Capital Flight: China's Experience

We study the empirical determinants of China’s capital flight. In addition to the covered interest differential, our empirical exercise includes a rather exhaustive list of macroeconomic variables and a few institutional factors. Overall, our regression exercise shows that China’s capital flight is quite well explained by its own history and covered interest differentials. The other possible determinants offer relatively small additional explanatory power. It is also found that China’s capital flight responds differently to the components of covered interest differentials and to the positive and negative components of these variables. The response pattern, however, depends on the choice of data frequency. The general impression is that the monthly results are more intuitive than the quarterly ones.covered interest differential, forward premium, expected depreciation, asymmetric response, macro determinants

The Empirics of China's Outward Direct Investment

We investigate the empirical determinants of China’s outward direct investment (ODI). It is found that China’s investments in developed and developing countries are driven by different sets of factors. Subject to the differences between developed and developing countries, there is evidence that a) both market seeking and resources seeking motives drive China’s ODI, b) the Chinese exports to developing countries induce China’s ODI, c) China’s international reserves promote its ODI, and d) the Chinese capital tends to agglomerate among developed economies but diversify among developing economies. Similar results are obtained using alternative ODI data. We do not find substantial evidence that China invests in African and oil-producing countries mainly for their natural resources.market seeking, resources seeking, servicing exports, international reserves, agglomeration effect

Hoarding of International Reserves: Mrs Machlup’s Wardrobe and the Joneses

Motivated by the observed international reserve hoarding behavior in the post-1997 crisis period, we explore the Mrs Machlup’s wardrobe hypothesis and the related keeping up with the Joneses argument. It is conceived that, in addition to psychological reasons, holding a relatively high level of international reserves reduces the vulnerability to speculative attacks and promotes growth. A stylized model is constructed to illustrate this type of hoarding behavior. The relevance of the keeping up with the Joneses effect is examined using a few plausible empirical specifications and data from 10 East Asian economies. Panel-based regression results are suggestive of the presence of the Joneses effect; especially in the post-1997 crisis period. Individual economy estimation results, however, show that the Joneses effect varies across economies.demand for international reserves, excessive international reserve accumulation, speculative attack, keeping up with the Joneses

Understanding Kernel Size in Blind Deconvolution

Most blind deconvolution methods usually pre-define a large kernel size to guarantee the support domain. Blur kernel estimation error is likely to be introduced, yielding severe artifacts in deblurring results. In this paper, we first theoretically and experimentally analyze the mechanism to estimation error in oversized kernel, and show that it holds even on blurry images without noises. Then to suppress this adverse effect, we propose a low rank-based regularization on blur kernel to exploit the structural information in degraded kernels, by which larger-kernel effect can be effectively suppressed. And we propose an efficient optimization algorithm to solve it. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method is comparable with the state-of-the-arts by accordingly setting proper kernel size, and performs much better in handling larger-size kernels quantitatively and qualitatively. The deblurring results on real-world blurry images further validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.Comment: Accepted by WACV 201

Liquid-gas Phase Transition in Strange Hadronic Matter with Weak Y-Y Interaction

The liquid-gas phase transition in strange hadronic matter is reexamined by using the new parameters about the $\Lambda - \Lambda$ interaction deduced from recent observation of $^{6}_{\Lambda\Lambda}He$ double hypernucleus. The extended Furnstahl-Serot-Tang model with nucleons and hyperons is utilized. The binodal surface, the limit pressure, the entropy, the specific heat capacity and the Caloric curves are addressed. We find that the liquid-gas phase transition can occur more easily in strange hadronic matter with weak Y-Y interaction than that of the strong Y-Y interaction.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

The association between consecutive days’ heat wave and cardiovascular disease mortality in Beijing, China

Abstract Background Although many studies have examined the effects of heat waves on the excess mortality risk (ER) posed by cardiovascular disease (CVD), scant attention has been paid to the effects of various combinations of differing heat wave temperatures and durations. We investigated such effects in Beijing, a city of over 20 million residents. Methods A generalized additive model (GAM) was used to analyze the ER of consecutive days’ exposure to extreme high temperatures. Results A key finding was that when extremely high temperatures occur continuously, at varying temperature thresholds and durations, the adverse effects on CVD mortality vary significantly. The longer the heat wave lasts, the greater the mortality risk is. When the daily maximum temperature exceeded 35 °C from the fourth day onward, the ER attributed to consecutive days’ high temperature exposure saw an increase to about 10% (p < 0.05), and at the fifth day, the ER even reached 51%. For the thresholds of 32 °C, 33 °C, and 34 °C, from the fifth day onward, the ER also rose sharply (16, 29, and 31%, respectively; p < 0.05). In addition, extreme high temperatures appeared to contribute to a higher proportion of CVD deaths among elderly persons, females and outdoor workers. When the daily maximum temperature was higher than 33 °C from the tenth consecutive day onward, the ER of CVD death among these groups was 94, 104 and 149%, respectively (p < 0.05), which is considerably higher than the ER for the overall population (87%; p < 0.05). Conclusions The results of this study may assist governments in setting standards for heat waves, creating more accurate heat alerts, and taking measures to prevent or reduce temperature-related deaths, especially against the backdrop of global warming