Collateral Value and Forbearance Lending

We investigate the foreclosure policy of collateral-based loans in which the endogenous collateral value plays a crucial role. If creditors are able to commit, then the equilibrium arrangement is more likely to feature forebearance lending by specifying a lower level of liquidation (or roll over all of the loans) relative to the expost efficiency criterion for each realization of the interim signal. The key is that collateral value may drop too low when banks call in loans by auctioning off borrowers¿ collateral and this makes clearing up non-performing loans less attractive. We attribute the banks¿ leniency as we have observed in Japan during the 1990s to an equilibrium arrangement where banks can commit due to either relationship banking or an implicit lenderborrower contract, such as the arrangement under Japan¿s main-bank system.Collateral value, forbearance lending, government guarantee.

Biologics for the treatment of chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps : state of the art

Chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps (CRSwNP) is a complex upper airway disease affecting up to 11% of the population of Western Europe. In these western countries, 85% of the CRSwNP disease reveals a type 2 inflammatory pattern. In the last 15 years, several randomized double-blind studies on monoclonal antibodies in CRSwNP were performed. These studies demonstrated for the first time that biologics targeting type 2 immune reactions might be successful in nasal polyps. The target proteins, interleukin (IL)-4, IL-5, IL-13, and IgE were previously identified as key mediators in studies using nasal polyp tissues to measure and to interact in ex-vivo settings. No biomarkers have been identified to predict response to a specific biologic or to monitor treatment success. These studies were characterized by small numbers of patients and heterogeneous populations. They did, however, pave the way for currently performed and analyzed phase 3 studies, which will possibly lead to the registration of the first biologic drug with the indication CRSwNP. The studies already provide indications on the effects to be expected from those biologics; the results of phase-3 studies in larger populations will be decisive for the indications, patient selection, and finally the stopping rules for those drugs in subjects with severe nasal polyps, in whom the current standard of care including topical and oral glucocorticosteroids, antibiotics and surgical procedures failed to control the disease. We may expect that those biologics will open new perspectives for those patients with severe polyposis with, but also independent of asthma, allowing to avoid the possible adverse events resulting from systemic glucocorticosteroids and surgery

Radical-Enhanced Chinese Character Embedding

We present a method to leverage radical for learning Chinese character embedding. Radical is a semantic and phonetic component of Chinese character. It plays an important role as characters with the same radical usually have similar semantic meaning and grammatical usage. However, existing Chinese processing algorithms typically regard word or character as the basic unit but ignore the crucial radical information. In this paper, we fill this gap by leveraging radical for learning continuous representation of Chinese character. We develop a dedicated neural architecture to effectively learn character embedding and apply it on Chinese character similarity judgement and Chinese word segmentation. Experiment results show that our radical-enhanced method outperforms existing embedding learning algorithms on both tasks.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure