Monitoring financial stability: a financial conditions index approach

Monitoring financial stability requires an understanding of both how traditional and evolving financial markets relate to each other and how they relate to economic conditions. This article describes two new indexes of financial conditions that aim to quantify these relationships.Financial stability ; Financial crises ; Finance

Gathering insights on the forest from the trees: a new metric for financial conditions

By incorporating the Harvey accumulator into the large approximate dynamic factor framework of Doz et al. (2006), we are able to construct a coincident index of financial conditions from a large unbalanced panel of mixed frequency financial indicators. We relate our financial conditions index, or FCI, to the concept of a "financial crisis" using Markov-switching techniques. After demonstrating the ability of the index to capture "crisis" periods in U.S. financial history, we present several policy-geared threshold rules for the FCI using Receiver Operator Characteristics (ROC) curve analysis.Financial crises ; Financial markets

Chicago Fed National Activity Index turns ten - analyzing its first decade of performance

This article discusses how the Chicago Fed National Activity Index has performed as a “real-time” indicator of economic activity and related inflationary pressure.

Argument-Checking:A Critical Pedagogy Approach to Digital Literacy

The digital revolution brought about unprecedented changes in people’s daily lives as well as in techno-scientific contexts. In this paper, we address the problem of information overload people experience in online media, news outlets, and social media. The problem is well-known for its negative influence on the quality of online information, with abundant discussion on the promise of fact-checking and the potential role of censorship and moderation by social media. We instead discuss the issue from the perspective of digital literacy; specifically, we advance the view that our procedure of argument-checking can enhance such literacy, as a form of critical pedagogy, thereby contributing to improving the quality of online information

A Practitioner's Guide and MATLAB Toolbox for Mixed Frequency State Space Models

The use of mixed frequency data is now common in many applications, ranging from the analysis of high frequency financial time series to large cross-sections of macroeconomic time series. In this article, we show how state space methods can easily facilitate both estimation and inference in these settings. After presenting a unified treatment of the state space approach to mixed frequency data modeling, we provide a series of applications to demonstrate how our MATLAB toolbox can make the estimation and post-processing of these models straightforward

Implementasi Virtual Tour Sebagai Media Informasi Daerah (Studi Kasus : Kota Manado)

– Perkembangan teknologi yang semakin hari semakin pesat, memunculkan banyak inovasi baru dari teknologi. Salah satu inovasi yang kita jumpai saat ini adalah Virtual tour misalnya penyampaian informasi tentang lokasi dari suatu daerah atau tempat dengan Virtual tour. Akan tetapi penggunaan aplikasi virtual tour sebagai media penyampaian informasi untuk memperkenalkan lokasi–lokasi di Kota Manado belum ada, sehingga dibuatlah sebuah media Implementasi Virtual Tour Sebagai Media Infomasi Daerah (Studi Kasus : Kota Manado). Tujuan aplikasi ini untuk mengimplementasikan virtual tour sebagai media informasi untuk memperkenalkan lokasi yang bisa di kunjungi di Kota Manado dimana informasi ini ditampilkan secara visual dari suatu lokasi dengan panorama 360o sehingga pengguna dapat mengetahui keadaan sekitar. Metode yang digunakan adalah metode Multimedia Development Life Cycle (MDLC) yang merupakan metode rancang bangun perangkat lunak multimedia yang menekankan pada 6 tahap pengembangan multimedia. Terdapat tiga puluh satu lokasi di Kota Manado yang digunakan dalam pembuatan apliaksi Virtual tour ini. Pada penelitian ini gambar panorama 3600 akan dipublish kedalam website Dinas Pariwisata dan Kebudayaan Kota Manado dan juga diintegrasikan ke Google Maps dan Google Street View sehingga pengguna dapat melihat lokasi-lokasi tersebut kapan dan dimana saja dengan menggunakan bantuan internet

Fault-tolerant Cooperative Tasking for Multi-agent Systems

A natural way for cooperative tasking in multi-agent systems is through a top-down design by decomposing a global task into sub-tasks for each individual agent such that the accomplishments of these sub-tasks will guarantee the achievement of the global task. In our previous works [1], [2] we presented necessary and sufficient conditions on the decomposability of a global task automaton between cooperative agents. As a follow-up work, this paper deals with the robustness issues of the proposed top-down design approach with respect to event failures in the multi-agent systems. The main concern under event failure is whether a previously decomposable task can still be achieved collectively by the agents, and if not, we would like to investigate that under what conditions the global task could be robustly accomplished. This is actually the fault-tolerance issue of the top-down design, and the results provide designers with hints on which events are fragile with respect to failures, and whether redundancies are needed. The main objective of this paper is to identify necessary and sufficient conditions on failed events under which a decomposable global task can still be achieved successfully. For such a purpose, a notion called passivity is introduced to characterize the type of event failures. The passivity is found to reflect the redundancy of communication links over shared events, based on which necessary and sufficient conditions for the reliability of cooperative tasking under event failures are derived, followed by illustrative examples and remarks for the derived conditions.Comment: Preprint, Submitted for publicatio