Evaluating the Effectiveness of Early Warning Indicators: An Application of Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve Approach to Panel Data

Early warning indicators (EWIs) of banking crises should ideally be judged on how well they function in relation to the choice issue faced by macroprudential policymakers. However, the effectiveness of EWIs depends upon the strength of the predicting power, stability, and timeliness of the signal. Using a balanced panel of 6 countries’ experience with banking and currency crises in recent times, this paper evaluates the effectiveness of EWIs using Receiver Operating Characteristics. Following the drivers of the banking crisis and currency crisis, the paper evaluates the effectiveness of aggregate credit growth, sectoral deployment of credit along and other macroeconomic indicators generally used as EWI. The paper observes that credit disbursements to non-financial sectors and the central government provides stable signals about systemic risks. Further debt service ratio, interbank rates and total reserves are also found to be useful in predicting these crises. Lastly, the effective EWIs are combined using shrinkage regression methods to evaluate the improvement of signal strength of the combination of EWIs. The predictive power of the combination of EWIs provides better signal strength in predicting the macroprudential crisis

Capital Control and Heterogeneous Impact on Capital Flows

This paper analyzes the heterogeneous direct and spillover effect of capital control on gross capital flows across three major institutional sectors namely public sector, banks and corporate. The paper examines the possible heterogeneity in the effect of capital control on the capital inflows to these institutional sectors using spatial econometric models. The empirical findings indicate that the direct effect of capital control moderates portfolio inflows to public sector whereas the portfolio inflows to banks and corporate sector does not respond to the capital control measures. The spillover effect of capital control increases capital inflows to all sectors in other countries. The paper explains the observed heterogeneity in the capital control effects by introducing signaling effect in a portfolio choice model. The paper argues that the heterogeneous direct effect is driven by private signals of capital control received by the investors about the state of economy whereas the spillover effect of capital control is mainly driven by the hedging and search for better yield

Financial Stress and Effect on Real Economy: The Turkish Experience

In this paper, we aim to analyze empirically how economic activity reacts to the financial stress shocks depending on the stress regime in Turkey. Using quarterly data, the effect of financial stress is examined using two threshold vector autoregression model (TVAR) for consumption, investment and real GDP by using financial stress index, credit growth and inflation rate as endogenous variables. The paper proposes local projection approach for estimating threshold VAR model as robustness check to overcome the data limitations. The main result of this paper is that the effect of financial stress on consumption, investment, and real GDP, such as magnitude and significance, vary greatly depending on the financial stress regime. The paper finds that financial stress is found to affect economic growth when the stress level is already high. This corroborates with the effectiveness of credit channel in the financial friction mechanism. On the contrary, the financial stress does not affect real economic activities to significantly during low stress regime. The effect of financial stress impairs consumption and investment growth during high stress regime which leads to slow down of economic activities

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Early Warning Indicators: An Application of Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve Approach to Panel Data

Early warning indicators (EWIs) of banking crises should ideally be judged on how well they function in relation to the choice issue faced by macroprudential policymakers. Several practical features of this challenge are translated into statistical evaluation criteria, including difficulties measuring the costs and advantages of various policy interventions, as well as requirements for the timeliness and stability of EWIs. We analyze the balance panel of possible EWIs for six countries that have experienced currency crisis and banking crisis in recent times. Using possible early warning indicators, we evaluate the suitability of these EWIs in view of their predictive power and stability of signals. The paper observes that credit disbursements to non-financial sectors and central government provides stable signal about systemic risks. Further debt service ratio, inter bank rates and total reserves are also found to be useful in predicting these crisis. Lastly, the paper observes that linear combination of these indicators improves the predictive power of EWIs further

Insulin Initiation with Insulin Degludec/Insulin Aspart versus Insulin Glargine in Oral Antidiabetic Drugs Failure Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: A Real-World Study from India

Context: Oral antidiabetic drug (OAD) failure is an indication for starting insulin therapy, but there is still a dilemma as to whether basal insulin or a premixed/co-formulation analog should be the choice. Aim: To compare the safety and efficacy of once daily (OD) insulin degludec/insulin aspart (IDegAsp) to OD insulin glargine (IGlar U100) in insulin-naïve Indian subjects with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), inadequately controlled with OADs alone. Setting and design: Retrospective study. Methods and material: Data was retrieved from the author’s clinic database of OAD failure patients (18-80 years), who were started either with (IGlar U100, n = 120) or IDegAsp (n = 89) OD over and above the standard of care. Data of fasting plasma glucose (FPG), postprandial plasma glucose (PPG) and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) from baseline and at last follow-up visits were collected. Statistical analysis used: Baseline characteristics and change in study parameters during the follow-up period were computed between two groups (IGlar U100 vs. IDegAsp) by unpaired t-test and paired t-test, respectively. ANCOVA test was used to compute percentage reduction in body weight, body mass index (BMI), FPG, PPG and HbA1c in between two groups (IGlar U100 vs. IDegAsp). Results: IDegAsp caused a significantly greater reduction in FPG, PPG and HbA1c as compared to the IGlar U100 arm. There was no significant difference in the proportion of patients with hypoglycemia between IDegAsp and IGlar U100 groups (p = 0.208). No episodes of severe hypoglycemia were reported. Conclusion: Comparison of IDegAsp and IGlar U100 OD in T2DM patients indicated that both were relatively safe but the former controlled FPG and PPG levels more effectively

Insulin Initiation with Insulin Degludec/Insulin Aspart versus Insulin Glargine in Oral Antidiabetic Drugs Failure Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: A Real-World Study from India

Context: Oral antidiabetic drug (OAD) failure is an indication for starting insulin therapy, but there is still a dilemma as to whether basal insulin or a premixed/co-formulation analog should be the choice. Aim: To compare the safety and efficacy of once daily (OD) insulin degludec/insulin aspart (IDegAsp) to OD insulin glargine (IGlar U100) in insulin-naïve Indian subjects with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), inadequately controlled with OADs alone. Setting and design: Retrospective study. Methods and material: Data was retrieved from the author’s clinic database of OAD failure patients (18-80 years), who were started either with (IGlar U100, n = 120) or IDegAsp (n = 89) OD over and above the standard of care. Data of fasting plasma glucose (FPG), postprandial plasma glucose (PPG) and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) from baseline and at last follow-up visits were collected. Statistical analysis used: Baseline characteristics and change in study parameters during the follow-up period were computed between two groups (IGlar U100 vs. IDegAsp) by unpaired t-test and paired t-test, respectively. ANCOVA test was used to compute percentage reduction in body weight, body mass index (BMI), FPG, PPG and HbA1c in between two groups (IGlar U100 vs. IDegAsp). Results: IDegAsp caused a significantly greater reduction in FPG, PPG and HbA1c as compared to the IGlar U100 arm. There was no significant difference in the proportion of patients with hypoglycemia between IDegAsp and IGlar U100 groups (p = 0.208). No episodes of severe hypoglycemia were reported. Conclusion: Comparison of IDegAsp and IGlar U100 OD in T2DM patients indicated that both were relatively safe but the former controlled FPG and PPG levels more effectively

The Telomeric Repeats of Human Herpesvirus 6A (HHV-6A) Are Required for Efficient Virus Integration

Human herpesvirus 6A (HHV-6A) and 6B (HHV-6B) are ubiquitous betaherpesviruses that infects humans within the first years of life and establishes latency in various cell types. Both viruses can integrate their genomes into telomeres of host chromosomes in latently infected cells. The molecular mechanism of viral integration remains elusive. Intriguingly, HHV-6A, HHV-6B and several other herpesviruses harbor arrays of telomeric repeats (TMR) identical to human telomere sequences at the ends of their genomes. The HHV-6A and HHV-6B genomes harbor two TMR arrays, the perfect TMR (pTMR) and the imperfect TMR (impTMR). To determine if the TMR are involved in virus integration, we deleted both pTMR and impTMR in the HHV-6A genome. Upon reconstitution, the TMR mutant virus replicated comparable to wild type (wt) virus, indicating that the TMR are not essential for HHV- 6A replication. To assess the integration properties of the recombinant viruses, we established an in vitro integration system that allows assessment of integration efficiency and genome maintenance in latently infected cells. Integration of HHV-6A was severely impaired in the absence of the TMR and the virus genome was lost rapidly, suggesting that integration is crucial for the maintenance of the virus genome. Individual deletion of the pTMR and impTMR revealed that the pTMR play the major role in HHV-6A integration, whereas the impTMR only make a minor contribution, allowing us to establish a model for HHV-6A integration. Taken together, our data shows that the HHV-6A TMR are dispensable for virus replication, but are crucial for integration and maintenance of the virus genome in latently infected cells

A Feature Weighting Technique on SVM for Human Action Recognition

626-630Human action recognition is a challenging research topic and attracted very good attention in the last few years. This paper presents a features weighting framework for human action recognition based on the movement of different body-parts. Intuitively, Understanding the motion of a particular body-part having a major contribution to a specific action gives a better representation of that human activity. For example, action like walking, running and jogging, movement of the leg is more important and in boxing, waving and clapping, hand movement is more effective. This work presents a technique, utilizing the sub-region body-parts recognition rate to the weight kernel function. First, the complete human body is extracted from the background and HOG (histogram of gradient) based body-part detection is applied to generate three different sub-region (head, arm and body, foot and leg) of complete human body. Recognition rate and weight is calculated for all these sub-region (body-parts) for a particular action. Based on the weight (ω) of sub-region, a weighted feature Gaussian kernel function is obtained and weighted feature support vector machine (WF-SVM) classifier is constructed. The experimental results of the proposed framework have better performance on both KTH and UCF-ARG datasets compared against several state-of-the-art methods