The value of relationship banking during financial crises : evidence from the Republic of Korea

A systemic financial crisis with monetary restriction is probably the most promising occasion for assessing whether, and to what extent, relationship banking is valuable to borrowers. The authors take this question to a unique database of credit bureau, microeconomic information covering the pervasive financial crisis the Republic of Korea experienced in 1997-98. The database includes all corporate borrowers surveyed by the Korean Credit Bureau, providing details on the structure of their borrowings, and on their relationship with lending banks. The authors did not have access to the identity of the corporate borrower, and their only non-financial control variable was the borrower's Standard Industrial Classification (SIC). This restriction limited their analysis to smaller borrowers, keeping their sample focused on small, and medium-size enterprises, which were likely to rely on banks for external financing. Their findings: 1) Outstanding loans plunge more for firms with weaker pre-crisis relationship banking. 2) The drop in credit lines - arguably a proxy identifying shifts in the loan supply - is larger for firms relying less on strong relationship banking. 3) More intense pre-crisis relationship banking reduces the probability that a previously non-delinquent firm would build (increase) its loans in arrears in 1998, the year of the sharpest liquidity constraints. 4) All things equal, this probability depends on whether firms were borrowing from one (or more) of the five banks foreclosed in June 1998, showing that it might be particularly difficult for borrowers to replace distressed lending banks during a financial crisis. The authors'findings support the hypothesis that relationship banking = with surviving banks - has a positive value during a systemic financial crisis. They argue that for many viable small, and medium-size businesses in Korea, relationship banking reduced liquidity constraints, and thus, diminished the probability of unwarranted bankruptcy.Financial Intermediation,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Economic Adjustment and Lending,Housing Finance

Wetting Behavior of Dental Implants

Titanium (Ti) and titanium alloys are widely used in biomedical devices and components, because of their desirable properties, such as relatively low modulus, good fatigue strength, formability, machinability, corrosion resistance, and biocompatibility. However, Ti and its alloys cannot meet all of the clinical requirements. Therefore, surface modification of Ti has been often performed to improve the biological, chemical, and mechanical properties. Various modifications of surface properties have been investigated to predictably improve the osseointegration of Ti implants. The rate and quality of osseointegration in Ti implants are related to their surface properties. A multiplicity of implant surface forms exist engineered with mechanical features that physically interlock the implant with bone. Various strategies have been utilized to improve bone integration of Ti-based implants. For example, surface grit blasting, acid-etching and anodization methods enhance cell growth, improving implant fixation through increases in interlocking surface area and alterations of oxide thickness. On the other hand, surface composition and hydrophilicity are parameters that may play a role in implant-tissue interaction and osseointegration. Highly hydrophilic surfaces seem more desirable than hydrophobic ones in view of their interactions with biological fluids, cells and tissues. Several recent studies have shown that the surface energy of biomaterials strongly has influence the initial cell attachment and spreading of osteoblastic cells on the biomaterial surfaces. Hallab et al. said that surface energy might be a more important determinant of cell adhesion and proliferation, and might be more useful than surface roughness for generating cell adhesion and cell. It may have the influence on protein adsorption and the structural rearrangement of the proteins on the material. Therefore, understanding the relationship between surface energy and cell adhesion on different biomaterials will facilitate the design of optimized implant material surfaces and subsequently the cell attachment. Surface energy is an important parameter of the material surface. It is affected by several surface characteristics, such as chemical composition, surface charge, and microstructural topography. Many papers reported that surface energy is one of important surface characteristics parameter of modified titanium surfaces. Given the importance of surface wettability of dental implants surfaces in the achievement of osseointegration, the surface free energy values for a given material, obtained by various methods and with use of different measuring liquids, are not consistent. Thus, we provided a review article of the surface modification on titanium surface and the surface wettability. The relationship between CAs and surface preparations was determined in this review

Partial Sum Minimization of Singular Values in Robust PCA: Algorithm and Applications

Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) via rank minimization is a powerful tool for recovering underlying low-rank structure of clean data corrupted with sparse noise/outliers. In many low-level vision problems, not only it is known that the underlying structure of clean data is low-rank, but the exact rank of clean data is also known. Yet, when applying conventional rank minimization for those problems, the objective function is formulated in a way that does not fully utilize a priori target rank information about the problems. This observation motivates us to investigate whether there is a better alternative solution when using rank minimization. In this paper, instead of minimizing the nuclear norm, we propose to minimize the partial sum of singular values, which implicitly encourages the target rank constraint. Our experimental analyses show that, when the number of samples is deficient, our approach leads to a higher success rate than conventional rank minimization, while the solutions obtained by the two approaches are almost identical when the number of samples is more than sufficient. We apply our approach to various low-level vision problems, e.g. high dynamic range imaging, motion edge detection, photometric stereo, image alignment and recovery, and show that our results outperform those obtained by the conventional nuclear norm rank minimization method.Comment: Accepted in Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI). To appea

Development of Ocean Economy Satellite Account in Korea

The ocean has emerged as a new solution to new growth engines. However, some issues remain to be resolved, such as unified concepts and evaluation methods for the ocean economy, comparability between the national economy and the ocean economy, and the connection between global and national assessments. Since the ocean economy comprises various complex industries, it is necessary to establish policies based on an objective analysis of economic indicators. However, there have been difficulties in analyzing industrial activities related to the ocean economy within the national account system. To more accurately calculate the share of the ocean economy sector in the national economy, it is necessary to create a satellite account that reflects the characteristics of the ocean economic activities while maintaining consistency with the national account. This study aims to develop a satellite account for the ocean economy, a measurement of GDP in the ocean sector, which can correspond with the national accounts system and intends to propose Korean practices as a framework in the process of discussing international guidelines. This study introduces a potential structure for Korea\u27s ocean economy satellite account, the principles, methods, and data used for value coefficient estimation, and finally presents pilot results for several components of the ocean economy. This account can be utilized to diagnose the economic position as well as the policy effects of Korea’s ocean economy sector while contributing to the establishment of mid-to-long term industrial policies. This case study of Korean practices can be an important example that offers a framework and principles for international discussions