Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in-utero transmission of SARS-CoV-2 remains a rarity and only very few cases have been proven across the world. Here we depict the clinical, laboratory ...and radiologic findings of preterm triplets born at 28 6/7 weeks to a mother who contracted COVID-19 just 1 week before delivery. The triplets showed SARS-CoV-2 positivity right after birth, developed significant leukopenia and early-onset pulmonary interstitial emphysema. The most severely affected triplet I required 10 days of high-frequency oscillatory ventilation due to failure of conventional invasive ventilation, and circulatory support for 4 days. Despite a severe clinical course in two triplets (triplet I and II), clinical management without experimental, targeted antiviral drugs was successful. At discharge home, the triplets showed no signs of neurologic or pulmonary sequelae. Placental immunohistology with SARS-CoV-2 N-protein localized strongly to syncytiotrophoblast cells and, to a lesser extent, to fetal Hofbauer cells, proving intrauterine virus transmission. We discuss the role of maternal viremia as a potential risk factor for vertical transmission. To the best of our knowledge, our report presents the earliest unequivocally confirmed prenatal virus transmission in long-term surviving children, i.e., at the beginning of the third trimester.
We estimate a forward‐looking New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) for the United States using data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters as proxy for expected inflation. We obtain significant ...and plausible estimates for the structural parameters independently of whether we use the output gap or unit labor costs as a measure of marginal costs. Moreover, when estimating a Phillips curve where lagged inflation enters due to price indexation by nonreoptimizing firms, we obtain significant parameter estimates of the sign predicted by theory independently of the marginal cost measure used. (JEL E31)
•Survey expectations of stock returns are unconditionally approximately unbiased.•Return forecasts fluctuate predictably between optimism and pessimism.•Respondents do not report risk-neutral or ...pessimistically-tilted expectations.
To reconcile the disconnect between survey expectations of stock returns and rational expectations, researchers have hypothesized that survey participants may confound beliefs and preferences by (i) reporting risk-neutral forecasts of future returns; or (ii) reporting pessimistically-tilted forecasts reflecting ambiguity aversion or robustness concerns. We find that these hypotheses are strongly rejected by the data, albeit for different reasons: Inconsistent with hypothesis (i), survey return forecasts are reliably much higher than risk-free interest rates and survey expected excess returns are predictably time-varying. Inconsistent with (ii), agents are not always pessimistic about future returns, but often predictably optimistic and unconditionally unbiased.
Optimal Sovereign Default Adam, Klaus; Grill, Michael
American economic journal. Macroeconomics,
01/2017, Letnik:
9, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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When is it optimal for a fully committed government to default on its legal repayment obligations? Considering a small open economy with domestic production risk and noncontingent government debt, we ...show that it is ex ante optimal to occasionally deviate from the legal repayment obligation and to repay debt only partially. This holds true even if default generates significant deadweight costs ex post. A quantitative analysis reveals that default is optimal only in response to persistent disaster-like shocks to domestic output. Applying the framework to the situation in Greece, we find that optimal default policies suggest a considerably larger and more timely default than the one actually implemented in the year 2012.
How do different levels of government debt affect the optimal conduct of monetary and fiscal policies? And what do these optimal policies imply for the evolution of government debt over time? To ...provide an answer, this paper studies a standard monetary policy model with nominal rigidities and monopolistic competition and adds to it a fiscal authority that issues nominal non-state contingent debt, levies distortionary labor income taxes and determines the level of public goods provision. Higher government debt levels make it optimal to reduce public spending, so as to dampen the adverse incentive effects of distortionary taxes, but also strongly influence the optimal stabilization response following technology shocks. In particular, higher debt levels give rise to larger risks to the fiscal budget and to tax rates. This makes it optimal to reduce government debt over time. The optimal speed of debt reduction is missed when using first-order approximations to optimal policies, but is shown to be quantitatively significant in a second-order approximation, especially when technology movements are largely unpredictable in nature.
•Relative price trends over the product life require targeting a positive inflation rate•The optimal inflation rate for France, Germany and Italy ranges between 1.1%-1.7%•Targeting instead a zero ...rate of inflation implies significant welfare costs
Using micro price data underlying the consumer price index, we estimate relative price trends over the product life cycle in France, Germany and Italy. Minimizing the welfare consequences of relative price distortions in the presence of these trends requires targeting a significantly positive inflation rate: the steady-state inflation rate jointly maximizing welfare in all three countries ranges between 1.1%-1.7%. The welfare costs of targeting an inflation rate of zero, as suggested by monetary models ignoring relative price trends, or of targeting 4% amount to several percentage points of consumption.
In keeping with the semantic core of the root גלל , the term גלולים designates "rollers." Connections with Egypt suggest a more specific use of גלולים in a number of passages of the Hebrew text of ...Ezekiel. It is a designation of the widely spread iconographic concept of the scarab, with its phenotypes of scarab-shaped and scaraboid stamp seals, heart scarabs, and depictions on reliefs. Heart-shaped amulets alluding to the scarab ideology provide the backdrop of Ezek 14:3. The scarab's association with the heart replacement in Egyptian mortuary cult shapes the backdrop of Ezek 6:5–6 and 36:25–27.
To study the relationship between house price movements, housing construction, consumption, and international borrowing, they generalize the closed economy asset pricing models developed previously ...in Adam and Marcet (2010, 2011) and Adam, Marcet, and Nicolini (2010) along three dimensions. First, they consider a setting with two assets, namely a domestically traded risky asset-the housing stock -- and an internationally traded riskless bond. Second, they newly incorporate a borrowing constraint that limits household leverage and the overall amount of borrowing, following Kiyotaki and Moore (1997). Third, they consider a production economy with endogenous asset supply by explicitly incorporating a construction sector. Despite these extensions the model is relatively parsimonious.
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