2,564 research outputs found
Sign Patterns of J-orthogonal Matrices
This thesis builds upon the results in “G-matrices, J-orthogonal matrices, and their sign patterns”, Czechoslovak Math. J. 66 (2016), 653-670, by Hall and Rozloˇzn ́ık. Some general results about the sign patterns of J-orthogonal matrices are proved, including about block diagonal matrices. It is shown that every full 4 × 4 sign pattern allows J -orthogonality and as a result that, for n ≤ 4, all n × n full sign patterns allow a J-orthogonal matrix as well as a G-matrix. The 3 × 3 sign patterns of the J -orthogonal matrices which have zero entires are also characterized
Fluctuations in the Foreign Exchange Market: How Important are Monetary Policy Shocks?
We study the effects of U.S. monetary policy shocks on the bilateral exchange rate between the U.S. and each of the G7 countries. We also estimate deviations from uncovered interest rate parity and exchange rate pass-through conditional on these shocks. The analysis is based on a structural vector autoregression in which monetary policy shocks are identified through the conditional heteroscedasticity of the structural disturbances. Unlike earlier work in this area, our empirical methodology avoids making arbitrary assumptions about the relevant policy indicator or transmission mechanism in order to achieve identification. At the same time, it allows us to assess the implications of imposing invalid identifying restrictions. Our results indicate that the nominal exchange rate exhibits delayed overshooting in response to a monetary expansion, depreciating for roughly ten months before starting to appreciate. The shock also leads to large and persistent departures from uncovered interest rate parity, and to a prolonged period of incomplete pass-through. Variance-decomposition results indicate that monetary policy shocks account for a non-trivial proportion of exchange rate fluctuations.Conditions heteroscedasticity, delayed overshooting, exchange rate pass-through, identification, structural vector autoregression, uncovered interest rate parity
Monetary Policy Shocks: Testing Identification Conditions Under Time-Varying Conditional Volatility
We propose an empirical procedure, which exploits the conditional heteroscedasticity of fundamental disturbances, to test the targeting and orthogonality restrictions imposed in the recent VAR literature to identify monetary policy shocks. Based on U.S. monthly data for the post-1982 period, we reject the nonborrowed-reserve and interest-rate targeting procedures. In contrast, we present evidence supporting targeting procedures implying more than one policy variable. We also always reject the orthogonality conditions between policy shocks and macroeconomic variables. We show that using invalid restrictions often produces misleading policy measures and dynamic responses. These results have important implications for the measurement of policy shocks and their temporal effects as well as for the estimation of the monetary authority's reaction function.Conditional heteroscedasticity, monetary policy indicators, orthogonality conditions
Sparse regulatory networks
In many organisms the expression levels of each gene are controlled by the
activation levels of known "Transcription Factors" (TF). A problem of
considerable interest is that of estimating the "Transcription Regulation
Networks" (TRN) relating the TFs and genes. While the expression levels of
genes can be observed, the activation levels of the corresponding TFs are
usually unknown, greatly increasing the difficulty of the problem. Based on
previous experimental work, it is often the case that partial information about
the TRN is available. For example, certain TFs may be known to regulate a given
gene or in other cases a connection may be predicted with a certain
probability. In general, the biology of the problem indicates there will be
very few connections between TFs and genes. Several methods have been proposed
for estimating TRNs. However, they all suffer from problems such as unrealistic
assumptions about prior knowledge of the network structure or computational
limitations. We propose a new approach that can directly utilize prior
information about the network structure in conjunction with observed gene
expression data to estimate the TRN. Our approach uses penalties on the
network to ensure a sparse structure. This has the advantage of being
computationally efficient as well as making many fewer assumptions about the
network structure. We use our methodology to construct the TRN for E. coli and
show that the estimate is biologically sensible and compares favorably with
previous estimates.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS350 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Fluctuating surface-current formulation of radiative heat transfer: theory and applications
We describe a novel fluctuating-surface current formulation of radiative heat
transfer between bodies of arbitrary shape that exploits efficient and
sophisticated techniques from the surface-integral-equation formulation of
classical electromagnetic scattering. Unlike previous approaches to
non-equilibrium fluctuations that involve scattering matrices---relating
"incoming" and "outgoing" waves from each body---our approach is formulated in
terms of "unknown" surface currents, laying at the surfaces of the bodies, that
need not satisfy any wave equation. We show that our formulation can be applied
as a spectral method to obtain fast-converging semi-analytical formulas in
high-symmetry geometries using specialized spectral bases that conform to the
surfaces of the bodies (e.g. Fourier series for planar bodies or spherical
harmonics for spherical bodies), and can also be employed as a numerical method
by exploiting the generality of surface meshes/grids to obtain results in more
complicated geometries (e.g. interleaved bodies as well as bodies with sharp
corners). In particular, our formalism allows direct application of the
boundary-element method, a robust and powerful numerical implementation of the
surface-integral formulation of classical electromagnetism, which we use to
obtain results in new geometries, including the heat transfer between finite
slabs, cylinders, and cones
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