67 research outputs found
International Reserves Management and Capital Mobility in a Volatile World: Policy Considerations and a Case Study of Korea
This paper characterizes the precautionary demand for international reserves driven by the attempt to reduce the incidence of costly output decline induced by sudden reversal of short-term capital flows. It validates the main predictions of the precautionary approach by investigating changes in the patterns of international reserves in Korea in the aftermath of the 1997-8 crisis. This crisis provides an interesting case study, especially because of the rapid rise in Korea's financial integration in the aftermath of the East-Asian crisis, where foreigners' shareholding has increased to 40% of total Korean market capitalization. We show that the crisis led to structural change in the hoarding of international reserves, and that the Korean monetary authority gives much greater attention to a broader notion of 'hot money,' inclusive of short-term debt and foreigners' shareholding.
Foreigners Stocks Investment and Financial Markets Instability in East Asia during the 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis
This paper investigates the question of whether the stability of financial markets is damaged by
foreigners stock investment by estimating its dynamic relationships with stock price and exchange rate
in East Asia, focusing on the 2007-2009 global financial crisis. We find that the negative effects of
foreigners stock investment on stock price and exchange rate are much stronger during a crisis than in
normal times in many East Asian countries. This finding suggests that foreigners stock investment
could act as a destabilizing factor in domestic financial markets, especially in the face of global
financial disturbances. In particular, the Korean exchange market is found to be most vulnerable to the
global shocks among East Asian countries.
As the impact of the global common shocks turns out to be very substantial in East Asian countries,
policy makers should strengthen financial cooperation within this region. Increasing the intra-regional
trades in stocks is expected to promote the financial stability in this region by providing opportunities
for sharing investment risks among East Asian countries. In addition, regulatory measure such as the
Tobin tax may be useful in limiting capital movements against a possible crisis
Excision And Recovery: Visual Defect Obfuscation Based Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection Strategy
Due to scarcity of anomaly situations in the early manufacturing stage, an
unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) approach is widely adopted which only uses
normal samples for training. This approach is based on the assumption that the
trained UAD model will accurately reconstruct normal patterns but struggles
with unseen anomalous patterns. To enhance the UAD performance,
reconstruction-by-inpainting based methods have recently been investigated,
especially on the masking strategy of suspected defective regions. However,
there are still issues to overcome: 1) time-consuming inference due to multiple
masking, 2) output inconsistency by random masking strategy, and 3) inaccurate
reconstruction of normal patterns when the masked area is large. Motivated by
this, we propose a novel reconstruction-by-inpainting method, dubbed Excision
And Recovery (EAR), that features single deterministic masking based on the
ImageNet pre-trained DINO-ViT and visual obfuscation for hint-providing.
Experimental results on the MVTec AD dataset show that deterministic masking by
pre-trained attention effectively cuts out suspected defective regions and
resolve the aforementioned issues 1 and 2. Also, hint-providing by mosaicing
proves to enhance the UAD performance than emptying those regions by binary
masking, thereby overcomes issue 3. Our approach achieves a high UAD
performance without any change of the neural network structure. Thus, we
suggest that EAR be adopted in various manufacturing industries as a
practically deployable solution.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 5 table
Anti-obesity effects of heat-transformed green tea extract through the activation of adipose tissue thermogenesis
Abstract
Background
Adipose tissue thermogenesis is a potential therapeutic target to increase energy expenditure and thereby combat obesity. The aim of the present study was to investigate the thermogenic and anti-obesity effects of heat-transformed green tea extract (HTGT) and enzymatically modified isoquercetin (EMIQ).
Methods
Immortalized brown pre-adipocytes and C3H10T1/2 cells were used for in vitro analyses. A high-fat diet (HFD)-induced obesity mouse model and CIDEA-reporter mice were used for in vivo experiments. The effects of HTGT and EMIQ on mitochondrial metabolism were evaluated by immunoblot, mitochondrial staining, and oxygen consumption rate analyses. In vivo anti-obesity effects of HTGT and EMIQ were measured using indirect calorimetry, body composition analyses, glucose tolerance tests, and histochemical analyses.
Results
Co-treatment with HTGT and EMIQ (50μg/mL each) for 48h increased brown adipocyte marker and mitochondrial protein levels (UCP1 and COXIV) in brown adipocytes by 2.9-fold, while the maximal and basal oxygen consumption rates increased by 1.57- and 1.39-fold, respectively. Consistently, HTGT and EMIQ treatment increased the fluorescence intensity of mitochondrial staining in C3H10T1/2 adipocytes by 1.68-fold. The combination of HTGT and EMIQ (100mg/kg each) increased the expression levels of brown adipocyte markers and mitochondrial proteins in adipose tissue. Two weeks of HTGT and EMIQ treatment (100mg/kg each) led to a loss of 3% body weight and 7.09% of body fat. Furthermore, the treatment increased energy expenditure by 8.95% and improved glucose tolerance in HFD-fed mice.
Conclusions
The current study demonstrated that HTGT and EMIQ have in vivo anti-obesity effects partly by increasing mitochondrial metabolism in adipocytes. Our findings suggest that a combination of HTGT and EMIQ is a promising therapeutic agent for the treatment of obesity and related metabolic diseases
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