U.S.–China trade war and corporate reallocation:Evidence from Chinese listed companies

This paper applies a difference-in-differences framework to explore the economic consequences of the recent U.S.–China trade war. The average abnormal returns of Chinese listed firms during a period centered on President Trump's announcement on 22 March 2018 are taken as a proxy for the firms' exposure to the potential trade war. Firms more negatively exposed are found, surprisingly, to report higher total revenues in the post-announcement period. The results indicate that the Chinese firms tend to reallocate their business from overseas to the domestic market. Such within-firm reallocation is found to be more pronounced among private firms, exporting firms and non-FDI firms. Besides, firms with higher negative exposure increase total investment and financing but decrease foreign investment after the trade war

Reform of the interantional economic order: Uncertainty and economic policy coordination

This special issue contains a selection of articles on globalization and fintech. The contributions provide new insights on reform of the international economic order, paying special attention to uncertainty and economic policy coordination. They will certainly help improve our understanding of these topics

The Nexus Between Social Capital and Bank Risk Taking

This study explores social capital and its relevance to bank risk taking across countries. Our empirical results show that the levels of bank risk taking are lower in countries with higher levels of social capital, and that the impact of social capital is mainly reflected by the reduced value of the standard deviation of return on assets. Moreover, the impact of social capital is found to be weaker when the legal system lacks strength. Furthermore, the study considers the impacts of social capital of the banks’ largest shareholders in these countries and finds that high levels of social capital present in these countries exert a negative effect on bank risk taking, but the effect is not strongly significant

Nonlinear Dependence between Stock and Real Estate Markets in China

The causality between the real estate and stock markets of China remains a mystery in the literature. This paper investigates the non-linear causal relationship between real estate property and stock returns in China from the perspective of conditional quantiles. The results of the quantile causality test suggest a significant causal relationship between these two markets, especially in the tail quantile

Prospective comparison of 68Ga-FAPI-04 and 18F-FDG PET/CT for tumor staging in nasopharyngeal carcinoma

PurposeTo explore the difference in the effectiveness of gallium-68 fibroblast activation protein inhibitor (68Ga-FAPI-04) PET/CT and fluorine-18 fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG) PET/CT for the initial staging of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC).MethodsThe Affiliated Hospital of Southwest Medical University hosted this single-center prospective investigation (Clinical Trials registration No.ChiCTR2100044131) between March 2020 and September 2021. Within a week, all subjects underwent MR scans, 68Ga-FAPI-04 PET/CT, and 18F-FDG PET/CT in order. The effectiveness of medical staging employing 68Ga-FAPI-04 and 18F-FDG PET/CT was compared.ResultsTwenty-eight patients with primary NPC were evaluated (mean age53 ± 11 years). 68Ga-FAPI-04 PET/CT indicated an elevated recognition rate for diagnosing primary tumors (28/28 [100%] vs. 27/28 [96%]) and lymph node metastases (263/285 [92%] vs. 228/285 [80%]), but a lower detection rate for distant metastases (5/7 [71%] vs. 7/7 [100%]) compared with 18F-FDG PET/CT. A significant association between the maximum standard uptake value (SUVmax) of 18F-FDG PET and 68Ga-FAPI-04 PET was found in the primary cancers (r = 0.691, p < 0.001). In comparison to 18F-FDG PET/CT, 68Ga-FAPI-04 PET/CT upstaged the T stage in five patients while downstaging the N stage in seven patients. 68Ga-FAPI-04 PET/CT corrected the overall staging of five patients on18F-FDG PET/CT.Conclusion68Ga-FAPI-04 PET/CT is preferable to 18F-FDG PET/CT for NPC staging in terms of the detection efficiency for primary tumors and lymph node metastasis. This is especially true when evaluating the primary cancer and any spread to contiguous tissues. It is possible to improve the staging assessment of NPC by using 68Ga-FAPI-04 PET/CT in conjunction with 18F-FDG PET/CT

A mouse model to distinguish NLRP6-mediated inflammasome-dependent and -independent functions

The NOD-like receptor (NLR) family pyrin domain containing 6 (NLRP6) serves as a sensor for microbial dsRNA or lipoteichoic acid (LTA) in intestinal epithelial cells (IECs), and initiating multiple pathways including inflammasome pathway and type I interferon (IFN) pathway, or regulating nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) and mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathways. NLRP6 can exert its function in both inflammasome-dependent and inflammasome-independent manners. However, there is no tool to distinguish the contribution of individual NLRP6-mediated pathway to the physiology and pathology in vivo. Here, we validated that Arg39 and Trp50 residues in the pyrin domain (PYD) of murine NLRP6 are required for ASC recruitment and inflammasome activation, but are not important for the RNA binding and PYD-independent NLRP6 oligomerization. We further generated th

Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics of Novel Selective Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor Receptor-2 Inhibitor Apatinib in Humans

ABSTRACT Apatinib is a new oral antiangiogenic molecule that inhibits vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2. The present study aimed to determine the metabolism, pharmacokinetics, and excretion of apatinib in humans and to identify the enzymes responsible for its metabolism. The primary routes of apatinib biotransformation included E-and Z-cyclopentyl-3-hydroxylation, N-dealkylation, pyridyl-25-N-oxidation, 16-hydroxylation, dioxygenation, and O-glucuronidation after 3-hydroxylation. Nine major metabolites were confirmed by comparison with reference standards. The total recovery of the administered dose was 76.8% within 96 hours postdose, with 69.8 and 7.02% of the administered dose excreted in feces and urine, respectively. About 59.0% of the administered dose was excreted unchanged via feces. Unchanged apatinib was detected in negligible quantities in urine, indicating that systemically available apatinib was extensively metabolized. The major circulating metabolite was the pharmacologically inactive E-3-hydroxy-apatinib-O-glucuronide (M9-2), the steady-state exposure of which was 125% that of the apatinib. The steady-state exposures of E-3-hydroxy-apatinib (M1-1), Z-3-hydroxy-apatinib (M1-2), and apatinib-25-N-oxide (M1-6) were 56, 22, and 32% of parent drug exposure, respectively. Calculated as pharmacological activity index values, the contribution of M1-1 to the pharmacology of the drug was 5.42 to 19.3% that of the parent drug. The contribution of M1-2 and M1-6 to the pharmacology of the drug was less than 1%. Therefore, apatinib was a major contributor to the overall pharmacological activity in humans. Apatinib was metabolized primarily by CYP3A4/ 5 and, to a lesser extent, by CYP2D6, CYP2C9, and CYP2E1. UGT2B7 was the main enzyme responsible for M9-2 formation. Both UGT1A4 and UGT2B7 were responsible for Z-3-hydroxyapatinib-O-glucuronide (M9-1) formation

Taking the pulse of COVID-19: A spatiotemporal perspective

The sudden outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) swept across the world in early 2020, triggering the lockdowns of several billion people across many countries, including China, Spain, India, the U.K., Italy, France, Germany, and most states of the U.S. The transmission of the virus accelerated rapidly with the most confirmed cases in the U.S., and New York City became an epicenter of the pandemic by the end of March. In response to this national and global emergency, the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center brought together a taskforce of international researchers and assembled implemented strategies to rapidly respond to this crisis, for supporting research, saving lives, and protecting the health of global citizens. This perspective paper presents our collective view on the global health emergency and our effort in collecting, analyzing, and sharing relevant data on global policy and government responses, geospatial indicators of the outbreak and evolving forecasts; in developing research capabilities and mitigation measures with global scientists, promoting collaborative research on outbreak dynamics, and reflecting on the dynamic responses from human societies.Comment: 27 pages, 18 figures. International Journal of Digital Earth (2020

Application of frequency ratio, weights of evidence and evidential belief function models in landslide susceptibility mapping

The landslide hazard occurred in Taibai County has the characteristics of the typical landslides in mountain hinterland. The slopes mainly consist of residual sediments and locate along the highway. Most of them are in the less stable state and in high risk during rainfall in flood season especially. The main purpose of this paper is to produce landslide susceptibility maps for Taibai County (China). In the first stage, a landslide inventory map and the input layers of the landslide conditioning factors were prepared in the geographic information system supported by field investigations and remote sensing data. The landslides conditioning factors considered for the study area were slope angle, altitude, slope aspect, plan curvature, profile curvature, distance to faults, distance to rivers, distance to roads, normalized difference vegetation index, lithological unit, rainfall and land use. Subsequently, the thematic data layers of conditioning factors were integrated by frequency ratio (FR), weights of evidence (WOE) and evidential belief function (EBF) models. As a result, landslide susceptibility maps were obtained. In order to compare the predictive ability of these three models, a validation procedure was conducted. The curves of cumulative area percentage of ordered index values vs. the cumulative percentage of landslide numbers were plotted and the values of area under the curve (AUC) were calculated. The predictive ability was characterized by the AUC values and it indicates that all these models considered have relatively similar and high accuracies. The success rate of FR, WOE and EBF models was 0.9161, 0.9132 and 0.9129, while the prediction rate of the three models was 0.9061, 0.9052 and 0.9007, respectively. Considering the accuracy and simplicity comprehensively, the FR model is the optimum method. These landslide susceptibility maps can be used for preliminary land use planning and hazard mitigation purpose