Monetary Policy Implications of Financial Frictions in the Czech Republic

As the global economy seems to be recovering from the 2009 financial crisis, we find it desirable to look back and analyze the Czech economy ex post. We work with a Swedish New Keynesian model of a small open economy which embeds financial frictions in light of the financial accelerator literature. Without explicitly modeling the banking sector, this model serves as a tool for understanding how a negative financial shock may spread to the real economy and how monetary policy may react. We use Bayesian techniques to estimate the model parameters to adjust the model structure closer to the evidence stemming from Czech data. Our attention focuses on a set of experiments in which we generate ex post forecasts of the economy prior to the 2009 crisis and illustrate that the monetary policy response to an upcoming crisis implied by the model with financial frictions is stronger on account of an increasing interest rate spread.Bayesian methods, financial frictions.

Early Warning Indicators of Economic Crises: Evidence from a Panel of 40 Developed Countries

Using a panel of 40 EU and OECD countries for the period 1970-2010 we construct an early warning system. The system consists of a discrete and a continuous model. In the discrete model, we collect an extensive database of various types of economic crises called CDEC 40-40 and examine potential leading indicators. In the continuous model, we construct an index of real crisis incidence as the response variable. We determine the optimal lead employing panel vector autoregression for each potential indicator, and then select useful indicators employing Bayesian model averaging. We re-estimate the resulting specification by system GMM and, to allow for country heterogeneity, additionally evaluate the random coefficients estimator and divide countries into clusters. Our results suggest that global variables are among the most useful early warning indicators. In addition, housing prices emerge consistently as an important source of risk. Finally, we simulate the past effectiveness of several policy instruments and conclude that some central bank tools (for example, reserves) could be useful in mitigating crisis incidence.Bayesian model averaging, dynamic panel, early warning indicators, macroprudential policies, panel VAR.

Retention Time and Fragmentation Predictors Increase Confidence in Identification of Common Variant Peptides

Precision medicine focuses on adapting care to the individual profile of patients, for example, accounting for their unique genetic makeup. Being able to account for the effect of genetic variation on the proteome holds great promise toward this goal. However, identifying the protein products of genetic variation using mass spectrometry has proven very challenging. Here we show that the identification of variant peptides can be improved by the integration of retention time and fragmentation predictors into a unified proteogenomic pipeline. By combining these intrinsic peptide characteristics using the search-engine post-processor Percolator, we demonstrate improved discrimination power between correct and incorrect peptide-spectrum matches. Our results demonstrate that the drop in performance that is induced when expanding a protein sequence database can be compensated, hence enabling efficient identification of genetic variation products in proteomics data. We anticipate that this enhancement of proteogenomic pipelines can provide a more refined picture of the unique proteome of patients and thereby contribute to improving patient care.publishedVersio

Comparing different early warning systems: Results from a horse race competition among members of the Macro-prudential Research Network

Over the recent decades researchers in academia and central banks have developed early warning systems (EWS) designed to warn policy makers of potential future economic and financial crises. These EWS are based on diverse approaches and empirical models. In this paper we compare the performance of nine distinct models for predicting banking crises resulting from the work of the Macroprudential Research Network (MaRs) initiated by the European System of Central Banks. In order to ensure comparability, all models use the same database of crises created by MaRs and comparable sets of potential early warning indicators. We evaluate the models’ relative usefulness by comparing the ratios of false alarms and missed crises and discuss implications for pratical use and future research. We find that multivariate models, in their many appearances, have great potential added value over simple signalling models. One of the main policy recommendations coming from this exercise is that policy makers can benefit from taking a broad methodological approach when they develop models to set macro-prudential instruments

Comparing different early warning systems: Results from a horse race competition among members of the Macro-prudential Research Network

Over the recent decades researchers in academia and central banks have developed early warning systems (EWS) designed to warn policy makers of potential future economic and financial crises. These EWS are based on diverse approaches and empirical models. In this paper we compare the performance of nine distinct models for predicting banking crises resulting from the work of the Macroprudential Research Network (MaRs) initiated by the European System of Central Banks. In order to ensure comparability, all models use the same database of crises created by MaRs and comparable sets of potential early warning indicators. We evaluate the models’ relative usefulness by comparing the ratios of false alarms and missed crises and discuss implications for pratical use and future research. We find that multivariate models, in their many appearances, have great potential added value over simple signalling models. One of the main policy recommendations coming from this exercise is that policy makers can benefit from taking a broad methodological approach when they develop models to set macro-prudential instruments

Comparing different early warning systems: Results from a horse race competition among members of the Macro-prudential Research Network

Over the recent decades researchers in academia and central banks have developed early warning systems (EWS) designed to warn policy makers of potential future economic and financial crises. These EWS are based on diverse approaches and empirical models. In this paper we compare the performance of nine distinct models for predicting banking crises resulting from the work of the Macroprudential Research Network (MaRs) initiated by the European System of Central Banks. In order to ensure comparability, all models use the same database of crises created by MaRs and comparable sets of potential early warning indicators. We evaluate the models’ relative usefulness by comparing the ratios of false alarms and missed crises and discuss implications for pratical use and future research. We find that multivariate models, in their many appearances, have great potential added value over simple signalling models. One of the main policy recommendations coming from this exercise is that policy makers can benefit from taking a broad methodological approach when they develop models to set macro-prudential instruments

Poster: Haplotypes and Human Diversity in Proteomics

Poster presented at the EuBIC-MS Winter School 2024ProHap is a python-based tool built to efficiently generate protein haplotype databases from phased genotypes of reference population panels.Full paper (preprint): https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.12.24.572591</p

Supplementary Data: Identifying Protein Haplotypes by Mass Spectrometry

Supplementary data related to the paper "Identifying Protein Haplotypes by Mass Spectrometry" SD1: FASTA file including all target protein sequences (Ensembl reference proteome, protein haplotype sequences, contaminant sequences), excluding decoys SD2: FASTA file including all target and decoy sequences SD3: List of all peptide-spectrum matches (PSMs) with all related metadata and quality control measures SD4: List of substitutions identified, along with IDs of corresponding PSMs To reproduce the post-processing steps, you can use the pipeline published at https://github.com/ProGenNo/IdentifyingHaplotypesByMS The repository also contains additional explanations of supplementary files contents.</p