Stock Prices and the Macro Economy in China

This paper analyses the relationship between stock prices and the Chinese macro economy measured by the level of GDP. There are many possible channels of influence between these two variables, channels which may operate in either direction. There are also many theories relevant to these interrelationships. Rather than explicitly testing theories, we focus on the empirical nature of this relationship which we analyse in the context of a VAR/VEC model which allows for two-way influences but is agnostic about the particular theoretical underpinnings. We apply tests for stationarity and cointegration and find that there is a long-run, cointegrating relationship between stock prices and GDP. We estimate a VEC model and use it to analyse both short-run and long-run causality as well as to generate impulse response functions (IRFs). We find that there is strong evidence of long-run causality from the economy to the stock market but not vice versa. We also find modest but weaker evidence of a similar short-run effect. These are borne out by the IRFs which show a small and weak link from the stock market to the economy but a stronger and much more substantial effect in the opposite direction. We rationalise our results in terms of the relatively small size of China’s stock market.stock prices, output, China

Revisiting Pre-Trained Models for Chinese Natural Language Processing

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has shown marvelous improvements across various NLP tasks, and consecutive variants have been proposed to further improve the performance of the pre-trained language models. In this paper, we target on revisiting Chinese pre-trained language models to examine their effectiveness in a non-English language and release the Chinese pre-trained language model series to the community. We also propose a simple but effective model called MacBERT, which improves upon RoBERTa in several ways, especially the masking strategy that adopts MLM as correction (Mac). We carried out extensive experiments on eight Chinese NLP tasks to revisit the existing pre-trained language models as well as the proposed MacBERT. Experimental results show that MacBERT could achieve state-of-the-art performances on many NLP tasks, and we also ablate details with several findings that may help future research. Resources available: https://github.com/ymcui/MacBERTComment: 12 pages, to appear at Findings of EMNLP 202

Associations between Aquaglyceroporin Gene Polymorphisms and Risk of Stroke among Patients with Hypertension

Background: Dysregulations ofAQP7andAQP9were found to be related to lipid metabolism abnormality, which had been provento be one of the mechanisms of stroke. However, limited epidemiological studies explore the associations betweenAQP7andAQP9and the risk of stroke among patients with hypertension in China. Aims: We aimed to investigate the associations between genetic variants in AQP7andAQP9and the risk of stroke among patients with hypertension, as well as to explore gene-gene andgene-environment interactions. Methods: Baseline blood samples were drawn from 211 cases with stroke and 633 matched controls. Genomic DNA was extracted by a commercially available kit. Genotyping of 5 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in AQP7 (rs2989924, rs3758269, and rs2542743) and AQP9 (rs57139208, rs16939881) was performed by the polymerase chain reaction assay with TaqMan probes. Results: Participants with the rs2989924 GG genotype were found to be with a 1.74-fold increased risk of stroke compared to those with the AA+AG genotype, and this association remained significant after adjustment for potential confounders (odds ratio (OR): 1.74, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.23-2.46). The SNP rs3758269 CC+TT genotype was found to be with a 33% decreased risk of stroke after multivariate adjustment (OR: 0.67, 95% CI: 0.45-0.99) compared to the rs3758269 CC genotype. The significantly increased risk of stroke was prominent among males, patients aged 60 or above, and participants who were overweight and with a harbored genetic variant in SNP rs2989924. After adjusting potential confounders, the SNP rs3758269 CT+TT genotype was found to be significantly associated with a decreased risk of stroke compared to the CC genotype among participants younger than 60 years old or overweight. No statistically significant associations were observed between genotypes of rs2542743, rs57139208, or rs16939881 with the risk of stroke. Neither interactions nor linkage disequilibrium had been observed in this study. Conclusions: This study suggests that SNPs rs2989924 and rs3758269 are associated with the risk of stroke among patients with hypertension, while there were no statistically significant associations between rs2542743, rs57139208, and rs16939881 and the risk of stroke being observed

Genomewide Analysis of Carotenoid Cleavage Dioxygenases in Unicellular and Filamentous Cyanobacteria

Carotenoid cleavage dioxygenases (CCDs) are a group of enzymes that catalyze the oxidative cleavage steps from carotenoids to various carotenoid cleavage products. Some ccd genes have been identified and encoded enzymes functionally characterized in many higher plants, but little in cyanobacteria. We performed a comparative analysis of ccd sequences and explored their distribution, classification, phylogeny, evolution, and structure among 37 cyanobacteria. Totally 61 putative ccd sequences were identified, which are abundant in Acaryochloris marina MBIC 11017, filamentous N2-fixing cyanobacteria, and unicellular cyanobacterial Cyanothece. According to phylogenetic trees of 16S rDNA and CCD, nced and ccd8 genes occur later than the divergence of ccd7, apco, and ccd1. All CCD enzymes share conserved basic structure domains constituted by a single loop formed with seven β-strands and one helix. In this paper, a general framework of sequence-function-evolution connection for the ccd has been revealed, which may provide new insight for functional investigation