-to-leading order supersymmetric QCD predictions for associated production of gauginos and gluinos [Phys. Rev. D 62, 095014 (2000)]

Errors in the published version of the paper are corrected, and new figures are provided.Comment: 3 pages, latex, 4 figure

Free particle wavefunction in light of the minimum-length deformed quantum mechanics and some of its phenomenological implications

At a fundamental level the notion of particle (quantum) comes from quantum field theory. From this point of view we estimate corrections to the free particle wave function due to minimum-length deformed quantum mechanics to the first order in the deformation parameter. Namely, in the matrix element $<0 |\varPhi(t,\,\mathbf{x}) |\mathbf{p} >$ that in the standard case sets the free particle wave function $\propto \exp(i[\mathbf{p}\mathbf{x} - \epsilon(\mathbf{p}) t])$ there appear three kinds of corrections when the field operator is calculated by using the minimum-length deformed quantum mechanics. Starting from the standard (not modified at the classical level) Lagrangian, after the field quantization we get a modified dispersion relation, and besides that we find that the particle's wave function contains a small fractions of an antiparticle wave function and the backscattered wave. The result leads to interesting implications for black hole physics.Comment: 9 pages; Revised version - more explanations, to appear in Phys. Rev.