Commercial Bank Small Business Lending Pre and Post Crisis

We analyze small business lending at U.S. commercial banks, how it has changed over time and how it differs by bank size. Specifically, we examine the impact of government policy intervention on small business lending in the aftermath of the financial crisis. We find several important results. First, we find that the Troubled-Asset Relief Program’s (TARP) $200 billion Capital Purchase Program (CPP) had little impact on the banks that received capital injections’ small business lending. Second, the Small Business Loan Fund (SBLF) lending program appears to have been a success as banks participating in the loan fund increased their lending to small businesses. Finally, we find that financial turmoil had a substantial negative impact on lending to small businesses at community banks but not their large bank counterparts. This result suggests that the larger banks may have behaved in a manner consistent with too big to fail. Collectively, these results provide important insights for policy makers as they continue to deal with the credit access issues of small firms

The globular cluster system of NGC 1316. II - The extraordinary object SH2

SH2 has been described as an isolated HII-region, located about 6.5 arcmin south of the nucleus of NGC 1316 (Fornax A), a merger remnant in the the outskirts of the Fornax cluster of galaxies. We give a first, preliminary description of the stellar content and environment of this remarkable object. We used photometric data in the Washington system and HST photometry from the Hubble Legacy Archive for a morphological description and preliminary aperture photometry. Low-resolution spectroscopy provides radial velocities of the brightest star cluster in SH2 and a nearby intermediate-age cluster. SH2 is not a normal HII-region, ionized by very young stars. It contains a multitude of star clusters with ages of approximately 0.1 Gyr. A ring-like morphology is striking. SH2 seems to be connected to an intermediate-age massive globular cluster with a similar radial velocity, which itself is the main object of a group of fainter clusters. Metallicity estimates from emission lines remain ambiguous. The present data do not yet allow firm conclusions about the nature or origin of SH2. It might be a dwarf galaxy that has experienced a burst of extremely clustered star formation. We may witness how globular clusters are donated to a parent galaxy.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in A&A, format slightly different from the printed versio

Is there plagiarism in the most influential publications in the field of andrology?

Plagiarism is a common form of academic misconduct that extensively jeopardises the quality of scientific publication. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent of plagiarism in the most influential andrology articles. A total of 77 highly cited andrology articles were analysed for their similarity index using iThenticate and Turnitin. The articles were categorised based on the year (before and on/after 2000) and type of publication (review and research articles), and the similarity indices were compared. Furthermore, the analysed articles were categorised based on the level of similarity using an arbitrary similarity index range (low: ≤10, moderate: 11–20, high: 21–50 and very high: >50) and average incidence rate (%) was determined. Our analysis revealed a higher percentage of the similarity indices for reviews than research articles. We noticed a higher similarity index for articles published on/after 2000 than those published before. The majority of the influential articles in the field of andrology showed a low similarity index, while some articles exhibited moderate to high levels of similarity. These findings support the need for the development of similarity index guidelines as a major pre‐requisite for establishing a more transparent and efficient system to address plagiarism in scientific publications

Could Only Fermions Be Elementary?

In standard Poincare and anti de Sitter SO(2,3) invariant theories, antiparticles are related to negative energy solutions of covariant equations while independent positive energy unitary irreducible representations (UIRs) of the symmetry group are used for describing both a particle and its antiparticle. Such an approach cannot be applied in de Sitter SO(1,4) invariant theory. We argue that it would be more natural to require that (*) one UIR should describe a particle and its antiparticle simultaneously. This would automatically explain the existence of antiparticles and show that a particle and its antiparticle are different states of the same object. If (*) is adopted then among the above groups only the SO(1,4) one can be a candidate for constructing elementary particle theory. It is shown that UIRs of the SO(1,4) group can be interpreted in the framework of (*) and cannot be interpreted in the standard way. By quantizing such UIRs and requiring that the energy should be positive in the Poincare approximation, we conclude that i) elementary particles can be only fermions. It is also shown that ii) C invariance is not exact even in the free massive theory and iii) elementary particles cannot be neutral. This gives a natural explanation of the fact that all observed neutral states are bosons.Comment: The paper is considerably revised and the following results are added: in the SO(1,4) invariant theory i) the C invariance is not exact even for free massive particles; ii) neutral particles cannot be elementar

The globular cluster system of NGC1316. I. Wide-field photometry in the Washington system

NGC 1316 (Fornax A) is a prominent merger remnant in the outskirts of the Fornax cluster. The cluster system has not yet been studied in its entirety. We therefore present a wide-field study of the globular cluster system of NGC 1316, investigating its properties in relation to the global morphology of NGC 1316. We used the MOSAIC II camera at the 4-m Blanco telescope at CTIO in the filters Washington C and Harris R. We identify globular cluster candidates and study their color distribution and the structural properties of the system. In an appendix, we also make morphological remarks, present color maps, and present new models for the brightness and color profiles of the galaxy. The cluster system is well confined to the optically visible outer contours of NGC 1316. The color distribution of the entire sample is unimodal, but the color distribution of bright subsamples in the bulge shows two peaks that, by comparison with theoretical Washington colors with solar metallicity, correspond to ages of about 2 Gyr and 0.8 Gyr, respectively. We also find a significant population of clusters in the color range 0.8 < C-R < 1.1 which must be populated by clusters younger than 0.8 Gyr, unless they are very metal-poor. The color interval 1.3 < C-R < 1.6 hosts the bulk of intermediate-age clusters which show a surface density profile with a sharp decline at about 4 arcmin. The outer cluster population shows an unimodal color distribution with a peak at C-R=1.1, indicating a larger contribution of old, metal-poor clusters. Their luminosity function does not show the expected turn-over, so the fraction of younger clusters is still significant. Cluster formation in NGC 1316 has continued after an initial burst, presumably related to the main merger. A toy model with two bursts of ages 2 Gyr and 0.8 Gyr is consistent with photometric properties and dynamical M/L-values.Comment: 19 pages, to appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics, abstract abridged, format slightly different from the printed versio

On the problem of interactions in quantum theory

The structure of representations describing systems of free particles in the theory with the invariance group SO(1,4) is investigated. The property of the particles to be free means as usual that the representation describing a many-particle system is the tensor product of the corresponding single-particle representations (i.e. no interaction is introduced). It is shown that the mass operator contains only continuous spectrum in the interval $(-\infty,\infty)$ and such representations are unitarily equivalent to ones describing interactions (gravitational, electromagnetic etc.). This means that there are no bound states in the theory and the Hilbert space of the many-particle system contains a subspace of states with the following property: the action of free representation operators on these states is manifested in the form of different interactions. Possible consequences of the results are discussed.Comment: 35 pages, Late