The Impact of Capital Inflows on Emerging East Asian Economies: Is Too Much Money Chasing Too Little Good?

In recent years, emerging East Asian economies have experienced large capital inflows-especially a surge in portfolio inflows-and an appreciation of asset prices such as equities, land, and both nominal and real exchange rates. The paper reviews why a surge in capital inflows can increase asset prices, and then empirically investigates the effects by employing a panel vector autoregression (VAR) model. The empirical results suggest that capital inflows have indeed contributed to the asset price appreciation in this region, although capital inflow shocks explain a relatively small part of asset price fluctuations. How to manage these capital inflows is also discussed.Capital inflows; portfolio inflows; asset prices

Complementarity between Bilateral Trade and Financial Integration

This paper explores the complementarities between bilateral trade in goods and financial assets. By utilizing a gravity model specification with an extended dataset in terms of time span and asset classification as well as alternative instrumental variables, we confirm the existence of positive evidence for complementarities. We find that common factors such as bilateral distance and other economic size variables that determine both cross-border trade and financial flows contribute to complementarity. However, the fact that the estimated coefficients of distance for financial transactions are about half the size of those for trade in goods suggests that physical distance is less important for financial transactions. Furthermore, the significance of distance in explaining bilateral transactions disappears when trade is added as an additional explanatory variable, indicating that distance may not directly influence financial flows. Finally, we also find that there exists another important factor that is responsible for the complementarities that exist between trade and financial integration. This additional factor is a direct causal relationship that acts from both directions between trade in goods and financial transactions, while the directional effects from trade in goods to financial transactions are much stronger

Complementarity between Bilateral Trade and Financial Integration

This paper explores the complementarities between bilateral trade in goods and financial assets. By utilizing a gravity model specification with an extended dataset in terms of time span and asset classification as well as alternative instrumental variables, we confirm the existence of positive evidence for complementarities. We find that common factors such as bilateral distance and other economic size variables that determine both cross-border trade and financial flows contribute to complementarity. However, the fact that the estimated coefficients of distance for financial transactions are about half the size of those for trade in goods suggests that physical distance is less important for financial transactions. Furthermore, the significance of distance in explaining bilateral transactions disappears when trade is added as an additional explanatory variable, indicating that distance may not directly influence financial flows. Finally, we also find that there exists another important factor that is responsible for the complementarities that exist between trade and financial integration. This additional factor is a direct causal relationship that acts from both directions between trade in goods and financial transactions, while the directional effects from trade in goods to financial transactions are much stronger

Modeling and Analysis of a High-Displacement Pneumatic Artificial Muscle With Integrated Sensing

We present a high-displacement pneumatic artificial muscle made of textiles or plastics that can include integrated electronics to sense its pressure and displacement. Compared to traditional pneumatic muscle actuators such as the McKibben actuator and other more recent soft actuators, the actuator described in this paper can produce a much higher (40~65%) contraction ratio. In this paper, we describe the design, fabrication, and evaluation of the actuator, as well as the manufacturing process used to create it. We demonstrate the actuator design with several examples that produce 120 and 300 N at pressures of 35 and 105 kPa, respectively, and have contraction ratios of 40–65%

Recurrent Deterministic Policy Gradient Method for Bipedal Locomotion on Rough Terrain Challenge

This paper presents a deep learning framework that is capable of solving partially observable locomotion tasks based on our novel interpretation of Recurrent Deterministic Policy Gradient (RDPG). We study on bias of sampled error measure and its variance induced by the partial observability of environment and subtrajectory sampling, respectively. Three major improvements are introduced in our RDPG based learning framework: tail-step bootstrap of interpolated temporal difference, initialisation of hidden state using past trajectory scanning, and injection of external experiences learned by other agents. The proposed learning framework was implemented to solve the Bipedal-Walker challenge in OpenAI's gym simulation environment where only partial state information is available. Our simulation study shows that the autonomous behaviors generated by the RDPG agent are highly adaptive to a variety of obstacles and enables the agent to effectively traverse rugged terrains for long distance with higher success rate than leading contenders.Comment: Published in IEEE proceedings: 2018 15th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (IEEE-ICARCV