The price elasticity of the Euro to movements in foreign reserves through European Central Bank intevention

The Euro has been used as the largest weighting element in a basket of currencies for forex arrangements adopted by several Central European countries outside the European Union (EU). The paper uses a new time-series approach to examine the relationship between the Euro exchange rate and the level of foreign reserves. It employs Zero-no-zero (ZNZ) patterned vector error-correction (VECM) modelling to investigate Granger causal relations among foreign reserves, the European Monetary Union money supply and the Euro exchange rate. The findings confirm that foreign reserves may influence movements in the Euro's exchange rate. Further, ZNZ patterned VECM modelling with exogenous variables is used to estimate the amount of foreign reserves currently required in order to again achieve a targetted Euro exchange rate

The effect of elasticity on drop creation in T-shaped microchannels

Polymeric microdrops of low viscosity, elastic fluids have been generated in T-shaped microfluidic devices using a cross-flow shear-induced drop generation process. Dilute (c/c* similar to 0.5) aqueous solutions of polyethylene oxide (PEO) of various molecular weights (3 x 10(5) -2 x 10(6) g/mol) were used as the drop phase fluids whilst silicone oils (5 mPa s

Elasticity, yielding and episodicity in simple models of mantle convection

We explore the implications of refinements in the mechanical description of planetary constituents on the convection modes predicted by finite-element simulations. The refinements consist in the inclusion of incremental elasticity, plasticity (yielding) and multiple simultaneous creep mechanisms in addition to the usual visco-plastic models employed in the context of unified plate-mantle models. The main emphasis of this paper rests on the constitutive and computational formulation of the model. We apply a consistent incremental formulation of the non-linear governing equations avoiding the computationally expensive iterations that are otherwise necessary to handle the onset of plastic yield. In connection with episodic convection simulations, we point out the strong dependency of the results on the choice of the initial temperature distribution. Our results also indicate that the inclusion of elasticity in the constitutive relationships lowers the mechanical energy associated with subduction events.