Exercise-induced whole-body dehydration does not affect airway responsiveness in athletes but may impair small airway function

Exercise-induced bronchoconstriction (EIB) is the transient narrowing of the airways that occurs during or shortly after strenuous exercise. Loss of water from the airway surface, due to the conditioning of large volumes of air during exercise, is the main physiological stimulus for EIB. We proposed that exercise-induced whole-body dehydration would interfere with hydration of the airways and, consequently, increase the risk and/or severity of EIB. We also investigated the effects of whole-body dehydration on resting lung function

Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit

macroeconomics, economic underworld, bankruptcy, profit

Trade and Growth in East Asian Countries: Cause and Effect?

Estimates of growth equations have found a role for openness, particularly in explaining rapid growth among East Asian countries. But major concerns of simultaneous causality between growth and trade have been expressed. This study aims to deal with the endogeneity of trade by using as instrumental variables the exogenous determinants from the gravity model of bilateral trade, such as proximity to trading partners. We find that the effect of openness on growth is even stronger when we correct for the endogeneity of openness than in standard OLS estimates. We conclude with estimates of how much has been contributed to East Asian growth both by the exogenous or geographical component of openness and by the residual or policy component.

International Trade with Endogenous Technological Change

To explain why trade restrictions sometimes speed up worldwide growth and sometimes slow it down, we exploit an analogy with the theory of consumer behavior. substitution effects make demand curves slope down, but income effects can increase or decrease the slope, and can sometimes overwhelm the substitution effect. We decompose changes in the worldwide growth rate into two effects (integration and redundancy) that unambiguously slow down growth, and a third effect (allocation) that can either speed it up or slow it down. We study two types of trade restrictions to illustrate the use of this decomposition. The first is across the board restrictions on traded goods in an otherwise perfect market. The second is selective protection of knowledge-intensive goods in a world with imperfect intellectual property rights. In both examples, we show that for trade between similar regions such as Europe and North America, the first two effects dominate; starting from free trade, restrictions unambiguously reduce worldwide growth.

Economic Integration and Endogenous Growth

In a world with two similar, developed economies, economic integration can cause a permanent increase in the worldwide rate of growth. Starting from a position of isolation, closer integration can be achieved by increasing trade in goods or by increasing flows of ideas. We consider two models with different specifications of the research and development sector that is the source of growth. Either form of integration can increase the long-run rate of growth if it encourages the worldwide exploitation of increasing returns to scale in the research and development sector.

The determinants of executive compensation in the commercial banking industry

The primary purpose of this study is to examine the viability of two basic theories of compensation to explain executive compensation in the banking industry. The two executive compensation motivation theories are sales/sales growth maximization and profit/shareholder wealth maximization. Overall, strong support is found for both theories. This research also seeks to significantly expand, compared to previous research, the number of banks investigated. This study succeeds, with over a four-fold increase in the number of banks analyzed, including over 330 banks not previously used in the literature. This investigation is further motivated by the paucity of banking studies on compensation and that recent banking compensation research ignores the sales/sales growth maximization theory. This study tests three different definitions of CEO compensation. They are total compensation, annual cash compensation, and options awarded. The period of time under investigation is 1998--2004. The primary source of bank CEO compensation data is SNL Financial L.P., which breaks down compensation into its component parts of base salary, bonus, other cash compensation, non-cash compensation, and value of options granted. Standard and Poor\u27s Research Insight (Compustat North America) provides the source for the various market-based and accounting-based performance measures used in this study. A one-way, fixed-effects, unbalanced panel model is used to analyze the data. In summary, when using the entire data set, this study strongly supports the viability of both theories of CEO compensation for each of the three tested definitions of CEO pay. Next, the data set is split into larger banks, representative of bank samples of earlier research, and smaller banks, previously excluded from research. These two sub-samples of banks yielded very different pay-performance linkages when analyzing total pay and option pay. In general, for the larger banks, less support is found for the profit or shareholder wealth maximization theory. In this research, scale of operations dominates other linkages between pay and performance. Smaller banks show stronger linkages to pay than larger banks

Historical Perspectives on the Monetary Transmission Mechanism

This paper examines changes over time in the importance of the lending channel in the transmission of monetary shocks to the real economy. We first use a simple extension of the Bernanke-Blinder model to isolate the observable factors that affect the strength of the lending channel. We then show that based on changes in the structure of banks assets, reserve requirements, and the composition of external firm finance, the lending channel should have been stronger before 1929 than during the post-World War II period, especially the first half of this period. Finally, we demonstrate that conventional indicators of the importance of the lending channel, such as the spread between the loan rate and the bond rate and the correlation between loans and output, do not show the predicted decline in the importance of lending over time. From this we conclude that either the traditional indicators are not useful measures of the strength of the lending channel or that the lending channel has not been quantitatively important in any era.