Financial Development, Fiscal Policy and Macroeconomic Volatility

This thesis examines empirically the effect of financial frictions and public debt on economic variables and seeks for an appropriate fiscal consolidation strategy. First, the thesis explores the determinants of output volatility, especially the roles of financial development and government debt. The analysis, based on a panel of 127 countries over four decades, employs system GMM dynamic panel regression. According to the regression results financial development is estimated to have a non-linear effect on output volatility. Increased government debt levels are statistically associated with increased macroeconomic volatility. However, we need to interpret the results carefully due to endogeneity problems. The effect of the interactions between the two is insignificant. Second, it analyses the role of financial frictions on economic fluctuations. When the three models are compared with the U.S. data along the second moments, the firm friction model helps in fitting some macroeconomic variables and outperforms the other models. In the impulse response functions, we find that financial frictions greatly amplify and propagate the effects of the exogenous shocks on economic variables. Specially, the firm friction model shows more persistent response than the bank friction model. In addition, the size of the response depends on the leverage in the model with financial frictions. Third, the thesis considers how the effects of fiscal policy consolidation differ depending on alternative strategies. To do this, we develop an open economy DSGE model with an endogenous risk premium mechanism. The government consumption cut has larger negative effects on output than the government investment cut because of a complementarity with private consumption. The response of the tax hike is smaller than the expenditue cut because the tax hikes reduce more debts and the lower risk premium crowds in consumption and investment. Among three fiscal rules, the expenditure adjusted rule is the most effective for both preventing the economic downturn and reducing government debt

Finding pathway regulators: gene set approach using peak identification algorithms

Recently, a number of different approaches have been used to examine variation in gene expression and to identify genes whose level of transcript differed greatly among unrelated individuals. Previous studies have commonly focused on identifying determinants that regulate gene expressions by targeting individual genes. However, it is difficult to detect true differences in the level of gene expression among genotypes from noise due to issues such as multiple testing and limited sample size. To increase the statistical power for detecting this difference, we consider a 'gene set' approach by focusing on subtle but coordinated changes in gene expression across multiple genes rather than individual genes. We defined a 'gene set' as a set of genes in the same biological pathway and focused on identifying common regulators based on an assumption that the genes within the same pathway are controlled by common regulators. We applied the gene set approach to the expression data of mRNA in Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain lymphoblast cells to identify regulators controlling the genes in a biological pathway. Our gene set approach successfully identified potent regulators controlling gene expression in an inflammatory response pathway

BIM-Based Construction Information Management Framework for Site Information Management

Projects in the construction industry are becoming increasingly large and complex, with construction technologies, methods, and the like developing rapidly. Various different types of information are generated by construction projects. Especially, a construction phase requires the input of many resources and generates a diverse set of information. While a variety of IT techniques are being deployed for information management during the construction phase, measures to create databases of such information and to link these various different types of information together are still insufficient. As such, this study aims to suggest a construction information database system based on BIM technology to enable the comprehensive management of site information generated during the construction phase. This study analyzed the information generated from construction sites and proposed a categorization system for structuring the generated information, along with a database model for storing such structured information. Through such efforts, it was confirmed that such a database system can be used for accumulating and using construction information; it is believed that, in the future, the continual accumulation and management of construction information will allow for corporate-level accumulation of knowledge as opposed to the individual accumulation of know-how