San Fransisco Fed organised a conference on Great Moderation. The conference is titled as “Recent Trends In Economic Volatility: Sources And Implications” and has some exciting papers on the subject.
The summary of the conference is here. The conclusion of the broad findings is:
While there is broad agreement that aggregate economic volatility has declined over the last 25 years, the relative roles of economywide factors, such as changes in monetary policy and technological change, remain topics of dispute. Also in dispute is the extent to which this decline in aggregate volatility is mirrored in microeconomic variables, such as income and employment. Reductions in aggregate and firm-level volatility do not necessarily translate into a reduction in volatility at the individual level. Rather, some studies argue that household consumption and individual earnings have become more volatile in recent decades, not less. The linkages between the disparate trends in volatility at the aggregate level and at the individual level remain important areas of economic research.
