8,591 research outputs found
Two-Sided Matching and Spread Determinants in the Loan Market
Empirical work on bank loans typically regresses loan spreads (markups of loan interest rates over a benchmark rate) on observed characteristics of banks, firms, and loans. The estimation is problematic when some of these characteristics are only partially observed and the matching of banks and firms is endogenously determined because they prefer partners that have higher quality. We study the U.S. bank loan market with a two-sided matching model to control for the endogenous matching, and obtain Bayesian inference using a Gibbs sampling algorithm with data augmentation. We find evidence of positive assortative matching of sizes, explained by similar relationships between quality and size on both sides of the market. Banks' risk and firms' risk are important factors in their quality. Controlling for the endogenous matching has a strong impact on estimated coefficients in the loan spread equation.Two-sided matching; Loan spread; Bayesian inference; Gibbs sampling with data augmentation
Manipulating lightcone fluctuations in an analogue cosmic string
We study the flight time fluctuations in an anisotropic medium inspired by a
cosmic string with an effective fluctuating refractive index caused by
fluctuating vacuum electric fields, which are analogous to the lightcone
fluctuations due to fluctuating spacetime metric when gravity is quantized. The
medium can be realized as a metamaterial that mimics a cosmic string in the
sense of transformation optics. For a probe light close to the analogue string,
the flight time variance is times that in a normal homogeneous and
isotropic medium, where is a parameter characterizing the deficit angle
of the spacetime of a cosmic string. The parameter , which is always
greater than unity for a real cosmic string, is determined by the dielectric
properties of the metamaterial for an analogue string. Therefore, the flight
time fluctuations of a probe light can be manipulated by changing the electric
permittivity and magnetic permeability of the analogue medium. We argue that it
seems possible to fabricate a metamaterial that mimics a cosmic string with a
large in laboratory so that a currently observable flight time variance
might be achieved.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur
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