The Return to Capital and the Business Cycle

A widely cited failing of real business cycle models is their inability to account for the cyclical patterns of financial variables. Perhaps less well known is the fact that the return to capital and equity are identical in the neoclassical growth model. This paper constructs a measure of the return to business capital for the U.S. The S&P 500 return is roughly six times more volatile than the return to business capital. Owing to the equivalence between the returns to capital and equity in the neoclassical growth model, papers in the real business cycle literature that successfully account for the time series variation in the S&P 500 return must fail to account for the time series properties of the return to capital. A fairly basic real business cycle model captures most of the observed variability in the return to capital. What is needed is a theory of the stock market that breaks the equivalence between the returns to equity and capital. Forthcoming, Review of Economic Dynamicsreturn to capital, business cycles, asset returns

The return to capital and the business cycle

Real business cycle models have difficulty replicating the volatility of S&P 500 returns. This fact should not be surprising since real business cycle theory suggests that the return to capital should be measured by the return to aggregate market capital, not stock market returns. We construct a quarterly time series of the after-tax return to business capital. Its volatility is considerably smaller than that of S&P 500 returns. Our benchmark model captures almost 40 percent of the volatility in the return to capital (relative to the volatility of output). We consider several departures from the benchmark model; the most promising is one with higher risk aversion, which captures over 60 percent of the relative volatility in the return to capital.Business cycles ; Capital

Analyzing and Modeling the Performance of the HemeLB Lattice-Boltzmann Simulation Environment

We investigate the performance of the HemeLB lattice-Boltzmann simulator for cerebrovascular blood flow, aimed at providing timely and clinically relevant assistance to neurosurgeons. HemeLB is optimised for sparse geometries, supports interactive use, and scales well to 32,768 cores for problems with ~81 million lattice sites. We obtain a maximum performance of 29.5 billion site updates per second, with only an 11% slowdown for highly sparse problems (5% fluid fraction). We present steering and visualisation performance measurements and provide a model which allows users to predict the performance, thereby determining how to run simulations with maximum accuracy within time constraints.Comment: Accepted by the Journal of Computational Science. 33 pages, 16 figures, 7 table

Autoreactivity and Exceptional CDR Plasticity (but Not Unusual Polyspecificity) Hinder Elicitation of the Anti-HIV Antibody 4E10

The broadly-neutralizing anti-HIV antibody 4E10 recognizes an epitope in the membrane-proximal external region of the HIV envelope protein gp41. Previous attempts to elicit 4E10 by vaccination with envelope-derived or reverse-engineered immunogens have failed. It was presumed that the ontogeny of 4E10-equivalent responses was blocked by inherent autoreactivity and exceptional polyreactivity. We generated 4E10 heavy-chain knock-in mice, which displayed significant B cell dysregulation, consistent with recognition of autoantigen/s by 4E10 and the presumption that tolerance mechanisms may hinder the elicitation of 4E10 or 4E10-equivalent responses. Previously proposed candidate 4E10 autoantigens include the mitochondrial lipid cardiolipin and a nuclear splicing factor, 3B3. However, using carefully-controlled assays, 4E10 bound only weakly to cardiolipin-containing liposomes, but also bound negatively-charged, non-cardiolipin-containing liposomes comparably poorly. 4E10/liposome binding was predominantly mediated by electrostatic interactions rather than presumed hydrophobic interactions. The crystal structure of 4E10 free of bound ligands showed a dramatic restructuring of the combining site, occluding the HIV epitope binding site and revealing profound flexibility, but creating an electropositive pocket consistent with non-specific binding of phospholipid headgroups. These results strongly suggested that antigens other than cardiolipin mediate 4E10 autoreactivity. Using a synthetic peptide library spanning the human proteome, we determined that 4E10 displays limited and focused, but unexceptional, polyspecificity. We also identified a novel autoepitope shared by three ER-resident inositol trisphosphate receptors, validated through binding studies and immunohistochemistry. Tissue staining with 4E10 demonstrated reactivity consistent with the type 1 inositol trisphosphate receptor as the most likely candidate autoantigen, but is inconsistent with splicing factor 3B3. These results demonstrate that 4E10 recognition of liposomes competes with MPER recognition and that HIV antigen and autoepitope recognition may be distinct enough to permit eliciting 4E10-like antibodies, evading autoimmunity through directed engineering. However, 4E10 combining site flexibility, exceptional for a highly-matured antibody, may preclude eliciting 4E10 by conventional immunization strategies

Epidemiology of pleural empyema in English hospitals and the impact of influenza

Pleural empyema represents a significant healthcare burden due to extended hospital admissions and potential requirement for surgical intervention. This study aimed to assess changes in incidence and management of pleural empyema in England over the past 10 years and the potential impact of influenza on rates. Hospital Episode Statistics data were used to identify patients admitted to English hospitals with pleural empyema between 2008 and 2018. Linear regression was used to analyse the relationship between empyema rates and influenza incidence recorded by Public Health England. The relationship between influenza and empyema was further explored using serological data from a prospective cohort study of patients presenting with pleural empyema. Between April 2008 and March 2018 there were 55 530 patients admitted with pleural empyema. There was male predominance (67% versus 33%), which increased with age. Cases have increased significantly from 4447 in 2008 to 7268 in 2017. Peaks of incidence correlated moderately with rates of laboratoryconfirmed influenza in children and young adults (r=0.30). For nine of the 10 years studied, the highest annual point incidence of influenza coincided with the highest admission rate for empyema (with a 2-week lag). In a cohort study of patients presenting to a single UK hospital with pleural empyema/ infection, 24% (17 out of 72) had serological evidence of recent influenza infection, compared to 7% in seasonally matched controls with simple parapneumonic or cardiogenic effusions (p<0.001). Rates of empyema admissions in England have increased steadily with a seasonal variation that is temporally related to influenza incidence. Patient-level serological data from a prospective study support the hypothesis that influenza may play a pathogenic role in empyema development

Impact of blood rheology on wall shear stress in a model of the middle cerebral artery

Perturbations to the homeostatic distribution of mechanical forces exerted by blood on the endothelial layer have been correlated with vascular pathologies including intracranial aneurysms and atherosclerosis. Recent computational work suggests that in order to correctly characterise such forces, the shear-thinning properties of blood must be taken into account. To the best of our knowledge, these findings have never been compared against experimentally observed pathological thresholds. In the current work, we apply the three-band diagram (TBD) analysis due to Gizzi et al. to assess the impact of the choice of blood rheology model on a computational model of the right middle cerebral artery. Our results show that, in the model under study, the differences between the wall shear stress predicted by a Newtonian model and the well known Carreau-Yasuda generalized Newtonian model are only significant if the vascular pathology under study is associated with a pathological threshold in the range 0.94 Pa to 1.56 Pa, where the results of the TBD analysis of the rheology models considered differs. Otherwise, we observe no significant differences.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, published at Interface Focu

Biodiversity-productivity relationships are key to nature-based climate solutions

The global impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change are interlinked, but the feedbacks between them are rarely assessed. Areas with greater tree diversity tend to be more productive, providing a greater carbon sink, and biodiversity loss could reduce these natural carbon sinks. Here, we quantify how tree and shrub species richness could affect biomass production on biome, national and regional scales. We find that GHG mitigation could help maintain tree diversity and thereby avoid a 9–39% reduction in terrestrial primary productivity across different biomes, which could otherwise occur over the next 50 years. Countries that will incur the greatest economic damages from climate change stand to benefit the most from conservation of tree diversity and primary productivity, which contribute to climate change mitigation. Our results emphasize an opportunity for a triple win for climate, biodiversity and society, and highlight that these co-benefits should be the focus of reforestation programmes

Announcing The Lancet Global Health Commission on Global Eye Health

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Potential severe asthma hidden in UK primary care

Funding: ISAR is conducted by Observational & Pragmatic Research Institution (OPRI), and co-funded by OPC Global and AstraZeneca. This research study was co-funded by AstraZeneca and Optimum Patient Care Global Limited, including access to the Optimum Patient Care Research Database (OPCRD).Peer reviewedPublisher PD