Vertical linkage between formal and informal credit markets: corruption and credit subsidy policy

We develop a model of vertical linkage between the formal and informal credit markets which highlights the presence of corruption in the distribution of formal credit. The existing moneylender, the bank official and the new moneylenders move sequentially and the existing moneylender acts as a Stackelberg leader and unilaterally decides on the informal interest rate. The analysis distinguishes between two different ways of designing a credit subsidy policy. If a credit subsidy policy is undertaken through an increase in the supply of institutional credit, it is likely to increase the competitiveness in the informal credit market and lower the informal sector interest rate under reasonable parametric restrictions. Any change in the formal sector interest rate has no effect. However, an anticorruption measure (increase in penalty) unambiguously lowers the interest rate in the informal credit market. Finally, we examine the effects of alternative policies on the incomes of different economic agents in our model.Formal/informal credit markets, informal interest rate; corruption; credit subsidy policy

Corruption in a Model of Vertical Linkage between Formal and Informal Credit Sources and Credit Subsidy Policy

The present paper develops a model of vertical linkage between the formal and informal credit markets highlighting the presence of corruption in the distribution of formal credit. The existing moneylender, the bank official and the new moneylenders move sequentially and the existing moneylender acts as a Stackelberg leader and unilaterally decides on the informal interest rate. The analysis distinguishes between two different ways of designing a credit subsidy policy. If a credit subsidy policy is undertaken through an increase in the supply of institutional credit it is likely to increase the competitiveness in the informal credit market and lower the informal sector interest rate under reasonable parametric restrictions. Any change in the formal sector interest rate has no effect. An anticorruption measure, on the contrary, may be counterproductive and raise the interest rate in the informal credit market.formal/informal credit markets, interest rates

Some intriguing properties of Tukey's half-space depth

For multivariate data, Tukey's half-space depth is one of the most popular depth functions available in the literature. It is conceptually simple and satisfies several desirable properties of depth functions. The Tukey median, the multivariate median associated with the half-space depth, is also a well-known measure of center for multivariate data with several interesting properties. In this article, we derive and investigate some interesting properties of half-space depth and its associated multivariate median. These properties, some of which are counterintuitive, have important statistical consequences in multivariate analysis. We also investigate a natural extension of Tukey's half-space depth and the related median for probability distributions on any Banach space (which may be finite- or infinite-dimensional) and prove some results that demonstrate anomalous behavior of half-space depth in infinite-dimensional spaces.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/10-BEJ322 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

The Role of Mangroves in Coastal and Estuarine Sedimentary Accretion in Southeast Asia

Mangroves provide a distinctive mechanism of trapping sediment and accelerating land-building processes in tide-dominated coastal and estuarine environments. The complex hydrodynamic and salinity conditions, accumulation rates of both organic and inorganic sediments, primary surface elevation, and hydroperiod influence sediment retention mechanism within mangrove ecosystems. Abundant terrigenous sediment supply can form dynamic mud banks and the complex aerial root system of mangroves may lead to accretion of sediment by weakening the tidal velocity. Such mechanisms are often enhanced by organic flocculation. The efficiency of sediment trapping by mangroves is species specific. Adaptability and resilience of mangroves enable them to cope with the moderate to high rates of sea level rise. However, subsurface movements and deep subsidence due to autocompaction may augment the effects of relative sea level rise. Increasing population pressure and forest-based economic activities have caused global reduction of mangrove coverage challenging the sedimentation processes. Marker horizon techniques and surface elevation table (SET) tests have facilitated assessment of spatial variability in patterns of sediment accretion and surface elevation in various coastal sites of species-diverse Southeast Asia, especially coastal Malaysia and Thailand. The mangroves of the eastern coast of India have witnessed sediment retention, having an association with the seasonal rainfall regime

An Analysis of Rhythmic Staccato-Vocalization Based on Frequency Demodulation for Laughter Detection in Conversational Meetings

Human laugh is able to convey various kinds of meanings in human communications. There exists various kinds of human laugh signal, for example: vocalized laugh and non vocalized laugh. Following the theories of psychology, among all the vocalized laugh type, rhythmic staccato-vocalization significantly evokes the positive responses in the interactions. In this paper we attempt to exploit this observation to detect human laugh occurrences, i.e., the laughter, in multiparty conversations from the AMI meeting corpus. First, we separate the high energy frames from speech, leaving out the low energy frames through power spectral density estimation. We borrow the algorithm of rhythm detection from the area of music analysis to use that on the high energy frames. Finally, we detect rhythmic laugh frames, analyzing the candidate rhythmic frames using statistics. This novel approach for detection of `positive' rhythmic human laughter performs better than the standard laughter classification baseline.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, conference pape

Deconstructing the role of myosin contractility in force fluctuations within focal adhesions

Force fluctuations exhibited in focal adhesions (FAs) that connect a cell to its extracellular environment point to the complex role of the underlying machinery that controls cell migration. To elucidate the explicit role of myosin motors in the temporal traction force oscillations, we vary the contractility of these motors in a dynamical model based on the molecular clutch hypothesis. As the contractility is lowered, effected both by changing the motor velocity and the rate of attachment/detachment, we show analytically in an experimentally relevant parameter space, that the system goes from stable oscillations to stable limit cycle oscillations through a super critical Hopf bifurcation. As a function of the motor activity and the number of clutches, the system exhibits a rich array of dynamical states. The frequency range of oscillations in the average clutch and motor deformation compares well with experimental results.Comment: 23 pages, and 6 figure