Testing the Fiscal Theory of Price Level in Case of Pakistan

The study tests the fiscal theory of price determination for Pakistan’s economy for the period 1970 to 2007. The evidence is less clear cut to infer that authorities are following a certain type of regime fiscal dominant or monetary dominant during the sample period. The liabilities responses negatively to the innovation in surpluses, that is in the subsequent period the liabilities decreases in face of increase in surplus. This characterises monetary dominant regime, the events that give rise to surplus innovation are likely to persist causing the rise in the future surpluses and surpluses pay-off some of the debt causing the fall in the liabilities. By analysing the behaviour of nominal GDP, an innovation in surplus reduces nominal income and decreases the level of debt in the subsequent periods, this analysis also confirms the Ricardian analysis. On the other hand, the study finds that, as predicted by the fiscal theory of price determination, the occurrence of wealth effects of changes in nominal public debt may pass through to prices by increasing inflation variability in case of Pakistan. The implication that comes out of this study is that nominal public liabilities, as reflected either in money growth or in nominal public debt, matter for price stability in case of Pakistan. The authorities may be following different regimes for different time periods during the 1970-2007.Fiscal Theory of Price Level, VAR, Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy

PENGARUH STRUKTUR PEKERJAAN DAN KARAKTERISTIK INDIVIDU TERHADAP KINERJA KARYAWAN PT. TANTO INTIM LINE DI SAMARINDA

Hasil analisa dan pembahasan menunjukkan bahwa berdasarkan uji F, maka variabel Struktur Pekerjaan dan Karakteristik Individu secara simultan atau bersama-sama berpengaruh signifikan terhadap Kinerja Karyawan PT. Tanto Intim Line di Samarinda. Berdasarkan uji t, maka variabel Struktur Pekerjaan secara parsial berpengaruh signifikan terhadap Kinerja Karyawan PT. Tanto Intim Line di Samarinda. Begitu juga dengan variabel Karakteristik Individu berpengaruh signifikan terhadap Kinerja Karyawan PT. Tanto Intim Line Di Samarinda. Berdasarkan uji korelasi menggambarkan keeratan hubungan variabel independen dan variabel dependen. Nilai korelasi 0,683 artinya nilai tersebut memiliki tingkat hubungan kuat antara Struktur Pekerjaan dan Karakteristik Individu Terhadap Kinerja Karyawan PT. Tanto Intim Line di Samarinda. Sedangkan berdasarkan nilai R square 0,466 atau sebesar 46,4% artinya variabel Struktur Pekerjaan dan Karakteristik Individu Terhadap Kinerja Karyawan PT. Tanto Intim Line Di Samarinda memiliki hubungan persentase sebesar 46,6% terhadap Pengaruh Struktur Pekerjaan dan Karakteristik Individu Terhadap Kinerja Karyawan PT. Tanto Intim Line di Samarinda, sedangkan sisanya sejumlah 53,4 dipengaruhi oleh variabel lain seperti sumber daya manusia, motivasi kerja, lingkungan kerja dan sebagainya.

Testing the Fiscal Theory of Price Level in Case of Pakistan

There are two competing views of the interaction between monetary and fiscal policy and their effects on price stability for policy-maker’s point of view. In the classical view, in Ricardian regimes it is the demand for liquidity and its evolution over time that determines prices. In such a regime fiscal policy is passive, which implies that government bonds are not net wealth [Barro (1974)], and monetary policy works through the interest rate or another instrument to determine prices. In the opposite view which is more recent, a non-Ricardian regime will prevail whenever fiscal policy becomes active1 and does not accommodate or adjust primary surpluses to guarantee fiscal solvency. As a result, the Ricardian equivalence do not hold, and the increase in nominal public debt to finance persistent budget deficits is perceived by private agents as an increase in nominal wealth. In fiscal dominant regime the government’s fiscal policy becomes sustainable through debt deflation that is an increase in prices that wash away the real value of public debt and in turn the real value of financial wealth until demand equals supply and a new equilibrium is reached. In this regime prices are determined by fiscal policy, and inflation becomes a fiscal phenomenon. If, on the other hand, primary surpluses follow an arbitrary process, then the equilibrium path of prices is determined by the requirement known as fiscal solvency; that is, the price level has to jump to satisfy a present value budget constraint called non-Ricardian regime. The basic distinction between the two regimes is that in non-Ricardian regime fiscal policy plays the role where as in Ricardian regime monetary policy provides stability in prices. In FTPL, the results of fiscal and monetary policies depend on which policy has dominant characteristics. The consequences of policies differ depending on the active and passive characteristics of the policy and depending on the characteristics of the following policy. If the policy mix is such that monetary policy is active and fiscal policy is passive, fiscal policy accommodates monetary policies; these policies are called dominant monetary policy by Sargent and Wallace (1981) and Ricardian regime by Woodford (1994, 1995)

Improving prediction of secondary structure, local backbone angles, and solvent accessible surface area of proteins by iterative deep learning

Direct prediction of protein structure from sequence is a challenging problem. An effective approach is to break it up into independent sub-problems. These sub-problems such as prediction of protein secondary structure can then be solved independently. In a previous study, we found that an iterative use of predicted secondary structure and backbone torsion angles can further improve secondary structure and torsion angle prediction. In this study, we expand the iterative features to include solvent accessible surface area and backbone angles and dihedrals based on Cα atoms. By using a deep learning neural network in three iterations, we achieved 82% accuracy for secondary structure prediction, 0.76 for the correlation coefficient between predicted and actual solvent accessible surface area, 19° and 30° for mean absolute errors of backbone φ and ψ angles, respectively, and 8° and 32° for mean absolute errors of Cα-based θ and τ angles, respectively, for an independent test dataset of 1199 proteins. The accuracy of the method is slightly lower for 72 CASP 11 targets but much higher than those of model structures from current state-of-the-art techniques. This suggests the potentially beneficial use of these predicted properties for model assessment and ranking

Success: evolutionary and structural properties of amino acids prove effective for succinylation site prediction

Post-translational modification is considered an important biological mechanism with critical impact on the diversification of the proteome. Although a long list of such modifications has been studied, succinylation of lysine residues has recently attracted the interest of the scientific community. The experimental detection of succinylation sites is an expensive process, which consumes a lot of time and resources. Therefore, computational predictors of this covalent modification have emerged as a last resort to tackling lysine succinylation. In this paper, we propose a novel computational predictor called ‘Success’, which efficiently uses the structural and evolutionary information of amino acids for predicting succinylation sites. To do this, each lysine was described as a vector that combined the above information of surrounding amino acids. We then designed a support vector machine with a radial basis function kernel for discriminating between succinylated and non-succinylated residues. We finally compared the Success predictor with three state-of-the-art predictors in the literature. As a result, our proposed predictor showed a significant improvement over the compared predictors in statistical metrics, such as sensitivity (0.866), accuracy (0.838) and Matthews correlation coefficient (0.677) on a benchmark dataset. The proposed predictor effectively uses the structural and evolutionary information of the amino acids surrounding a lysine. The bigram feature extraction approach, while retaining the same number of features, facilitates a better description of lysines. A support vector machine with a radial basis function kernel was used to discriminate between modified and unmodified lysines. The aforementioned aspects make the Success predictor outperform three state-of-the-art predictors in succinylation detection

High serum immunoglobulin g and m levels predict freedom from adverse cardiovascular events in hypertension: a nested case-control substudy of the Anglo-Scandinavian cardiac outcomes trial

Aims: We aimed to determine whether the levels of total serum IgM and IgG, together with specific antibodies against malondialdehyde-conjugated low-density lipoprotein (MDA-LDL), can improve cardiovascular risk discrimination. Methods and Results: The Anglo-Scandinavian Cardiac Outcomes Trial (ASCOT) randomized 9098 patients in the UK and Ireland into the Blood Pressure-Lowering Arm. 485 patients that had cardiovascular (CV) events over 5.5 years were age and sex matched with 1367 controls. Higher baseline total serum IgG, and to a lesser extent IgM, were associated with decreased risk of CV events (IgG odds ratio (OR) per one standard deviation (SD) 0.80 [95% confidence interval, CI 0.72,0.89], p < 0.0001; IgM 0.83[0.75,0.93], p = 0.001), and particularly events due to coronary heart disease (CHD) (IgG OR 0.66 (0.57,0.76); p < 0.0001, IgM OR 0.81 (0.71,0.93); p = 0.002). The association persisted after adjustment for a basic model with variables in the Framingham Risk Score (FRS) as well as following inclusion of C-reactive protein (CRP) and N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide (NtProBNP). IgG and IgM antibodies against MDA-LDL were also associated with CV events but their significance was lost following adjustment for total serum IgG and IgM respectively. The area under the receiver operator curve for CV events was improved from the basic risk model when adding in total serum IgG, and there was improvement in continuous and categorical net reclassification (17.6% and 7.5% respectively) as well as in the integrated discrimination index. Conclusion: High total serum IgG levels are an independent predictor of freedom from adverse cardiovascular events, particularly those attributed to CHD, in patients with hypertension

PREDICTION OF NATURAL CONVECTION HEAT TRANSFER IN COMPLEX PARTITIONS CAVITY

A numerical investigation has been carried out to examine the effects of insulated baffle mounted in complex cavity representing as an industrial building on flow pattern and heat transfer characteristics. The cavity is formed by adiabatic horizontal bottom, inclined upper walls and vertical isothermal walls. This problem is solved by using flow-energy equations in terms of stream-vorticity formulation in curvilinear coordinates. Two cases are considered; in the first (case 1) the insulated baffle position attached to the horizontal bottom wall of the cavity while in the second case (case 2) the insulated baffle position attached the upper inclined wall. A parametric study is carried out using following parameters: Rayleigh number from 103 to 106, Prandtl number for 0.7 and 10, baffle height (HB=0, 0.3H*, 0.4H*, and 0.5H*), baffle location for (LB=0.25L and 0.75L) with or without baffle in the cavity (total of 100 tests). For case 1 results show that, the flow strength generally increasing with increasing Ra values, increasing baffle height, and decreasing values of Pr, while in case 2 the same behavior of above could be show except the flow strength decreasing with increasing baffle height, also, increase Ra leads to increase the rate of heat transfer. The configuration of the cavity in case 2 leads to increase in heat transfer rate comparing with that in case 1

Percutaneous Intervention or Bypass Graft for Left Main Coronary Artery Disease? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background. The safety and efficacy of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) versus coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) for stable left main coronary artery disease (LMCAD) remains controversial.Methods. Digital databases were searched to compare the major adverse cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events (MACCE) and its components. A random effect model was used to compute an unadjusted odds ratio (OR).Results. A total of 43 studies (37 observational and 6 RCTs) consisting of 29,187 patients (PCI 13,709 and CABG 15,478) were identified. The 30-day rate of MACCE (OR, 0.56; 95% CI, 0.42-0.76;p = 0.0002) and all-cause mortality (OR, 0.52; 95% CI, 0.30-0.91;p = 0.02) was significantly lower in the PCI group. There was no significant difference in the rate of myocardial infarction (MI) (p = 0.17) and revascularization (p = 0.12). At 5 years, CABG was favored due to a significantly lower rate of MACCE (OR, 1.67; 95% CI, 1.18-2.36;p = <0.04), MI (OR, 1.67; 95% CI, 1.35-2.06;p = <0.00001), and revascularization (OR, 2.80; 95% CI, 2.18-3.60;p = <0.00001), respectively. PCI was associated with a lower overall rate of a stroke, while the risk of all-cause mortality was not significantly different between the two groups at 1- (p = 0.75), 5- (p = 0.72), and 10-years (p = 0.20). The Kaplan-Meier curve reconstruction revealed substantial variations over time; the 5-year incidence of MACCE was 38% with CABG, significantly lower than 45% with PCI (p = <0.00001).Conclusion. PCI might offer early safety advantages, while CABG provides greater durability in terms of lower long-term risk of ischemic events. There appears to be an equivalent risk for all-cause mortality

Cardiorenal Biomarkers, Canagliflozin, and Outcomes in Diabetic Kidney Disease: The CREDENCE Trial

BACKGROUND: People with type 2 diabetes and albuminuria are at an elevated risk for cardiac and renal events. The optimal biomarkers to aid disease prediction and to understand the benefits of sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibition remain unclear. METHODS: Among 2627 study participants in the CREDENCE trial (Canagliflozin and Renal Events in Diabetes With Established Nephropathy Clinical Evaluation), concentrations of NT-proBNP (N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide), high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T, growth differentiation factor-15, and IGFBP7 (insulin-like growth factor binding protein 7) were measured. The effect of canagliflozin on biomarker concentrations was evaluated. The prognostic potential of each biomarker on the primary outcome (a composite of end-stage kidney disease [dialysis, transplantation, or a sustained estimated glomerular filtration rate of <15 mL·min-1·1.73 m-2], doubling of the serum creatinine level, or renal death or cardiovascular death) was assessed. RESULTS: The median (quartiles 1 and 3) concentration of each biomarker was generally elevated: NT-proBNP, 180 ng/L (82, 442 ng/L); high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T, 19 ng/L (12, 29 ng/L); growth differentiation factor-15, 2595 ng/L (1852, 3775 ng/L); and IGFBP7, 121.8 ng/mL (105.4, 141.5 ng/mL). At 1 year, the biomarkers all rose by 6% to 29% in the placebo arm but only by 3% to 10% in the canagliflozin arm (all P<0.01 in multivariable linear mixed-effect models). Baseline concentrations of each biomarker were strongly predictive of cardiac and renal outcomes. When the biomarkers were analyzed together in a multimarker panel, individuals with high risk scores (hazard ratio [HR], 4.01 [95% CI, 2.52-6.35]) and moderate risk scores (HR, 2.39 [95% CI, 1.48-3.87]) showed a higher risk for the primary outcome compared with those with low risk scores. By 1 year, a 50% increase in NT-proBNP (HR, 1.11 [95% CI, 1.08-1.15]), high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T (HR, 1.86 [95% CI, 1.64-2.10]), growth differentiation factor-15 (HR, 1.45 [95% CI, 1.24-1.70]), and IGFBP7 (HR, 3.76 [95% CI, 2.54-5.56]) was associated with risk of the primary outcome. CONCLUSIONS: Multiple cardiorenal stress biomarkers are strongly prognostic in people with type 2 diabetes and albuminuria. Canagliflozin modestly reduced the longitudinal trajectory of rise in each biomarker. Change in the biomarker level in addition to the baseline level augments the primary outcome prediction. REGISTRATION: URL: https://www. CLINICALTRIALS: gov; Unique identifier: NCT02065791

Hospital admissions for vitamin D related conditions and subsequent immune-mediated disease: record-linkage studies

PMCID: PMC3729414The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/171. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited