The Dynamic Effect of Uncertainty on Corporate Investment through Internal and External Financing

Using firm-level data on the Japanese manufacturing industry, this study identifies the causal effect of uncertainty on the dynamic relation between corporate investment and financing conditions. It demonstrates that the cautionary effect is increasingly dominant under high uncertainty irrespective of the type of corporate investment—capital investment and R&D—and that this result remains even in the weak instrument robust inference. Hence, the dominance of the cautionary effect over the financing constraint effect makes actual corporate investment decisions under high uncertainty indifferent to the firm’s financing conditions

Th Subset Balance in Lupus Nephritis

Lupus nephritis, which has various histological patterns and variable clinical outcomes, is one of the most important complications of systemic lupus nephritis (SLE). This pathogenetic mechanism in each histologically different type of lupus nephritis (LN) remains unclear. Although SLE is suggested to be a Th2-driven disease, elevation of both Th1 and Th2 cytokines occurs in both humans and mice, suggesting that SLE is a complex disease driven by different lymphocyte subsets with high heterogeneity of clinical manifestations and organ involvement. Recent findings in LN elucidate an essential role for the Th1, IL-17 producing T cells and Th17 cells in the development of diffuse proliferative lupus nephritis (DPLN), and Th2 cytokine in that of membranous lupus nephritis (MLN). These data support the hypothesis that individual Th1/Th2 balance is one of the critical determinants for histopathology of LN

The Sensitivity Effect of Uncertainty on Corporate Investment through Internal and External Financing: Evidence on Cautionary Channel from Japanese Manufacturing Firms

Using firm-level data on the Japanese manufacturing industry, this paper studies the causal impact of uncertainty on the dynamic relation between corporate investment and financing conditions. It demonstrates that the cautionary effect that makes actual corporate investment decisions indifferent to the firm's financing conditions increases in higher uncertainty irrespective of the type of corporate investment---capital investment and R\&D---and is more pronounced in firms with less cash holdings. This result remains even in the weak and invalid instrument robust inference

The Dynamic Effect of Uncertainty on Corporate Investment through Internal and External Financing

Using firm-level data on the Japanese manufacturing industry, this study identifies the causal effect of uncertainty on the dynamic relation between corporate investment and financing conditions. It demonstrates that the cautionary effect is increasingly dominant under high uncertainty irrespective of the type of corporate investment—capital investment and R&D—and that this result remains even in the weak instrument robust inference. Hence, the dominance of the cautionary effect over the financing constraint effect makes actual corporate investment decisions under high uncertainty indifferent to the firm’s financing conditions

The Emergence of A Parallel World: The Misperception Problem for Bank Balance Sheet Risk and Lending Behavior

We examine the reason that there have coexisted the two opposing views on distressed banks' lending behavior in Japan's post-bubble period: the one is the stagnant lending in a capital crunch and the other is the forbearance lending to low-quality borrowers. To this end, we address the measurement problem for bank balance sheet risk. We identify the credit supply and allocation effects of bank capital in the bank loan equation specified at loan level, thereby finding that the ``parallel worlds'', or the two opposing views, emerge because the regulatory capital does not reflect the actual condition of increased risk on bank balance sheet, while the market value of capital does. By uncovering banks' engagement in patching-up of the regulatory capital in the Japan's post-bubble period, we show that lowly market capitalized banks that had difficulty in building up adequate equity capital for their risk exposure decreased the overall supply of credits. The parallels world can emerge whenever banks are allowed to overvalue assets with their discretion, as in Japan' post-bubble period

ACT2G: Attention-based Contrastive Learning for Text-to-Gesture Generation

Recent increase of remote-work, online meeting and tele-operation task makes people find that gesture for avatars and communication robots is more important than we have thought. It is one of the key factors to achieve smooth and natural communication between humans and AI systems and has been intensively researched. Current gesture generation methods are mostly based on deep neural network using text, audio and other information as the input, however, they generate gestures mainly based on audio, which is called a beat gesture. Although the ratio of the beat gesture is more than 70% of actual human gestures, content based gestures sometimes play an important role to make avatars more realistic and human-like. In this paper, we propose a attention-based contrastive learning for text-to-gesture (ACT2G), where generated gestures represent content of the text by estimating attention weight for each word from the input text. In the method, since text and gesture features calculated by the attention weight are mapped to the same latent space by contrastive learning, once text is given as input, the network outputs a feature vector which can be used to generate gestures related to the content. User study confirmed that the gestures generated by ACT2G were better than existing methods. In addition, it was demonstrated that wide variation of gestures were generated from the same text by changing attention weights by creators

Theobromine enhances the conversion of white adipocytes into beige adipocytes in a PPARγ activation-dependent manner

The adipocytes play an important role in driving the obese-state—white adipose tissue (WAT) stores the excess energy as fat, wherein brown adipose tissue (BAT) is responsible for energy expenditure via the thermoregulatory function of uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1)—the imbalance between these two onsets obesity. Moreover, the anti-obesity effects of brown-like-adipocytes (beige) in WAT are well documented. Browning, the process of transformation of energy-storing into energy-dissipating adipocytes, is a potential preventive strategy against obesity and its related diseases. In the present study, to explore an alternative source of natural products in the regulation of adipocyte transformation, we assessed the potential of theobromine (TB), a bitter alkaloid of the cacao plant, inducing browning in mice (in vivo) and primary adipocytes (in vitro). Dietary supplementation of TB significantly increased skin temperature of the inguinal region in mice and induced the expression of UCP1 protein. It also increased the expression levels of mitochondrial marker proteins in subcutaneous adipose tissues but not in visceral adipose tissues. The microarray analysis showed that TB supplementation upregulated multiple thermogenic and beige adipocyte marker genes in subcutaneous adipose tissue. Furthermore, in mouse-derived primary adipocytes, TB upregulated the expression of the UCP1 protein and mitochondrial mass in a PPARγ ligand-dependent manner. It also increased the phosphorylation levels of PPARγ coactivator 1α without affecting its protein expression. These results indicate that dietary supplementation of TB induces browning in subcutaneous WAT and enhances PPARγ-induced UCP1 expression in vitro, suggesting its potential to treat obesity.ArticleThe Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry. 100: 108898 (2021)journal articl

The Interaction Effect in a Nonlinear Specification of Bank Lending: A Reexamination of ``Unnatural Selection"

Peek and Rosengren (2005) suggested the mechanism of ``unnatural selection,'' where Japanese banks with impaired capital increase credit to low-quality firms because of their motivation to pursue balance sheet cosmetics. In this study, we reexamine this mechanism in terms of the interaction effect in a nonlinear specification of bank lending, using data from 1994 to 1999. We rigorously demonstrate that their estimation results imply that Japanese banks allocated lending from viable firms to unviable ones regardless of the degree of bank capitalization