18,166 research outputs found

    Essays on monetary policy and financial stability

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    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

    A Protocol for Cast-as-Intended Verifiability with a Second Device

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    Numerous institutions, such as companies, universities, or non-governmental organizations, employ Internet voting for remote elections. Since the main purpose of an election is to determine the voters' will, it is fundamentally important to ensure that the final election result correctly reflects the voters' votes. To this end, modern secure Internet voting schemes aim for what is called end-to-end verifiability. This fundamental security property ensures that the correctness of the final result can be verified, even if some of the computers or parties involved are malfunctioning or corrupted. A standard component in this approach is so called cast-as-intended verifiability which enables individual voters to verify that the ballots cast on their behalf contain their intended choices. Numerous approaches for cast-as-intended verifiability have been proposed in the literature, some of which have also been employed in real-life Internet elections. One of the well established approaches for cast-as-intended verifiability is to employ a second device which can be used by voters to audit their submitted ballots. This approach offers several advantages - including support for flexible ballot/election types and intuitive user experience - and it has been used in real-life elections, for instance in Estonia. In this work, we improve the existing solutions for cast-as-intended verifiability based on the use of a second device. We propose a solution which, while preserving the advantageous practical properties sketched above, provides tighter security guarantees. Our method does not increase the risk of vote-selling when compared to the underlying voting protocol being augmented and, to achieve this, it requires only comparatively weak trust assumptions. It can be combined with various voting protocols, including commitment-based systems offering everlasting privacy

    Deliberative Democracy, Perspective from Indo-Pacific Blogosphere: A Survey

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    Deliberation and communication within the national space have had numerous implications on how citizens online and offline perceive government. It has also impacted the relationship between opposition and incumbent governments in the Indo-Pacific region. Authoritarian regimes have historically had control over the dissemination of information, thereby controlling power and limiting challenges from citizens who are not comfortable with the status quo. Social media and blogs have allowed citizens of these countries to find a way to communicate, and the exchange of information continues to rise. The quest by both authoritarian and democratic regimes to control or influence the discussion in the public sphere has given rise to concepts like cybertroopers, congressional bloggers, and commentator bloggers, among others. Cybertroopers have become the de facto online soldiers of authoritarian regimes who must embrace democracy. While commentator and congressional bloggers have acted with different strategies, commentator bloggers educate online citizens with knowledgeable information to influence the citizens. Congressional bloggers are political officeholders who use blogging to communicate their positions on ongoing national issues. Therefore, this work has explored various concepts synonymous with the Indo-Pacific public sphere and how it shapes elections and democracy

    Annual report of the officers of the town of Jackson, New Hampshire for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2022.

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    This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire

    Towards the Formation of Genuine European Parties? Examining and Comparing the Cases of DiEM25 and Volt Europa

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    The 2019 European Parliament (EP) election saw the participation of two transnational parties: DiEM25 and Volt Europa. Both seek to democratise the European Union (EU) by engaging with European institutions and mobilising their supporters across member states, putting the EU's democratic deficit at the centre of their endeavour. They consider the European space as their primary field of appeal and mobilization, adopting a transnational conception of 'the people' as the source of democratic legitimacy. This paper explores the potential of genuine pan-European parties in increasing public contestation and inclusiveness at the European level and in democratising EU politics by treating DiEM25 and Volt as prototypical cases. Through a comparative analysis, we highlight the novelties of the two parties in relation to existing 'Europarties' and assess how these respond to deficiencies related to the democratic deficit. We conclude by reflecting upon what DiEM25 and Volt reveal about the potentials and challenges of 'transnationalising' EU politics

    Countermeasures for the majority attack in blockchain distributed systems

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    La tecnología Blockchain es considerada como uno de los paradigmas informáticos más importantes posterior al Internet; en función a sus características únicas que la hacen ideal para registrar, verificar y administrar información de diferentes transacciones. A pesar de esto, Blockchain se enfrenta a diferentes problemas de seguridad, siendo el ataque del 51% o ataque mayoritario uno de los más importantes. Este consiste en que uno o más mineros tomen el control de al menos el 51% del Hash extraído o del cómputo en una red; de modo que un minero puede manipular y modificar arbitrariamente la información registrada en esta tecnología. Este trabajo se enfocó en diseñar e implementar estrategias de detección y mitigación de ataques mayoritarios (51% de ataque) en un sistema distribuido Blockchain, a partir de la caracterización del comportamiento de los mineros. Para lograr esto, se analizó y evaluó el Hash Rate / Share de los mineros de Bitcoin y Crypto Ethereum, seguido del diseño e implementación de un protocolo de consenso para controlar el poder de cómputo de los mineros. Posteriormente, se realizó la exploración y evaluación de modelos de Machine Learning para detectar software malicioso de tipo Cryptojacking.DoctoradoDoctor en Ingeniería de Sistemas y Computació

    An Experimental Study on Sentiment Classification of Moroccan dialect texts in the web

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    With the rapid growth of the use of social media websites, obtaining the users' feedback automatically became a crucial task to evaluate their tendencies and behaviors online. Despite this great availability of information, and the increasing number of Arabic users only few research has managed to treat Arabic dialects. The purpose of this paper is to study the opinion and emotion expressed in real Moroccan texts precisely in the YouTube comments using some well-known and commonly used methods for sentiment analysis. In this paper, we present our work of Moroccan dialect comments classification using Machine Learning (ML) models and based on our collected and manually annotated YouTube Moroccan dialect dataset. By employing many text preprocessing and data representation techniques we aim to compare our classification results utilizing the most commonly used supervised classifiers: k-nearest neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), and deep learning (DL) classifiers such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LTSM). Experiments were performed using both raw and preprocessed data to show the importance of the preprocessing. In fact, the experimental results prove that DL models have a better performance for Moroccan Dialect than classical approaches and we achieved an accuracy of 90%.Comment: 13 pages, 5 tables, 2 figure

    Modelo de gestión de factores asociados al rol de los servidores públicos, que influencian en la adopción ciudadana de servicios de e-government

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    El e-government es una innovación en el sector público que muchos gobiernos alrededor del mundo han implementado con el fin de prestar mejores servicios, aumentar la eficacia y la eficiencia, mejorar el relacionamiento con sus ciudadanos y aumentar la confianza y transparencia en la gestión pública. El éxito de este tipo de iniciativas depende en gran medida de la adopción por parte de los ciudadanos (Carter & FraBelanger, 2005, p. 57). Sin embargo, la adopción ciudadana de servicios de e-government es baja en los países de América Latina, y en Colombia a pesar de que los porcentajes son relativamente mayores comparados con otros países de la región, la adopción sigue considerándose baja, especialmente en las regiones menos desarrolladas (OCDE, 2018, p. 3). El propósito de este trabajo es enfocarse en uno de los actores claves del éxito de proyectos de e-government y que ha sido poco investigado, como los son los servidores públicos. Por lo anterior, se propone un modelo para gestionar los factores asociados al rol de los servidores públicos, que influencian en la adopción ciudadana de servicios de e-government. Esta investigación es de enfoque cualitativo, en la que se llevaron a cabo seis entrevistas semi estructuradas a expertos de un proyecto de e-government en Medellín, Colombia con el fin de validar el modelo propuesto y obtener insumos para la definición de estrategias y acciones que se recomiendan llevar a cabo para mejorar la adopción de servicios de e-government y por ende la prestación de los servicios a los ciudadanos.E-government is an innovation in the public sector that many governments around the world have implemented in order to provide better services, increase effectiveness and efficiency, improve the relations with their citizens, and increase trust and transparency in public management. The success of these types of initiatives depends to a large extent on citizen adoption (Carter & FraBelanger, 2005, p. 57). However, citizen adoption of e-government services is low in Latin American countries, and in Colombia, despite the fact that the percentages are relatively higher compared to other countries in the region, the adoption is still considered low, especially in less developed regions (OCDE, 2018, p. 3). The purpose of this work is to focus on one of the key actors in the success of e-government projects that has been underinvestigated, such as public servants. Therefore, a model is proposed to manage the factors associated with the public servants’ role, which influence in e-government services citizen adoption. This research has a qualitative approach, in which six semi-structured interviews were carried out with experts from an e-government project in Medellín, Colombia; in order to validate the proposed model and obtain inputs for the definition of strategies and actions that they recommended to be carried out to improve the adoption of e-government services and therefore the provision of services to citizens

    Partisan Gerrymandering and The Right to Privacy

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    This paper argues that partisan gerrymanderers violate citizens’ right to privacy by using data containing sensitive information on citizens without a compelling state interest. It first details how partisan gerrymandering claims have been argued in Court in the past. Next, it discusses theories of the right to privacy, mainly exploring the tensions between James Madison’s writings on privacy and Warren and Brandeis’ famed The Right to Privacy. Then, I present originalist arguments for upholding the original meaning and principles of the right to privacy and the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments before walking through case law related to privacy and technological advances. In conclusion, this paper holds that state legislatures violate the original meaning of the right to privacy, protected by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, when they use anonymized data sets to partisan gerrymander. Resultingly, these data sets should only be accessed when a compelling state interest is identified and partisan bias is curbed
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