The credit channel at work - lessons from the Republic of Korea's financial crisis

The authors suggest that the credit channel - as a transmitter of monetary and financial shocks - appears to have aggravated the Republic of Korea's economic crisis. They use micro-data gathered at the bank level to better identify this channel of transmission. They find that: 1) Monetary tightening broadens the spread between marginal bank lending rates and corporate commercial paper rates (consistent with hypothesis that bank lending is a transmitter of monetary shocks). 2) Credit limits on overdrafts - arguably a proxy to identify shifts in the loan supply - react negatively to the monetary squeeze. 3) After the stiffening of bank capital adequacy requirements, banks suffering from larger negative capital shocks experience a more marked slowdown in lending and deposit-taking and also raise their loan rates disproportionately. These findings lend support to the hypothesis that autonomous contraction by banks restricts the availability of credit and magnifies the increase in its cost. This phenomenon compounded the Korean crisis by aggravating liquidity constraints for most agents that rely on bank credit as their only external source of funds. Policymakers may want to provide relief - possibly through market-based actions - to the small and medium-sized enterprises (and other businesses) that suffer unduly from such a credit crunch. To reduce obstacles to recovery, they may also want to devise market-based incentives to make bank loans available to healthy firms in sectors (such as exports) on which recovery depends.Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Financial Intermediation,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Intermediation,Economic Theory&Research,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Banking Law

Financial intermediary distress in the Republic of Korea - Small is beautiful?

Taking the Korean experience as a laboratory experiment in systemic financial crises, the authors analyze distress in individual institutions among two groups of financial intermediaries. They pool together a group of large financial intermediaries (commercial banks, merchant banking corporations) and another group of tiny mutual savings and finance companies. Both the too-big-to-fail doctrine and the credit channel approach suggest that the probability of distress would be greater for small intermediaries. But the authors find that proportionately fewer small intermediaries were distressed than were large intermediaries. They offer two hypothetical explanations for this unexpected result: 1) Exchange rate exposure - a major shock to Korean intermediaries - was presumably negligible for the small financial intermediaries. 2) Small financial intermediaries allocated loans better, because of the"peer monitoring"natural to their mutual nature and deep local roots. Available data did not allow the authors to test the first hypothesis, but they did find support for the second one. Estimating a logit model, they find that the probability of distress was systematically smaller for the mutual savings and finance companies that stayed closer to their origins (for example, collecting many deposits as"credit mutual installment savings") and for those with a longer history of doing business in their local community.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Intermediation,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Intermediation

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

ELVIS: Empowering Locality of Vision Language Pre-training with Intra-modal Similarity

Deep learning has shown great potential in assisting radiologists in reading chest X-ray (CXR) images, but its need for expensive annotations for improving performance prevents widespread clinical application. Visual language pre-training (VLP) can alleviate the burden and cost of annotation by leveraging routinely generated reports for radiographs, which exist in large quantities as well as in paired form (imagetext pairs). Additionally, extensions to localization-aware VLPs are being proposed to address the needs of accurate localization of abnormalities for CAD in CXR. However, we find that the formulation proposed by locality-aware VLP literatures actually leads to loss in spatial relationships required for downstream localization tasks. Therefore, we propose Empowering Locality of VLP with Intra-modal Similarity, ELVIS, a VLP aware of intra-modal locality, to better preserve the locality within radiographs or reports, which enhances the ability to comprehend location references in text reports. Our locality-aware VLP method significantly outperforms state-of-the art baselines in multiple segmentation tasks and the MS-CXR phrase grounding task. Qualitatively, ELVIS is able to focus well on regions of interest described in the report text compared to prior approaches, allowing for enhanced interpretability.Comment: Under revie

Nanoscale reaction vessels: Highly ordered nanocrystal arrays inside porous anodic alumina nanowells

Using an anodic alumina template as a nanoscale reaction vessel, the authors developed a simple and unique method to prepare highly ordered arrays of nanocrystals in isolated nanowells. The highly ordered arrays of nanoscale wells were fabricated by short anodization. After the nanoscale wells were filled with a precursor solution of NaCl by dewetting, the solvent of the precursor solution was evaporated, resulting in spontaneous formation of uniformly sized NaCl nanocrystals inside the nanoscale wells. The size of crystals could be easily adjusted by varying the concentration of the precursor solution and the size of nanoscale wells. This approach is simple and cost-effective, and it can fabricate nanocrystal arrays on substrates with high throughput. It can also be readily adapted to synthesize other types of high-density nanocrystal arrays on different substrates. © 2015 The Authorsopen0

THE EFFECTS OF WEARING SPANDEX WEAR WITH COMPRESSION BAND ON MUSCLE ACTIVITY DURING A GOLF SWING

The purpose of this study was to determine how spandex wear with compressive band affects muscle activities during a golf swing. This study showed that average and maximum nEMG (normalized EMG) values of left AO (external abdominal oblique) were less in EG (experimental group) compared with CG (control group) during back swing, whereas those of left PM (pectoralis major) in EG were greater than CG. It is more likely that EG performed effectively golf swing without excess muscle activity. Thus, the spandex wear with compressive band played an important role in improving swing performance with injury prevention. This has led to suggestions of the need for further kinetic and kinematic analyses to evaluate its function