DEBT OVERHANG, FINANCIAL SECTOR DEVELOPMENT AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

This paper uses panel data of 20 high external debt countries selected from Asia and Latin-America to investigate the financial sector development-debt-growth nexus within the framework of an endogenous growth and financial development mechanism. First, we found that among 20 high external debt countries, the external debt-to-GDP ratio is significantly negatively correlated with economic growth rates, indicating that excessive debt is detrimental to the growth of an economy. Second, we introduced the simultaneous GMM equations between financial sector development and economic growth to evaluate the interaction effects among economic growth, external debt, and financial sector development. In empirical results, we find that the negative impact of high debt on growth appears to operate through a strong negative effect, in terms of compulsion to resort to financially repressive policies. In addition, we also find a two-way relationship between financial sector development and economic growth.Debt Overhang Hypothesis, Dynamic Panel Data, Dynamic GMM, Financial Sector Development, Economic Growth

The Effectiveness and Sustainability of the Sterilization Policy in China

The aim of this paper is to examine the sterilization policy in China. First, several indices are used to measure the status of China’s markets and to determine effectiveness and sustainability of the sterilization policy and the possible impacts it may have induced. Second, within a microeconomic framework, we incorporate the housing price variable into the target loss function of the monetary authority to explore its financial capabilities and evaluate the effectiveness and sustainability of China’s sterilization policy. The empirical results show that Chinese monetary authorities sterilize almost all of the effects of international capital inflows and increase foreign exchange reserves on the monetary base. That is, increased capital mobility does not sabotage the independence of the Chinese monetary policy. Nevertheless, analyses of the sustainability of sterilization policy indicate that the sustainability of the monetary sterilization policy has been seriously challenged since March 2008, which suggests that Chinese monetary authority has endured tremendous pressure for unsustainable sterilization

Improving Automatic Jazz Melody Generation by Transfer Learning Techniques

In this paper, we tackle the problem of transfer learning for Jazz automatic generation. Jazz is one of representative types of music, but the lack of Jazz data in the MIDI format hinders the construction of a generative model for Jazz. Transfer learning is an approach aiming to solve the problem of data insufficiency, so as to transfer the common feature from one domain to another. In view of its success in other machine learning problems, we investigate whether, and how much, it can help improve automatic music generation for under-resourced musical genres. Specifically, we use a recurrent variational autoencoder as the generative model, and use a genre-unspecified dataset as the source dataset and a Jazz-only dataset as the target dataset. Two transfer learning methods are evaluated using six levels of source-to-target data ratios. The first method is to train the model on the source dataset, and then fine-tune the resulting model parameters on the target dataset. The second method is to train the model on both the source and target datasets at the same time, but add genre labels to the latent vectors and use a genre classifier to improve Jazz generation. The evaluation results show that the second method seems to perform better overall, but it cannot take full advantage of the genre-unspecified dataset.Comment: 8 pages, Accepted to APSIPA ASC(Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference ) 201

The Effectiveness of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Treating Patients with Leukemia

Leukemia is the most common malignancy among all childhood cancers and is associated with a low survival rate in adult patients. Since 1995, the National Health Insurance (NHI) program in Taiwan has been offering insurance coverage for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), along with conventional Western medicine (WM). This study analyzes the status of TCM utilization in Taiwan, in both pediatric and adult patients with leukemia. A retrospective cohort study was conducted using population-based National Health Insurance Research Database of Registry of Catastrophic Illness, involving patient data from 2001 to 2010 and follow-up data through 2011. The effectiveness of TCM use was evaluated. Relevant sociodemographic data showed that both pediatric and adult patients who were TCM users one year prior to leukemia diagnosis were more likely to utilize TCM services for cancer therapy. A greater part of medical expenditure of TCM users was lower than that of TCM nonusers, except little discrepancy in drug fee of adult patients. The survival rate is also higher in TCM users. Altogether, these data show that TCM has the potential to serve as an adjuvant therapy when combined with conventional WM in the treatment of patients with leukemia

THE EFFECTS OF EXTERNAL LOAD ON LOWER EXTREMiTY ELECTROMYOGRAPHY AMPLITUDE DURING COUNTERMOVEMENT JUMP

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of different loads on the mean electromyography (EMG) amplitude of the gluteus maximus, biceps fernoris, vastus medialis, gastrocnemius, soleus, and tibialis anterior during the deceleration phase and the acceleration phase of the countermovement jumps (CMJ). Ten male physical education students performed different CMJs with and without an external load (0,2.5,5.0, 7.5, or 10.0 kg hold in arms). The results s h o w the amplitude of the gluteus maximus with load of 7.5 kg was higher than with load of 2.5 kg during the deceleration phase (p < .05), and the amplitude of the soleus with load of 10.0 kg was higher than with load of 2.5 kg during the acceleration phase (p < .05). It indicated that the activities of lower limb muscles were not influenced by the relative lower of external loading during CMJ

Aqueous Extract of Paeonia suffruticosa Inhibits Migration and Metastasis of Renal Cell Carcinoma Cells via Suppressing VEGFR-3 Pathway

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) cells are characterized by strong drug resistance and high metastatic incidence. In this study, the effects of ten kinds of Chinese herbs on RCC cell migration and proliferation were examined. Aqueous extract of Paeonia suffruticosa (PS-A) exerted strong inhibitory effects on cancer cell migration, mobility, and invasion. The results of mouse xenograft experiments showed that the treatment of PS-A significantly suppressed tumor growth and pulmonary metastasis. We further found that PS-A markedly decreased expression of VEGF receptor-3 (VEGFR-3) and phosphorylation of FAK in RCC cells. Moreover, the activation of Rac-1, a modulator of cytoskeletal dynamics, was remarkably reduced by PS-A. Additionally, PS-A suppressed polymerization of actin filament as demonstrated by confocal microscopy analysis and decreased the ratio of F-actin to G-actin in RCC cells, suggesting that PS-A inhibits RCC cell migration through modulating VEGFR-3/FAK/Rac-1 pathway to disrupt actin filament polymerization. In conclusion, this research elucidates the effects and molecular mechanism for antimigration of PS-A on RCC cells and suggests PS-A to be a therapeutic or adjuvant strategy for the patients with aggressive RCC