Banks' wholesale funding and credit procyclicality: evidence from Korea

Credit procyclicality has recently been the focus of considerable attention, but what fuels the often excessive credit growth is rarely questioned. We investigate the relationship between the composition of banks' liabilities and their credit procyclicality. After examining the macroeconomic context where banks rely increasingly on wholesale funding (WSF), we estimate the effect of WSF on the banks’ credit growth using panel data for the commercial banks of Korea between 2000:1 and 2011:2. We find that a higher sensitivity of banks' WSF to the business cycle leads to an excessive response of credit growth to the business cycle, even with a low share of WSF on bank liabilities. This finding suggests that the regulation of banks’ WSF mechanism may contribute to financial stability through a bank credit channel of monetary policy. On the other hand, we find that overseas WSF has a more marked effect on credit procyclicality, which may additionally exacerbate the financial fragility of export-led emerging economies.credit procyclicality; wholesale funding; financial fragility

Regulation of virus induced inflammatory immune responses with cytokine DNA

Viral infection frequently results in chronic inflammatory lesions the principal mediators of which are proinflammatory molecules from activated T cells. Controlling these events has been a focus of the clinical field. Although cytokine therapy using some regulatory cytokines such as IL-10 or TGFβ represents one of the most promising approaches, proteins have a short half-life and bioactivity in vivo, making the strategy inconvenient and costly. In this study, cytokines expressed by means of plasmid DNA were evaluated for their efficacy to modulate inflammatory responses and the mechanisms by which such modulation occurred were investigated. Both mucosal and systemic administration of plasmid DNA encoding IL-4 or IL-10 prior to HSV infection inhibited the development of cutaneous inflammatory responses. To achieve modulation of ocular inflammation administration close to the eye itself provided best results. In the case of cytokine DNA administration to already HSV-primed animals (therapeutic approach), only plasmid DNA encoding IL-10 showed a regulatory effect on the expression phase of the cutaneous DTH response. The mechanisms of immune modulation following prophylactic administration of plasmid DNA encoding IL-4 showed a shift the Th subset balance toward Th2 responses. In contrast, both prophylactic and therapeutic administration of plasmid DNA encoding IL-10 downregulated the activity of Thi response. The delivery systems for the therapeutic modulation of cutaneous inflammatory response were also compared. Plasmid DNA encoding IL-10 had a delayed and milder, yet more persisting effect than that achieved by viral vectors expressing IL-10. Moreover, plasmid DNA was not affected by preexisting immunity as occurred following administration of viral vectors. Finally, the studies on the mechanism of modulation by plasmid DNA encoding IL-10 revealed that multiple mechanisms such as active suppression, induction of energy or inhibition of ARC appeared to be involved. Although wide dissemination, even to the inflammatory sites and transgene expression occur following in vivo inoculation of plasmid DNA, the central T cell regulation appeared to be the principal mechanism for immune modulation by IL-10 DNA

Gravitational waves from first-order phase transitions: Towards model separation by bubble nucleation rate

We study gravitational-wave production from bubble collisions in a cosmic first-order phase transition, focusing on the possibility of model separation by the bubble nucleation rate dependence of the resulting gravitational-wave spectrum. By using the method of relating the spectrum with the two-point correlator of the energy-momentum tensor \left, we first write down analytic expressions for the spectrum with a Gaussian correction to the commonly used nucleation rate, $\Gamma \propto e^{\beta t}\rightarrow e^{\beta t-\gamma^2t^2}$, under the thin-wall and envelope approximations. Then we quantitatively investigate how the spectrum changes with the size of the Gaussian correction. It is found that the spectral shape shows ${\mathcal O}(10)\%$ deviation from $\Gamma \propto e^{\beta t}$ case for some physically motivated scenarios. We also briefly discuss detector sensitivities required to distinguish different spectral shapes.Comment: 36 pages, 13 figures, 1 figure from arXiv:1605.0140

Real-time rss-based indoor navigation for autonomous UAV flight

Navigation for the autonomous flight of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in an indoor space has attracted much attention recently. One of the main goals of an indoor navigation system is developing an alternative method to obtain position information that can replace or complement the global positioning system. While much research has focused on vision-based indoor navigation systems, this paper aims to develop a Received Signal Strength (RSS)-based navigation system, which is a more cost effective alternative. Then, the position and attitude of a UAV can be computed by the fusion of RSS measurements and measurements from the onboard inertial measurement unit. In order to improve the estimation accuracy, we first consider a mathematical model of the RSS-based navigation system and formulate optimization problems to compute the parameter values which minimize the RSS measurement error. Using the optimal parameters, an autonomous flight system is developed whose estimator and controller components are designed to work well with the RSS-based navigation system. Simulations and experiments using a quadrotor demonstrate the feasibility and performance of the proposed RSS-based navigation system for UAVs operating in indoor environments

The Dynamics of Productivity Changes in Agricultural Sector of Transition Countries

Relying on frontier production approach (e.g., Luenberger's shortage function), we investigated the performance of agricultural sector in transition countries and its changes over time, especially focusing on the dynamics of productivity changes. We found that; (i) CEE countries have improved their performance during the sample period whereas CIS have not; (ii) productivity changes in the last decade was attributable to the technical progress; (iii) overall performance was decelerated for the second 5-year sub-period (1997-2001) in both regions; (iv) agricultural reform has positive effects on the productivity and its components especially in CEE countries.transition countries, productivity, directional distance function, agricultural reform, Productivity Analysis,

Quantum Error Correcting Codes and Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation over Nice Rings

Quantum error correcting codes play an essential role in protecting quantum information from the noise and the decoherence. Most quantum codes have been constructed based on the Pauli basis indexed by a finite field. With a newly introduced algebraic class called a nice ring, it is possible to construct the quantum codes such that their alphabet sizes are not restricted to powers of a prime. Subsystem codes are quantum error correcting schemes unifying stabilizer codes, decoherence free subspaces and noiseless subsystems. We show a generalization of subsystem codes over nice rings. Furthermore, we prove that free subsystem codes over a finite chain ring cannot outperform those over a finite field. We also generalize entanglement-assisted quantum error correcting codes to nice rings. With the help of the entanglement, any classical code can be used to derive the corresponding quantum codes, even if such codes are not self-orthogonal. We prove that an R-module with antisymmetric bicharacter can be decomposed as an orthogonal direct sum of hyperbolic pairs using symplectic geometry over rings. So, we can find hyperbolic pairs and commuting generators generating the check matrix of the entanglement-assisted quantum code. Fault-tolerant quantum computation has been also studied over a finite field. Transversal operations are the simplest way to implement fault-tolerant quantum gates. We derive transversal Clifford operations for CSS codes over nice rings, including Fourier transforms, SUM gates, and phase gates. Since transversal operations alone cannot provide a computationally universal set of gates, we add fault-tolerant implementations of doubly-controlled Z gates for triorthogonal stabilizer codes over nice rings. Finally, we investigate optimal key exchange protocols for unconditionally secure key distribution schemes. We prove how many rounds are needed for the key exchange between any pair of the group on star networks, linear-chain networks, and general networks

Missio Dei in Worship Service : a case study of the Christian Church of Groningen

Masterthesis Missiologi