12,617 research outputs found

    Essays on monetary policy and financial stability

    Get PDF
    Doutoramento em EconomiaBy focusing on the relationship between financial stability and monetary policy for the cases of Chile, Colombia, Japan, Portugal and the UK, this thesis aims to add to the existing literature on the fundamental issue of the relationship between financial stability and monetary policy, a traditional topic that gained importance in the aftermath of the GFC as Central Banks lowered policy rates in an effort to rescue their economies. As the zero-lower bound loomed and the reach of traditional monetary policy narrowed, policy makers realised that alternative frameworks were needed and hence, macroprudential policy measures aimed at targeting the financial system as a whole were introduced. The second chapter looks at the relationship between monetary policy and financial stability, which has gained importance in recent years as Central Bank policy rates neared the zero-lower bound. We use an SVAR model to study the impact of monetary policy shocks on three proxies for financial stability as well as a proxy for economic growth. Monetary policy is represented by policy rates for the EMEs and shadow rates for the AEs in our chapter. Our main results show that monetary policy may be used to correct asset mispricing, to control fluctuations in the real business cycle and also to tame credit cycles in the majority of cases. Our results also show that for the majority of cases, in line with theory, local currencies appreciate following a positive monetary policy shock. Monetary policy intervention may indeed be successful in contributing to or achieving financial stability. However, the results show that monetary policy may not have the ability to maintain or re-establish financial stability in all cases. Alternative policy choices such as macroprudential policy tool frameworks which are aimed at targeting the financial system as a whole may be implemented as a means of fortifying the economy. The third chapter looks at the institutional setting of the countries in question, the independence of the Central Bank, the political environment and the impact of these factors on financial Abstract stability. I substantiate the literature review discussion with a brief empirical analysis of the effect of Central Bank Independence on credit growth using an existing database created by Romelli (2018). The empirical results show that there is a positive relationship between credit growth and the level of Central Bank Independence (CBI) due to the positive and statistically significant coefficient on the interaction term between growth in domestic credit to the private sector and the level of CBI. When considering domestic credit by deposit money banks and other financial institutions, the interaction term is positive and statistically significant for the case of the UK for the third regression equation. A number of robustness checks show that the coefficient is positive and statistically significant for a number of cases when implementing a variety of estimation methods. Fluctuations in credit growth are larger for higher levels of CBI and hence, in periods of financial instability or ultimately financial crises, CBI would be reined back in an effort to re-establish financial stability. Based on the empirical results, and in an effort to slow down surging credit supply and to maintain financial stability, policy makers and governmental authorities should attempt to decrease the level of CBI when the economy shows signs of overheating and credit supply continues to increase. The fourth chapter looks at the interaction between macroprudential policy and financial stability. The unexpected interconnectedness of the global economy and the economic blight that occurred as a result of this, recapitulated the need to implement an alternative policy framework aimed at targeting the financial system as a whole and hence, targeting the maintenance of financial stability. In this chapter, an index of domestic macroprudential policy tools is constructed and the effectiveness of these tools in controlling credit growth, managing GDP growth and stabilising inflation growth is studied using a dynamic panel data model for the period between 2000 and 2017. The empirical analysis includes two panels namely an EU panel of 27 countries and a Latin American panel of 7 countries, the chapter also looks at a case study of Japan, Portugal and the UK. Our main results find that a tighter macroprudential policy tool stance leads to a decrease in both credit growth and GDP growth while, a tighter macroprudential policy tool stance results in higher inflation in the majority of cases. Further, we find that capital openness plays a more important role in the case of Latin America, this may be due to the region’s dependence on foreign capital flows and exchange rate movements. Lastly, we find that, in times of higher perceived market volatility, GDP growth tends to be higher and inflation growth tends to be lower in the EU. In the other cases, higher levels of perceived market volatility result in higher inflation, higher credit growth and lower GDP Abstract growth. This is in line with expectations as an increase in perceived market volatility is met with an increased flow of assets into safer markets such as the EU. This thesis establishes a relationship between financial stability and monetary policy by studying the response of Chile, Colombia, Japan, Portugal and the UK in the aftermath of the GFC as Central Banks lowered policy rates in an effort to rescue their economies. In short, the results of the work conducted in this thesis may be summarised as follows. Our results show that monetary policy contributes to the achievement of financial stability. Still, monetary policy alone is not sufficient and should be reinforced by less traditional policy choices such as macroprudential policy tools. Secondly, we find that the level of CBI should be reined in in times of surging credit supply in an effort to maintain financial stability. Finally, we conclude that macroprudential policy tools play an important role in the achievement of financial stability. These tools should complement traditional monetary policy frameworks and should be adapted for each region.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    The Radical Behavioral Challenge and Wide-Scope Obligations in Business

    Get PDF
    This paper responds to the Radical Behavioral Challenge (RBC) to normative business ethics. According to RBC, recent research on bounded ethicality shows that it is psychologically impossible for people to follow the prescriptions of normative business ethics. Thus, said prescriptions run afoul of the principle that nobody has an obligation to do something that they cannot do. I show that the only explicit response to this challenge in the business ethics literature (due to Kim et al.) is flawed because it limits normative business ethics to condemning practitioners’ behaviour without providing usable suggestions for how to do better. I argue that a more satisfying response is to, first, recognize that most obligations in business are wide-scope which, second, implies that there are multiple ways of fulfilling them. This provides a solid theoretical grounding for the increasingly popular view that we have obligations to erect institutional safeguards when bounded ethicality is likely to interfere with our ability to do what is right. I conclude with examples of such safeguards and some advice on how to use the research findings on bounded ethicality in designing ethical business organizations.</p

    A review of abnormal behavior detection in activities of daily living

    Get PDF
    Abnormal behavior detection (ABD) systems are built to automatically identify and recognize abnormal behavior from various input data types, such as sensor-based and vision-based input. As much as the attention received for ABD systems, the number of studies on ABD in activities of daily living (ADL) is limited. Owing to the increasing rate of elderly accidents in the home compound, ABD in ADL research should be given as much attention to preventing accidents by sending out signals when abnormal behavior such as falling is detected. In this study, we compare and contrast the formation of the ABD system in ADL from input data types (sensor-based input and vision-based input) to modeling techniques (conventional and deep learning approaches). We scrutinize the public datasets available and provide solutions for one of the significant issues: the lack of datasets in ABD in ADL. This work aims to guide new research to understand the field of ABD in ADL better and serve as a reference for future study of better Ambient Assisted Living with the growing smart home trend

    Anuário científico da Escola Superior de Tecnologia da Saúde de Lisboa - 2021

    Get PDF
    É com grande prazer que apresentamos a mais recente edição (a 11.ª) do Anuário Científico da Escola Superior de Tecnologia da Saúde de Lisboa. Como instituição de ensino superior, temos o compromisso de promover e incentivar a pesquisa científica em todas as áreas do conhecimento que contemplam a nossa missão. Esta publicação tem como objetivo divulgar toda a produção científica desenvolvida pelos Professores, Investigadores, Estudantes e Pessoal não Docente da ESTeSL durante 2021. Este Anuário é, assim, o reflexo do trabalho árduo e dedicado da nossa comunidade, que se empenhou na produção de conteúdo científico de elevada qualidade e partilhada com a Sociedade na forma de livros, capítulos de livros, artigos publicados em revistas nacionais e internacionais, resumos de comunicações orais e pósteres, bem como resultado dos trabalhos de 1º e 2º ciclo. Com isto, o conteúdo desta publicação abrange uma ampla variedade de tópicos, desde temas mais fundamentais até estudos de aplicação prática em contextos específicos de Saúde, refletindo desta forma a pluralidade e diversidade de áreas que definem, e tornam única, a ESTeSL. Acreditamos que a investigação e pesquisa científica é um eixo fundamental para o desenvolvimento da sociedade e é por isso que incentivamos os nossos estudantes a envolverem-se em atividades de pesquisa e prática baseada na evidência desde o início dos seus estudos na ESTeSL. Esta publicação é um exemplo do sucesso desses esforços, sendo a maior de sempre, o que faz com que estejamos muito orgulhosos em partilhar os resultados e descobertas dos nossos investigadores com a comunidade científica e o público em geral. Esperamos que este Anuário inspire e motive outros estudantes, profissionais de saúde, professores e outros colaboradores a continuarem a explorar novas ideias e contribuir para o avanço da ciência e da tecnologia no corpo de conhecimento próprio das áreas que compõe a ESTeSL. Agradecemos a todos os envolvidos na produção deste anuário e desejamos uma leitura inspiradora e agradável.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Machine Learning Research Trends in Africa: A 30 Years Overview with Bibliometric Analysis Review

    Full text link
    In this paper, a critical bibliometric analysis study is conducted, coupled with an extensive literature survey on recent developments and associated applications in machine learning research with a perspective on Africa. The presented bibliometric analysis study consists of 2761 machine learning-related documents, of which 98% were articles with at least 482 citations published in 903 journals during the past 30 years. Furthermore, the collated documents were retrieved from the Science Citation Index EXPANDED, comprising research publications from 54 African countries between 1993 and 2021. The bibliometric study shows the visualization of the current landscape and future trends in machine learning research and its application to facilitate future collaborative research and knowledge exchange among authors from different research institutions scattered across the African continent

    A Decision Support System for Economic Viability and Environmental Impact Assessment of Vertical Farms

    Get PDF
    Vertical farming (VF) is the practice of growing crops or animals using the vertical dimension via multi-tier racks or vertically inclined surfaces. In this thesis, I focus on the emerging industry of plant-specific VF. Vertical plant farming (VPF) is a promising and relatively novel practice that can be conducted in buildings with environmental control and artificial lighting. However, the nascent sector has experienced challenges in economic viability, standardisation, and environmental sustainability. Practitioners and academics call for a comprehensive financial analysis of VPF, but efforts are stifled by a lack of valid and available data. A review of economic estimation and horticultural software identifies a need for a decision support system (DSS) that facilitates risk-empowered business planning for vertical farmers. This thesis proposes an open-source DSS framework to evaluate business sustainability through financial risk and environmental impact assessments. Data from the literature, alongside lessons learned from industry practitioners, would be centralised in the proposed DSS using imprecise data techniques. These techniques have been applied in engineering but are seldom used in financial forecasting. This could benefit complex sectors which only have scarce data to predict business viability. To begin the execution of the DSS framework, VPF practitioners were interviewed using a mixed-methods approach. Learnings from over 19 shuttered and operational VPF projects provide insights into the barriers inhibiting scalability and identifying risks to form a risk taxonomy. Labour was the most commonly reported top challenge. Therefore, research was conducted to explore lean principles to improve productivity. A probabilistic model representing a spectrum of variables and their associated uncertainty was built according to the DSS framework to evaluate the financial risk for VF projects. This enabled flexible computation without precise production or financial data to improve economic estimation accuracy. The model assessed two VPF cases (one in the UK and another in Japan), demonstrating the first risk and uncertainty quantification of VPF business models in the literature. The results highlighted measures to improve economic viability and the viability of the UK and Japan case. The environmental impact assessment model was developed, allowing VPF operators to evaluate their carbon footprint compared to traditional agriculture using life-cycle assessment. I explore strategies for net-zero carbon production through sensitivity analysis. Renewable energies, especially solar, geothermal, and tidal power, show promise for reducing the carbon emissions of indoor VPF. Results show that renewably-powered VPF can reduce carbon emissions compared to field-based agriculture when considering the land-use change. The drivers for DSS adoption have been researched, showing a pathway of compliance and design thinking to overcome the ‘problem of implementation’ and enable commercialisation. Further work is suggested to standardise VF equipment, collect benchmarking data, and characterise risks. This work will reduce risk and uncertainty and accelerate the sector’s emergence

    Preferentialism and the conditionality of trade agreements. An application of the gravity model

    Get PDF
    Modern economic growth is driven by international trade, and the preferential trade agreement constitutes the primary fit-for-purpose mechanism of choice for establishing, facilitating, and governing its flows. However, too little attention has been afforded to the differences in content and conditionality associated with different trade agreements. This has led to an under-considered mischaracterisation of the design-flow relationship. Similarly, while the relationship between trade facilitation and trade is clear, the way trade facilitation affects other areas of economic activity, with respect to preferential trade agreements, has received considerably less attention. Particularly, in light of an increasingly globalised and interdependent trading system, the interplay between trade facilitation and foreign direct investment is of particular importance. Accordingly, this thesis explores the bilateral trade and investment effects of specific conditionality sets, as established within Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). Chapter one utilises recent content condition-indexes for depth, flexibility, and constraints on flexibility, established by Dür et al. (2014) and Baccini et al. (2015), within a gravity framework to estimate the average treatment effect of trade agreement characteristics across bilateral trade relationships in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) from 1948-2015. This chapter finds that the composition of a given ASEAN trade agreement’s characteristic set has significantly determined the concomitant bilateral trade flows. Conditions determining the classification of a trade agreements depth are positively associated with an increase to bilateral trade; hereby representing the furthered removal of trade barriers and frictions as facilitated by deeper trade agreements. Flexibility conditions, and constraint on flexibility conditions, are also identified as significant determiners for a given trade agreement’s treatment effect of subsequent bilateral trade flows. Given the political nature of their inclusion (i.e., the appropriate address to short term domestic discontent) this influence is negative as regards trade flows. These results highlight the longer implementation and time frame requirements for trade impediments to be removed in a market with higher domestic uncertainty. Chapter two explores the incorporation of non-trade issue (NTI) conditions in PTAs. Such conditions are increasing both at the intensive and extensive margins. There is a concern from developing nations that this growth of NTI inclusions serves as a way for high-income (HI) nations to dictate the trade agenda, such that developing nations are subject to ‘principled protectionism’. There is evidence that NTI provisions are partly driven by protectionist motives but the effect on trade flows remains largely undiscussed. Utilising the Gravity Model for trade, I test Lechner’s (2016) comprehensive NTI dataset for 202 bilateral country pairs across a 32-year timeframe and find that, on average, NTIs are associated with an increase to bilateral trade. Primarily this boost can be associated with the market access that a PTA utilising NTIs facilitates. In addition, these results are aligned theoretically with the discussions on market harmonisation, shared values, and the erosion of artificial production advantages. Instead of inhibiting trade through burdensome cost, NTIs are acting to support a more stable production and trading environment, motivated by enhanced market access. Employing a novel classification to capture the power supremacy associated with shaping NTIs, this chapter highlights that the positive impact of NTIs is largely driven by the relationship between HI nations and middle-to-low-income (MTLI) counterparts. Chapter Three employs the gravity model, theoretically augmented for foreign direct investment (FDI), to estimate the effects of trade facilitation conditions utilising indexes established by Neufeld (2014) and the bilateral FDI data curated by UNCTAD (2014). The resultant dataset covers 104 countries, covering a period of 12 years (2001–2012), containing 23,640 observations. The results highlight the bilateral-FDI enhancing effects of trade facilitation conditions in the ASEAN context, aligning itself with the theoretical branch of FDI-PTA literature that has outlined how the ratification of a trade agreement results in increased and positive economic prospect between partners (Medvedev, 2012) resulting from the interrelation between trade and investment as set within an improving regulatory environment. The results align with the expectation that an enhanced trade facilitation landscape (one in which such formalities, procedures, information, and expectations around trade facilitation are conditioned for) is expected to incentivise and attract FDI

    Reduction of Petri net maintenance modeling complexity via Approximate Bayesian Computation

    Get PDF
    This paper is part of the ENHAnCE ITN project (https://www.h2020-enhanceitn.eu/) funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie SklodowskaCurie grant agreement No. 859957. The authors would like to thank the Lloyd's Register Foundation (LRF), a charitable foundation in the U.K. helping to protect life and property by supporting engineeringrelated education, public engagement, and the application of research. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of these organizations which have enabled the research reported in this paper.The accurate modeling of engineering systems and processes using Petri nets often results in complex graph representations that are computationally intensive, limiting the potential of this modeling tool in real life applications. This paper presents a methodology to properly define the optimal structure and properties of a reduced Petri net that mimic the output of a reference Petri net model. The methodology is based on Approximate Bayesian Computation to infer the plausible values of the model parameters of the reduced model in a rigorous probabilistic way. Also, the method provides a numerical measure of the level of approximation of the reduced model structure, thus allowing the selection of the optimal reduced structure among a set of potential candidates. The suitability of the proposed methodology is illustrated using a simple illustrative example and a system reliability engineering case study, showing satisfactory results. The results also show that the method allows flexible reduction of the structure of the complex Petri net model taken as reference, and provides numerical justification for the choice of the reduced model structure.European Commission 859957Lloyd's Register Foundation (LRF), a charitable foundation in the U.K

    Functional Representation of the Intentional Bounded Rationality of Decision-Makers: A Laboratory to Study the Decisions a Priori

    Get PDF
    This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, [ECO2013-48496-C4-3-R and MTM2016-77642-C2-2-P], the Diputacion General de Aragon (DGA) and the European Social Fund [CREVALOR], the Spanish State Research Agency Projects PID2019-10380RBI00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, and the Andalusian Government Project P20_00673.The judgments of decision-makers are frequently the best way to process the information on complex alternatives. However, the performances of the alternatives are often not observable in their entirety, which prevents researchers from conducting controlled empirical studies. This paper justifies a functional representation that, due to its good predictive results, has been widely used ad hoc in studies in different branches of knowledge; it formalizes aspects of the human mental structure that influence the ability of people to decide and the intentional bounded rationality, and it subsequently analyzes how the reliability of decision-makers is affected by the difficulty of the problem and the expertise and beliefs of the decision-maker. The main research objective of this paper is to derive explicitly a general functional form that represents the behavior of a decision-maker linked to their way of thinking. This functional form allows a laboratory to be created to study a priori the performance of human decisions, i.e., the probability of choosing each of the alternatives, once the returns of the alternatives, the level of expertise, and the initial beliefs of the decision-maker are known exogenously. This laboratory will allow (1) the evaluation of decision support techniques; (2) the creation of agent-based models that anticipate group performances due to individual interactions; and (3) the development of other investigations based on statistical simulations.Spanish Government ECO2013-48496-C4-3-R MTM2016-77642-C2-2-PGobierno de AragonEuropean Social Fund [CREVALOR]Spanish Government PID2019-10380RBI00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033Andalusian Government Project P20_0067

    Discovering the hidden structure of financial markets through bayesian modelling

    Get PDF
    Understanding what is driving the price of a financial asset is a question that is currently mostly unanswered. In this work we go beyond the classic one step ahead prediction and instead construct models that create new information on the behaviour of these time series. Our aim is to get a better understanding of the hidden structures that drive the moves of each financial time series and thus the market as a whole. We propose a tool to decompose multiple time series into economically-meaningful variables to explain the endogenous and exogenous factors driving their underlying variability. The methodology we introduce goes beyond the direct model forecast. Indeed, since our model continuously adapts its variables and coefficients, we can study the time series of coefficients and selected variables. We also present a model to construct the causal graph of relations between these time series and include them in the exogenous factors. Hence, we obtain a model able to explain what is driving the move of both each specific time series and the market as a whole. In addition, the obtained graph of the time series provides new information on the underlying risk structure of this environment. With this deeper understanding of the hidden structure we propose novel ways to detect and forecast risks in the market. We investigate our results with inferences up to one month into the future using stocks, FX futures and ETF futures, demonstrating its superior performance according to accuracy of large moves, longer-term prediction and consistency over time. We also go in more details on the economic interpretation of the new variables and discuss the created graph structure of the market.Open Acces
    • …
    corecore