The sustainability of China's exchange rate policy and capital account liberalisation.

This paper deals with two related issues: the sustainability of China’s exchange rate regime and the opening up of its capital account. The exchange rate discussion deliberately passes over the issue of the “equilibrium” value of the renminbi and its alleged undervaluation – typically at the heart of the current policy debate – and focuses instead on the domestic costs of the current regime and the potential risks to domestic financial stability in the long run. The paper argues that the renminbi exchange rate should be increasingly determined by market forces and that administrative controls should be progressively relinquished. The exchange rate is obviously linked to well-functioning and efficient capital markets, which require no barriers to capital flows. Thus, exchange rate reform has to be correctly sequenced with reform of the capital account to avoid disruptive capital flows. The paper discusses China’s twin surpluses of the current and capital accounts and attempts to identify the drivers of this “anomalous” external position. The pragmatic strategy pursued by the Chinese authorities in the aftermath of the Asian crisis encouraged FDI inflows and favoured the accumulation of a large stock of foreign exchange reserves. Combined with a relatively weak institutional setting, these factors have been important determinants of the pattern and composition of the country’s capital flows and international investment position. Finally, the paper speculates on the outlook for Chinese capital flows should barriers to capital movements be lifted. It argues that whether China continues to supply capital to the rest of the world or eventually becomes a net borrower in international capital markets – as was the case for most of its recent history – will depend on the evolution of its institutions. JEL Classification: F10, F21, F31, F32, P48.China, exchange rate policy, international investment position, capital account liberalisation, institutions.

Neural correlates of the distinction between self and others in the macaque's frontal cortex

Social interaction is a fundamental prerogative of primate’s life. Different abilities are part of the repertoire that is necessary to fulfill a complex social behavior. Many of these abilities are shared between human and monkeys: non-human primates are capable of cooperating (Haroush & Williams 2015), monitor each other’s actions (Falcone et al. 2012a), learn from observation (Subiaul et al. 2004, Falcone et al. 2012b, Chang et al. 2011, Monfardini et al. 2014). One of the bases of social behavior is certainly the ability to understand other’s actions. In this respect, one of the major discovery in neurophysiology in the last decades is that of ‘mirror neurons’ in monkey’s parietofrontal circuits (di Pellegrino et al. 1992, Rizzolatti et al. 1996). These neurons are activated both when an action is performed and when the same action it is just observed. It has been suggested that they could play a critical role in providing the bases for understanding the action of others through the same neural mechanisms which activate during the execution of a specific motor act. Despite that, the activity of mirror neurons is not able to provide a neural signal able to distinguish between self and others. Recently, some studies attempted to investigate the neural correlates of self-others differentiation, looking for evidence of a non-overlapping neural representation of self and others action. In this thesis, I will discuss the results of three distinct neurophysiology experiments that investigated the role played by different areas of the macaque frontal cortex in providing such distinction. Through a task design that required the interaction between humans and monkeys, the aim of these experiments was to explore the distinct neural correlates which allow the prediction or the anticipation of someone else actions. In Section 1, a general description of the experimental design adopted by the three experiments discussed here is provided. The non-match-to-goal task required the interaction between the monkey and the experimenter, which alternated their role as actor and observer along the different trials. In Section 2, the methods and the main results of two previous neurophysiology experiments (Falcone et al. 2016, Falcone et al. 2017) are discussed. These experiments investigated the property of single neurons recorded in the lateral prefrontal cortex and in the medial frontal cortex. In Section 3 are discussed the methods and the main results of our study (Cirillo et al. 2018), which adopted the same task design as the two previous experiments, recording the activity of neurons in the dorsal premotor cortex. Section 4 presents an overview of the overall results, discussing the role played by different categories of cells identified within the frontal cortex in the three experiments that investigated the neural correlates of representing others’ future and past behavior in a separate way from one’s own

Organization and evolution of synthetic idiotypic networks

We introduce a class of weighted graphs whose properties are meant to mimic the topological features of idiotypic networks, namely the interaction networks involving the B-core of the immune system. Each node is endowed with a bit-string representing the idiotypic specificity of the corresponding B cell and a proper distance between any couple of bit-strings provides the coupling strength between the two nodes. We show that a biased distribution of the entries in bit-strings can yield fringes in the (weighted) degree distribution, small-worlds features, and scaling laws, in agreement with experimental findings. We also investigate the role of ageing, thought of as a progressive increase in the degree of bias in bit-strings, and we show that it can possibly induce mild percolation phenomena, which are investigated too.Comment: 13 page

Neural Intrinsic timescales in the macaque dorsal premotor cortex predict the strength of spatial response coding

Our brain continuously receives information over multiple timescales that are differently processed across areas. In this study, we investigated the intrinsic timescale of neurons in the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) of two rhesus macaques while performing a non-match-to-goal task. The task rule was to reject the previously chosen target and select the alternative one. We defined the intrinsic timescale as the decay constant of the autocorrelation structure computed during a baseline period of the task. We found that neurons with longer intrinsic timescale tended to maintain a stronger spatial response coding during a delay period. This result suggests that longer intrinsic timescales predict the functional role of PMd neurons in a cognitive task. Our estimate of the intrinsic timescale integrates an existing hierarchical model (Murray et al., 2014), by assigning to PMd a lower position than prefrontal cortex in the hierarchical ordering of the brain areas based on neurons' timescales

Coding of self and other's future choices in dorsal premotor cortex during social interaction

Representing others’ intentions is central to primate social life. We explored the role of dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) in discriminating between self and others’ behavior while two male rhesus monkeys performed a non-match-to-goal task in a monkey-human paradigm. During each trial, two of four potential targets were randomly presented on the right and left parts of a screen, and the monkey or the human was required to choose the one that did not match the previously chosen target. Each agent had to monitor the other's action in order to select the correct target in that agent's own turn. We report neurons that selectively encoded the future choice of the monkey, the human agent, or both. Our findings suggest that PMd activity shows a high degree of self-other differentiation during face-to-face interactions, leading to an independent representation of what others will do instead of entailing self-centered mental rehearsal or mirror-like activities. Understanding others’ intentions is essential to successful primate social life. Cirillo et al. explore the role of dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) in discriminating between self and others’ behavior while macaques interacted with humans. They show that the majority of neurons encoding the future choice did so selectively for the monkey or the human agent. PMd thus differentiates self from others’ behavior, leading to independent representations of future actions

role of the social actor during social interaction and learning in human monkey paradigms

Abstract The social interactions between primates is drawn by their ability to predict others' behaviours, to learn from others' actions and to represent others' intentions. It allows them to extract information by observation to understand which action is leading to which outcome and to maximize the efficiency of their own future behaviours. These processes have mainly been investigated studying non-human primates observing conspecifics, but more recently an increasing body of work has adopted a human-monkey paradigm, and some have now convincingly shown that macaque monkeys understand human choices, consider them and can act accordingly. Two main hypotheses have been developed to explain macaque monkeys' ability to learn from humans: 1) the similarity between the behaviours of both species 2) the presence of a non-ambiguous link between the observed action and its outcome. Based on the literature examined the recent evidence appears to supports the second. The non-social observational learning, meaning the learning by observation of an inanimate agent, can be a powerful tool to understand the mechanisms underlying the social interactions

Voces que emergen desde el desierto: la presencia mapuche en Olascoaga

Mi infancia y adolescencia transcurrieron en el partido de Bragado. Luego de mi paso por la ciudad de La Plata, actualmente me encuentro viviendo nuevamente aquí. Es por eso que el siguiente trabajo surge a partir de mi reciente experiencia como docente de Prácticas del Lenguaje y Literatura en escuelas rurales del Partido de Bragado, principalmente en la Extensión 2050 perteneciente a la E.E.S N°5, en la cual se encuentra la Escuela Martín Fierro ubicada en Olascoaga, a unos 18 kilómetros de Bragado. Hoy día me encuentro desarrollando la tesis de Licenciatura en Letras en la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata bajo la tutoría de Mariano Dubin. Las siguientes páginas son una aproximación a la tesis que estoy desarrollando: La presencia mapuche en el cotidiano escolar de Olascoaga. Un estudio de caso.Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educació

Effects of reward size and context on learning in macaque monkeys

Abstract The outcome of an action plays a crucial role in decision-making and reinforcement learning processes. Indeed, both human and animal behavioural studies have shown that different expected reward values, either quantitatively or qualitatively, modulate the motivation of subjects to perform an action and, as a consequence, affect their behavioural performance. Here, we investigated the effect of different amounts of reward on the learning of macaque monkeys using a modified version of the object-in-place task. This task offers the opportunity to shape rapid learning based on a set of external stimuli that enhance an animal's accuracy in terms of solving a problem. We compared the learning of three monkeys among three different reward conditions. Our results demonstrate that the larger the reward, the better the monkey's ability to learn the associations starting with the second presentation of the problem. Moreover, we compared the present results with those of our previous work using the same monkeys in the same task but with a unique reward condition, the intermediate one. Interestingly, the performance of our animals in our previous work matched with their performance in the largest and not intermediate reward condition of the present study These results suggest that learning is mostly influenced by the reward context and not by its absolute value