Mapping the State of Financial Stability

The paper uses the Self-Organizing Map for mapping the state of financial stability and visualizing the sources of systemic risks as well as for predicting systemic financial crises. The Self-Organizing Financial Stability Map (SOFSM) enables a two-dimensional representation of a multidimensional financial stability space that allows disentangling the individual sources impacting on systemic risks. The SOFSM can be used to monitor macro-financial vulnerabilities by locating a country in the financial stability cycle: being it either in the pre-crisis, crisis, post-crisis or tranquil state. In addition, the SOFSM performs better than or equally well as a logit model in classifying in-sample data and predicting out-of-sample the global financial crisis that started in 2007. Model robustness is tested by varying the thresholds of the models, the policymaker’s preferences, and the forecasting horizons

Applications of Genetic Programming to Finance and Economics: Past, Present, Future

While the origins of Genetic Programming (GP) stretch back over fifty years, the field of GP was invigorated by John Koza’s popularisation of the methodology in the 1990s. A particular feature of the GP literature since then has been a strong interest in the application of GP to real-world problem domains. One application domain which has attracted significant attention is that of finance and economics, with several hundred papers from this subfield being listed in the Genetic Programming Bibliography. In this article we outline why finance and economics has been a popular application area for GP and briefly indicate the wide span of this work. However, despite this research effort there is relatively scant evidence of the usage of GP by the mainstream finance community in academia or industry. We speculate why this may be the case, describe what is needed to make this research more relevant from a finance perspective, and suggest some future directions for the application of GP in finance and economics

Noninvasive pulmonary hemodynamic evaluation in athletes with exercise induced hypoxemia

BACKGROUND: Pulmonary capillary stress failure is potentially involved in exercise-induced hypoxemia (ie, a significant fall in hemoglobin oxygen saturation [SpO2]) during sea level exercise in endurance-trained athletes. It is unknown whether there are specific properties of pulmonary vascular function in athletes exhibiting oxygen desaturation. METHODS: Ten endurance-trained athletes with exercise-induced hypoxemia (EIH), nine endurance-trained athletes with no exercise-induced hypoxemia (NEIH), and 10 untrained control subjects underwent an incremental exercise stress echocardiography coupled with lung diffusion capacity for carbon monoxide (DLCO) and lung diffusion capacity for nitric oxide (DLNO) testing. Functional adaptation of the pulmonary circulation was evaluated with measurements of mean pulmonary arterial pressure (mPAP), pulmonary capillary pressure, pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR), cardiac output (Qc), and pulmonary vascular distensibility (alpha) mathematically determined from the curvilinearity of the multi-point mPAP/Qc relation. RESULTS: EIH athletes exhibited a lower exercise-induced PVR decrease compared with the untrained and NEIH groups (P < .001). EIH athletes showed higher maximal mPAP compared with NEIH athletes (45.4 +/- 0.9 mm Hg vs 41.6 +/- 0.9 mm Hg, respectively; P =.003); there was no difference between the NEIH and untrained subjects. Alpha was lower in the EIH group compared with the NEIH group (P < .05). Maximal mPAP, Pcap, and alpha were correlated with the fall of SpO2 during exercise (P < .01, P < .01, and P < .05). DLNO and DLCO increased with exercise in all groups, with no differences between groups. DLNO/Qc was correlated to the exercise-induced SpO2 changes (P < .05). CONCLUSIONS: EIH athletes exhibit higher maximal pulmonary vascular pressures, lower vascular distensibility, or exercise-induced changes in PVR compared with NEIH subjects, in keeping with pulmonary capillary stress failure or intrapulmonary shunting hypotheses

Interplay between the magnetic and transport properties in the III-V diluted magnetic semiconductor Ga1-xMnxAs

Contains fulltext : 28539.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access

Proposed folding pattern for apolipoprotein A-II based on a structural analogy with uteroglobin.

The tertiary structure observed in the crystalline state for uteroglobin, a small steroid binding protein, is used as a template to build an approximated model for apolipoprotein A-II. The presence of four proline residues and four hydrophobic clusters located at similar positions in apolipoprotein A-II and uteroglobin is taken as the major source of stability in such tertiary structures. A brief description of plausible specific binding sites appearing on the model of apolipoprotein A-II is given. It is suggested that the internal cavity and the four surface pockets observed for uteroglobin and postulated for apolipoprotein A-II might be used to insure specific binding of triglycerides, phospholipids, or cholesterol