The government's role in Japanese and Korean credit markets : a new institutional economics perspective

The authors discuss the effectiveness of credit policies in the early stages of economic development in Japan and Korea. They examine the importance of institutional arrangements for managing credit policies in the two countries. They emphasize participatory government intervention, wherein credit policies could be viewed as part of an internal allocation mechanism: government, banks, and large industrial firms may be said to have formed what the authors call a"government led internal organization"(GLIO). They examine the theoretical foundations for this view and discuss the implications for the efficiency of credit allocations. They argue that in early economic development such a participatory approach may have helped overcome pervasive market imperfections. But there were also significant dangers: problems of entrenched interests and institutional inertia. In both countries, the relative importance of GLIO gradually diminished as competitive capital markets and large conglomerates ("privately led internal government organizations") expanded with economic growth.Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Financial Intermediation

Currency Market Reactions to Good and Bad News During the Asian Crisis

There is considerable disagreement among analysts about the extent to which the spread of the Asian crisis was based on reasonable changes in expectations about fundamentals versus pure contagion effects resulting from imperfections in the behavior of currency and financial markets. In this paper we focus specifically on the behavior of the foreign exchange market for the five Asian countries. We find little support for the hypothesis that the Asian currency crisis was dominated by panic in the markets such that investors and speculators reacted much more strongly to bad than to good news. While the strongest reactions were to home news, there were also a number of significant cross effects. Almost all of these were of the same sign, suggesting that investors typically assumed that what was good for one country was good for all. Again, there was no systematic evidence of stronger reactions to bad than to good news. The markets may have overreacted in general, pushing currencies below the levels justified by the fundamentals, but, if so, this did not undercut the markets ability to respond to good as well as bad news, nor do these responses appear to have been systematically smaller to good than to bad news. The symptoms of the blind panic that has so often been alleged do not appear in the data.

The Falsification of Four Popular Hypotheses about International Financial Behavior during the Asian Crisis

Various claims have been made about the causes of the Asian crisis and its spread. Here, we use data on the behavior of capital flows during the crisis to test the strong forms of four such hypotheses, including the dominant role of portfolio investors and hedge funds in initiating and spreading the crisis; moral hazard; and, finally, the role of Japanese banks in spreading the trouble to countries in which they were the largest source of funds. All are falsified as monocausal explanations. For example, portfolio investments that could not have been subject to substantial moral hazard continued to flow into Asia until very shortly before the crisis. Likewise, contrary to common expectations banks were a much larger source of capital outflows during the crisis than were portfolio investors. While falsified in their strongest forms, several of these hypotheses in less strong form should play a role in a more nuanced analysis. It is time to move past simple single-factor approaches in order to produce a more complete, synthetic explanation of this episode.

Modeling chemistry in and above snow at Summit, Greenland – Part 1: Model description and results

Sun-lit snow is increasingly recognized as a chemical reactor that plays an active role in uptake, transformation, and release of atmospheric trace gases. Snow is known to influence boundary layer air on a local scale, and given the large global surface coverage of snow may also be significant on regional and global scales. We present a new detailed one-dimensional snow chemistry module that has been coupled to the 1-D atmospheric boundary layer model MISTRA. The new 1-D snow module, which is dynamically coupled to the overlaying atmospheric model, includes heat transport in the snowpack, molecular diffusion, and wind pumping of gases in the interstitial air. The model includes gas phase chemical reactions both in the interstitial air and the atmosphere. Heterogeneous and multiphase chemistry on atmospheric aerosol is considered explicitly. The chemical interaction of interstitial air with snow grains is simulated assuming chemistry in a liquid-like layer (LLL) on the grain surface. The coupled model, referred to as MISTRA-SNOW, was used to investigate snow as the source of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and gas phase reactive bromine in the atmospheric boundary layer in the remote snow covered Arctic (over the Greenland ice sheet) as well as to investigate the link between halogen cycling and ozone depletion that has been observed in interstitial air. The model is validated using data taken 10 June–13 June, 2008 as part of the Greenland Summit Halogen-HOx experiment (GSHOX). The model predicts that reactions involving bromide and nitrate impurities in the surface snow can sustain atmospheric NO and BrO mixing ratios measured at Summit, Greenland during this period

The use of ‘PICO for synthesis’ and methods for synthesis without meta-analysis: protocol for a survey of current practice in systematic reviews of health interventions

INTRODUCTION: Systematic reviews involve synthesis of research to inform decision making by clinicians, consumers, policy makers and researchers. While guidance for synthesis often focuses on meta-analysis, synthesis begins with specifying the ’PICO for each synthesis’ (i.e. the criteria for deciding which populations, interventions, comparators and outcomes are eligible for each analysis). Synthesis may also involve the use of statistical methods other than meta-analysis (e.g. vote counting based on the direction of effect, presenting the range of effects, combining P values) augmented by visual display, tables and text-based summaries. This study examines these two aspects of synthesis. OBJECTIVES: To identify and describe current practice in systematic reviews of health interventions in relation to: (i) approaches to grouping and definition of PICO characteristics for synthesis; and (ii) methods of summary and synthesis when meta-analysis is not used. METHODS: We will randomly sample 100 systematic reviews of the quantitative effects of public health and health systems interventions published in 2018 and indexed in the Health Evidence and Health Systems Evidence databases. Two authors will independently screen citations for eligibility. Two authors will confirm eligibility based on full text, then extract data for 20% of reviews on the specification and use of PICO for synthesis, and the presentation and synthesis methods used (e.g. statistical synthesis methods, tabulation, visual displays, structured summary). The remaining reviews will be confirmed as eligible and data extracted by a single author. We will use descriptive statistics to summarise the specification of methods and their use in practice. We will compare how clearly the PICO for synthesis is specified in reviews that primarily use meta-analysis and those that do not. CONCLUSION: This study will provide an understanding of current practice in two important aspects of the synthesis process, enabling future research to test the feasibility and impact of different approaches

Historic landmarks in clinical transplantation: Conclusions from the consensus conference at the University of California, Los Angeles

The transplantation of organs, cells, and tissues has burgeoned during the last quarter century, with the development of multiple new specialty fields. However, the basic principles that made this possible were established over a three-decade period, beginning during World War II and ending in 1974. At the historical consensus conference held at UCLA in March 1999, 11 early workers in the basic science or clinical practice of transplantation (or both) reached agreement on the most significant contribution of this era that ultimately made transplantation the robust clinical discipline it is today. These discoveries and achievements are summarized here is six tables and annotated with references