Mortgage Lending and the Great moderation: a multivariate GARCH Approach

Financial innovation during the Great Moderation increased the size and scope of credit flows in the US. Credit flows increased both in volume and with regard to the range of activities and investments that was debt-financed. This may have contributed to the reduction in output volatility that was the Great Moderation. We hypothesize that during the Great Moderation (i) growth in mortgage finance partly decoupled from fundamentals as measured by overall output growth and (ii) this allowed mortgages less to finance residential investment and more to finance spending on other GDP components. We document that the start of the Moderation coincided with a surge in bank credit creation (especially mortgage credit), a rise in property income, a rise in the consumption share of GDP, and a change in correlation (from positive to negative) between consumption and non-consumption GDP components (investment, export and government expenditure). In a multivariate GARCH framework, we observe unidirectional causality in variance from total output to mortgage lending before the Great Moderation, which is no longer detectable during the Great Moderation. We also find that bidirectional causality in variance of home mortgage lending and residential investment existed before, but not during the Great Moderation. Both these findings are consistent with a role for credit dynamics in explaining the Great Moderation.great moderation; mortgage credit; multivariate GARCH; causality

Moderation through exclusion? The journey of the Tunisian Ennahda from fundamentalist to conservative party

The success of processes of democratic change is often predicated on the moderation of anti-systemic and extremist parties. The literature on such parties argues that such moderation, namely the acceptance of democratic procedures, human rights, and a market economy, comes about through inclusion. This seems to be borne out when one analyses a number of Islamist parties having contributed to the progressive democratization of their respective countries. The Tunisian case, however, offers a different perspective on moderation. This article argues that it has been exclusion through repression and social marginalization that has led the Islamist party Ennahda to move from its extreme anti-systemic position of the 1970s to become the mainstream conservative party it is today

A soothing invisible hand: moderation potentials in optimal control

A moderation incentive is a continuously differentiable control-dependent cost term that is identically zero on the boundary of the admissible control region, and is subtracted from the `do or die' cost function to reward sub-maximal control utilization in optimal control systems. A moderation potential is a function on the cotangent bundle of the state space such that the solutions of Hamilton's equations satisfying appropriate boundary conditions are solutions of the synthesis problem - the control-parametrized Hamiltonian system central to Pontryagin's Maximum Principle. A multi-parameter family of moderation incentives for affinely controlled systems with quadratic control constraints possesses simple, readily calculated moderation potentials. One member of this family is a shifted version of the kinetic energy-style control cost term frequently used in geometric optimal control. The controls determined by this family approach those determined by a logarithmic penalty function as one of the parameters approaches zero, while the cost term itself is bounded.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figure

Performativity, fabrication and trust: exploring computer-mediated moderation

Based on research conducted in an English secondary school, this paper explores computer mediated moderation as a performative tool. The Module Assessment Meeting (MAM) was the moderation approach under investigation. I mobilise ethnographic data generated by a key informant, and triangulated with that from other actors in the setting, in order to examine some of the meanings underpinning moderation within a performative environment. Drawing on the work of Ball (2003), Lyotard (1979) and Foucault (1977, 1979), I argue that in this particular case performativity has become entrenched in teachers’ day-to-day practices, and not only affects those practices but also teachers’ sense of self. I suggest that MAM represented performative and fabricated conditions and (re)defined what the key participant experienced as a vital constituent of her educational identities - trust. From examining the case in point, I hope to have illustrated for those interested in teachers’ work some of the implications of the interface between technology and performativity

Deep Learning for User Comment Moderation

Experimenting with a new dataset of 1.6M user comments from a Greek news portal and existing datasets of English Wikipedia comments, we show that an RNN outperforms the previous state of the art in moderation. A deep, classification-specific attention mechanism improves further the overall performance of the RNN. We also compare against a CNN and a word-list baseline, considering both fully automatic and semi-automatic moderation

The great moderation: good luck, good policy, or less oil dependence?

Three explanations have been suggested for the moderation in real GDP and inflation that has occurred in industrialized countries since the 1980s: good luck, better monetary policy, and structural changes in the economy. Recent research finds that better monetary policy explains most of the moderation in inflation, and good luck and the less-intensive use of oil (a structural change) have played a major role in the moderation of GDP.Petroleum products - Prices ; Economic conditions ; Monetary policy

Early years foundation stage profile: local authority moderation requirements booklet 2010—11

"This guidance explains the requirements and sets out the procedures for local authority moderation of the early years foundation stage profile (EYFS) and identifies key elements of effective practice... QCDA is remitted by the Department for Education (DfE) to ensure that 2011 EYFS profile outcomes are robust and reliable as a result of improved moderation practice. All English local authorities must have regard to any guidance given by the QCDA in exercising its function under the EYFS (Learning and Development Requirements) Order 2007, Section 4.2." - Page 3

On the sources of the Great Moderation

The remarkable decline in macroeconomic volatility experienced by the U.S. economy since the mid-80s (the so-called Great Moderation) has been accompanied by large changes in the patterns of comovements among output, hours and labor productivity. Those changes are reflected in both conditional and unconditional second moments as well as in the impulse responses to identified shocks. That evidence points to structural change, as opposed to just good luck, as an explanation for the Great Moderation. We use a simple macro model to suggest some of the immediate sources which are likely to be behind the observed changes.Great Moderation, structural VAR, technology shocks, monetary policy rules, labor hoarding

The Great Moderation in the euro area: What role have macroeconomic policies played ?

Most OECD countries have experienced a sharp reduction in the volatility of output and inflation over the past three decades. Although this Great Moderation process has stirred considerable interest in economic and policy circles, research on its causes has so far tended to focus on the US economy and has produced relatively little empirical evidence on the euro area or other non-US OECD countries. This paper contributes to fill in the gap by providing a euro-area view of the Great Moderation process and by assessing the euro-area experience against developments in other OECD countries. Its main focus is on the possible role of macroeconomic policies. After reviewing a set of key stylised facts of the fall in output growth volatility in the euro area, the paper discusses the possible channels through which economic policies may have contributed to the Great Moderation and resents the results of an econometric panel analysis of the determinants of output growth volatility. Its main conclusion is that the Great Moderation is not just the result of a long period of luck in the form of milder shocks but can also partly be ascribed to changes in economic policies, in particular improvements in the conduct of monetary policy and, to a lesser extent, more powerful automatic fiscal stabilisers.macroeconomic volatility, great moderation, euro area, Gonzalez Cabanillas, Ruscher