ab initio Study of Strain-Induced Ferroelectricity in SrTiO3

Valley lines on total-energy surfaces for the zone-center distortions of free-standing and in-plane strained SrTiO3 are investigated with a newly developed first-principles structure optimization technique [Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. vol.43 (2004), p.6785]. The results of numerical calculations confirmed that the ferroelectricity is induced, and the Curie temperature is increased, by applying biaxial compressive or tensile strains. Along the distortion, strong nonlinear coupling between the soft- and hard-modes is demonstrated.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Jpn. J. Appl. Phy

Ab initio Study of Valley Line on a Total-Energy Surface for Zone-Center Distortions of Ferroelectric Perovskite Oxides BaTiO3 and PbTiO3

An ab initio structure optimization technique is newly developed to determine the valley line on a total-energy surface for zone-center distortions of ferroelectric perovskite oxides and is applied to barium titanate BaTiO3 and lead titanate PbTiO3. The proposed technique is an improvement over King-Smith and Vanderbilt's scheme [Phys. Rev. B 49, p.5828 (1994)] of evaluating total energy as a function of the amplitude of atomic displacements. The results of numerical calculations show that total energy can be expressed as a fourth-order function of the amplitude of atomic displacements in BaTiO3 but not in PbTiO3.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Pass-Through of Exchange Rate Changes and Macroeconomic Shocks to Domestic Inflation in East Asian Countries

We examine the pass-through effects of exchange rate changes on the domestic prices among the East Asian countries using the conventional pass-through equation and a VAR analysis. First, dynamics of pass-through from the exchange rate to import prices and consumer prices is analyzed using the conventional model of pass-through based on the micro-foundations of the exporter's pricing behavior. Both the short-run and long-run elasticities of the exchange rate pass-through are estimated. Second, a vector autoregression (VAR) technique is applied to the pass-through analysis. A Choleski decomposition is used to identify structural shocks and to examine the pass-through of each shock to domestic price inflation by the impulse response function and variance decomposition analyses. Both the conventional analysis and VAR analysis show that while the degree of exchange rate pass-through to import prices is quite high in the crisis-hit countries, the pass-through to CPI is generally low, with a notable exception of Indonesia. The VAR analysis shows that the size of the pass-through of monetary shocks is even larger in Indonesia. Thus, it was Indonesia's accommodative monetary policy as well as the high degree of the CPI responsiveness to exchange rates that contributed to high domestic price inflation, resulting in the loss of its export competitiveness, even when the currency depreciated sharply in nominal terms in 1997-98.

Impacts of the Basle Capital Standard on Japanese Banks' Behavior

This paper examines how the risk based capital standards, the so-called Basle Accord between 1990 and 1993. As the Japanese stock prices fell, banks' latent capital gains, which are part of tier II capital, became smaller. Empirical findings are consistent with a view that banks with lower capital ratios tended to issue more subordinated debts (tier II) and to reduce lending (risk assets).

How Did the Dollar Peg Fail in Asia?

In this paper we have constructed a theoretical model in which Asian firms maximize their profit, competing with Japanese and US firms in their markets. The duopoly model is used to determine export prices and volumes in response to the exchange rate fluctuations vis-…-vis the Japanese yen and the US dollar. Then, the optimal basket weight to minimize the fluctuation of the growth rate of trade balance is derived. These are the novel features of our model. The export price equation and export volume equation are estimated for several Asian countries for the sample period of 1981 to 1996. Results are generally reasonable. The optimal currency weights for the yen and the US dollars are derived and compared with actual weights that had been adopted before the currency crisis of 1997. For all the countries in the sample, it is shown that the optimal weight of the yen is significantly higher than the actual weight.

Embedded Ubiquitous Services on Hospital Information Systems.

A Hospital Information Systems (HIS) have turned a hospital into a gigantic computer with huge computational power, huge storage and wired/wireless local area network. On the other hand, a modern medical device, such as echograph, is a computer system with several functional units connected by an internal network named a bus. Therefore, we can embed such a medical device into the HIS by simply replacing the bus with the local area network. This paper designed and developed two embedded systems, a ubiquitous echograph system and a networked digital camera. Evaluations of the developed systems clearly show that the proposed approach, embedding existing clinical systems into HIS, drastically changes productivity in the clinical field. Once a clinical system becomes a pluggable unit for a gigantic computer system, HIS, the combination of multiple embedded systems with application software designed under deep consideration about clinical processes may lead to the emergence of disruptive innovation in the clinical field