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The role of money and monetary policy of the central bank in pursuing macroeconomic stability has significantly changed over the period since the end of World War II. Globalization, liberalization, integration, and transition processes generally shaped the crucial milestones of the macroeconomic development and substantial features of economic policy and its framework in Europe. Policy-driven changes together with variety of exogenous shocks significantly affected the key features of macroeconomic environment on the European continent that fashioned the framework and design of monetary policies.

This chapter examines the key basis of the central bank’s monetary policy on its way to pursue and preserve the internal and external stability of the purchasing power of money. Substantial elements of the monetary policy like objectives and strategies are not only generally introduced but also critically discussed according to their accuracy, suitability, and reliability in the changing macroeconomic conditions. Brief overview of the Eurozone common monetary policy milestones and the past Eastern bloc countries’ experience with a variety of exchange rate regimes provides interesting empirical evidence on origins and implications of vital changes in the monetary policy conduction in Europe and the Eurozone.

Sufficiently persistent rise in nominal interest increases inflation rate in short-run. This short-run comovement of nominal interest rate and inflation rate is known as Neo-Fisherianism. This chapter proposes a policy based on Neo-Fisherianism to escape Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) using a textbook Forward Looking New Keynesian Model. I have shown that proposed policy with properly chosen inflation target and persistence can stimulate economy and escape ZLB by raising nominal interest rate. I have also shown that the proposed policy is robust to varying degrees of price stickiness.

This paper examines the performance of nominal income targeting as a possible direction for monetary policy. The existing literature consists of historical counterfactual simulations to determine how economic performance might have differed if this policy had been adopted. To provide better assessment of the performance of nominal income targeting in practice, this paper focuses on Germany where this policy is implemented. The results highlight the importance of price stability in the design of German monetary policy. Furthermore, causality test results indicate a causal flow from money to nominal income. However, there is no evidence of a causal flow from nominal income to various definitions of money. These results confirm the Bundesbank’s claim that monetary growth runs ahead of fluctuations in nominal income in Germany. That is, the Bundesbank is able to target nominal income by using a monetary aggregate. These findings challenge the skepticism regarding the use of a monetary aggregate as the intermediate target, which has arisen mainly from the US experience.

The purpose of this paper is to use data on new apartment offerings in the municipality of Sao Paulo, Brazil to illustrate its main claim that the hedonic direct method using time dummies as well as the simple average method include cyclical behavior of observables and non‐observables in a house price index that may overestimate or underestimate the actual change in house prices, well beyond the composition effects.

The paper proposes the use of alternative characteristics hedonic functions to compute alternative Laspeyres house price indexes that differentiate the sources of observable shocks in the index. The decomposition allows for the inclusion of level and cyclical behavior of sets of aggregate variables into the index.

The appropriate house price index should filter out real shocks that potentially affect the real estate sector. An index should capture nominal variation and incorporating real variation biases the measurement. Thus, the index is intended and able to buffer the bias spillover into the rest of economy. In the limited sample from the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the main finding is that real shocks and US foreign shocks give an upward bias in the house price index, while nominal shocks give mostly a downward bias. Real shocks make the index incorporate gains that should not be incorporated into the index, thus providing a noisy picture of the nominal variation in house prices.

The key contribution of this paper is to provide a framework for the construction of a house price index that filters out real shocks that potentially affect the real estate sector. An index should capture nominal variation and incorporating real variation biases the measurement. Those biases can spillover to the rest of the economy is a detrimental way. Thus, the index is intended and able to buffer the bias spillover into the rest of economy.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ability of monetary policy to generate real effects in laboratory general equilibrium production economies.

To understand why monetary policy is not consistently effective at stabilizing economic activity, the author vary the types of agents interacting in the economy and consider treatments where subjects are playing the role of households (firms) in an economy where automated firms (households) are programmed to behave rationally.

While the majority of participants’ expectations respond to monetary policy in the direction intended, subjects do form expectations adaptively, relying heavily on past variables and forecasts in forming two-steps-ahead forecasts. Moreover, in the presence of counterparts that are boundedly rational, forecast accuracy worsens significantly. When interacting with automated households, updating firms’ prices respond modestly to monetary policy and significantly to anticipated marginal costs and future prices. The greatest deviations in behavior from theoretical predictions arise from human households (HH). Households persistent oversupply of labor and under-consumption is attributed to precautionary saving and debt aversion. The results provide evidence that the effects of monetary policy on decision making hinge on the distribution of indebtedness of households.

The author present causal evidence of the effects of potential bounded rationality on agents’ consumption and labor decisions.

The authors point out that the existing research confuses the operational liabilities formed based on the “transaction” relationship with the financial liabilities formed based on the “investment” relationship, which not only exaggerates the value of leverage but also underestimates the level of protection that companies provide for creditors alone. That is, the confusion of concepts not only triggers the problem of leverage misestimate but also triggers the short-term financial risk misestimate. The performance of “nominal leverage” and “nominal short-term solvency” based on total assets calculation cannot reflect the real leverage level and the real short-term financial risk of enterprises.

To distinguish the concepts of “assets” and “capital” and rationalize the relationship between “transactions” and “investments”, authors systematically design the “real leverage” indicators and “real short-term solvency” indicators, and measure the degree of misestimate of leverage and short-term financial risk indicators by traditional research. On this basis, this paper describes and analyses the trends of leveraged misestimate and short-term financial risk misestimate of listed companies in China and analyses which companies have more serious leverage misestimate. And it helps readers to form an objective understanding of the leveraged misestimate and short-term financial risk misestimate of listed companies in China.

Firstly, the overall high level of leverage of listed companies in China in the traditional sense is largely because of the misestimate of indicators. And this kind of misestimate is more serious among firms that have advantages in trading, such as state-owned enterprises and firms with higher market shares. Secondly, for most firms with normal solvency, traditional research systematically overestimated the negative impact of “nominal leverage” on financial risk indicators (represented by short-term solvency). The overestimation is significant in firms with serious leverage misestimate. Thirdly, indicators’ misestimate of the traditional research makes the banks cannot make effective credit decisions according to the firm's “real leverage” and “real short-term solvency”.

Firstly, clarify the differences between the concepts of “assets” and “capital”, and clarify the level of “real leverage” of listed companies in China, which is conducive to the process of “de-leveraging”. Secondly, revise the problem of misestimate of related indicators, so that financial institutions can clearly identify the true profitability and real risk level of the entity domain, and thus improve the effectiveness of credit decisions.

Automatic interpretation of Nominal Compounds is a crucial issue for many applications, for example, sentence understanding, machine translation, question-answering system and so forth. Many automatic interpretation models of Nominal Compounds use the strategies based on verbs or rules to obtain the interpretation of compounds. However, the performances of these models are still limited. The purpose of this paper is to propose an effective approach for automatic interpretation of Chinese nominal compounds.

The authors propose a top-down and bottom-up model based on rules and large-scale corpus for automatic interpretation of Nominal Compounds.

Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art automatic interpretation model.

The paper is an up-to-date study of automatic interpretation for Nominal Compounds. It can help people understand the meaning of Nominal Compounds in reading. With a better understanding of Nominal Compounds, we can discover more hidden knowledge in them.

Introduces the group interview technique of nominal grouping as an alternative to the widely used technique of focus groups in qualitative market research. Nominal grouping is a highly structured technique designed to keep personal interaction at a minimum level during the process of new idea generation, while maximizing the individual contribution of each respondent. Describes a comparative experiment in which both focus groups and nominal groups of various sizes (five, seven and ten respondents) were used for the purpose of gathering customer perceived service quality improvements. The results reveal that nominal group members produced a significantly larger amount of service enhancements than respondents in focus groups. Concludes that, as far as the quality of ideas is concerned, there is a significant difference between nominal groups and focus groups with respect to the quality of ideas produced by the groups of seven respondents. Moreover, significantly greater levels of group member satisfaction with respect to the participation in the data collection process were found for the groups of seven and ten respondents, with the former receiving the highest score.

This paper aims to explore the incidence of nominal and real wage cuts in the Finnish private sector during the 1990s.

Estimation of econometric models for the probability of wage cuts using individual‐level wage survey data from the payroll records of the Finnish employers' organizations.

Centralized nominal wage freezes together with a positive inflation rate produced real wage cuts for a large proportion of workers during the worst recession years of the early 1990s. Hence, centralized bargaining shaped the adjustment. The share of nominal wage cuts does not increase with falling inflation, which is consistent with downward wage rigidities. Full‐time workers have had a lower likelihood of wage cuts compared with part‐time workers. Declines in wages have also been more common in small plants. There is an important transitory component in wage cuts.

Provides useful information about the adjustment of wages at the individual level.

Few papers have analysed individual and employer characteristics that account for wage cuts. The paper contributes to the literature on wage rigidity.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to demonstrate how memes perpetuate trauma with a schematic. This conceptual paper uses the “begin with the end in mind” meme to format the presentation of the necessary components for the schematic of how trauma persists across generations. It is the third paper in a series of applications of the recursive, test-operate-test schematic to the systemic effects of the information processes involved in trauma. The schematic presented permits evaluations of solutions to interrupt the generational trauma cycle.

The required schematic components are described. Trauma (actual or perceived threat to survival) will be briefly discussed. Evolutionary processes that create the psychophysiology necessary to support nominal social expectations (NSEs) memes and metaphors will be summarized. The development of NSEs will be discussed. Metaphors and memes necessary for the creation of the schematic and esoteric events at level Learning IV will be briefly described. Finally, Figure 3, which illustrates the maintenance of NSEs and attempts to prevent their violation, will be explained.

It is asserted that functional human social behavior requires NSEs. Trauma is found to persist through the presence of anti-nominal NSE memes that are transduced by the individual into anti-nominal metaphors, which then damage grid, place and dentate gyrus cell (GPDG) neurophysiology. The damaged neurocircuits allow the use of anti-nominal NSE metaphors within our individual neurophysiology. Furthermore, anti-NSE memes interfere with the self-organized criticalities (SOCs) of genetic-epigenetic processes necessary for the intergenerational transfer of functional social behavior. When anti-NSE nominal metaphors are transduced back into anti-NSEs, social niche memes, the trauma process is reiterated. Anti-NSE memes and metaphors are found to be inappropriate criteria central to the maintenance of persistent trauma. Therefore, anti-NSE memes have hijacked our epigenetics and our social niches. Solutions are available because during our evolution, the Homo clade developed esoteric capabilities and the ability to bring back what information we can from those encounters. This physiology operates around the 5HT2A neural receptors that process hallucinogens, such as psilocybin. Accessing this resource system, either through naturally occurring altered states of consciousness or through micro-dose pharmaceutical psilocybin and related neurotransmitters, produces a significant structural change in the GPDG system to reset the NSE system illustrated in the schematic to its nominal status so that we can maintain nominal NSE relationships within our meme niche(s).

The source of persistent trauma in our social niche(s), the means by which the trauma is maintained and the means to mitigate and perhaps eliminate persistent trauma are identified. Based on these three conclusions, it is difficult to make decisions regarding corrective actions because of ubiquitous anti-NSE memes and because of the limitations of our ordinary consciousness.

If we wish to survive as a species, we will need to discover the criteria necessary to maintain our niche(s) congruent SOCs and use them instead of tyrannical memes described by Dawkins (1989) to make decisions about ourselves and our niche(s).

Significant courage is required to identify the memes that maintain trauma because many of them are culturally sacred cows. Unfortunately, we have known since Bremner's (1995) MRI study of posttraumatic stress disorder that trauma causes brain damage. Fortunately, our NSE genes compel us to pursue restitution of the memes that maintain our trauma-inducing cultures.

Several original assertions are presented. While the Homo clade ancestors began the creation of the social niche(s) that led to Homo sapiens sapiens, it is asserted that the australopiths created the NSE memes which are the foundation behaviors that permit our social niche(s). Furthermore, NSEs were produced by enhanced intentionality skills and NSEs were created by both genetic and memetic processes. The evolution of intentionality-NSE neural networks is asserted as the source of intentional material manipulation. While anti-NSE memes are claimed as the source of persistent trauma, the practice of esoteric technologies is presented as a solution to persistent trauma.