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The low cycle fatigue (LCF) property and low cycle dwell fatigue (LCDF) property of bimodal structure and lamellar structure for Ti60 titanium alloy under high peak stress were studied by means of optical microscope (OM), scanning electron microscope (SEM) and electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD). The results show that microstructure has little effect on LCF property, while significantly influences LCDF property. The dwell fatigue sensitivity of bimodal structure is higher than that of lamellar structure. Under dwell loading condition, the fatigue life decreases remarkably. The fatigue life decreases with the increase of the peak stress, while the dwell fatigue sensitivity increases. Within the same cycle, plastic strain accumulation of LCDF is greater than that of LCF, and the plastic strain accumulation of bimodal structure is more than that of lamellar structure. The LCF crack initiates at the specimen surface with single source, while LCDF crack originates inside of specimen with multiple sources. There are quasi-cleavage facets on the fracture surface. The density of facets for bimodal structure is higher than that of lamellar structure.

This paper considers the application of price jump information in modeling and forecasting the volatility. We use the method in Corsi et al. (2010) to separate the asset price jump information more effectively, and use the HAR-RV-CJ volatility model containing that information to model and predict the volatility of asset prices. From our research of price volatility of Shanghai Composite Index and Shenzhen Component Index we found that HAR-RV-CJ model which contains jump information is more excellent in predicting out-of-sample prices than other volatility models like HAR-RV, ARFIMA, GARCH and SV.

Leucine-rich repeat neuronal protein-4 (LRRN4 or NLRR4) has been identified as a new member of LRRN family, which is a group of proteins that contain leucine-rich repeat domains and functioned as regulators in a variety of pathologic processes including cardiac remodeling. However, the exact pattern of expression and function of LRRN4 in the human hearts is still unclear. In our study, the western blot test and real-time PCR were performed to detect the LRRN4 level in hearts of patients with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), ischemia heart disease (IHD) hearts respectively. Interestingly, the LRRN4 was highly expressed in donor hearts, but significantly reduced in hearts with DCM. While a comparable level of expression was detected in the IHD hearts when compared with donor hearts. Immunohistochemistry assay showed that LRRN4 was particularly expressed in cardiomyocytes and responsible for its decreased expression in the DCM hearts. Furthermore, we found LRRN4 was expressed in the ventricular cardiomyocytes of mice and apparently reduced after pressure overload treatment in the wild type mice. Therefore, our hitherto unrecognized findings provided the first evidence that the highly expressed LRRN4 is critical for maintaining morphology and function of heart. In addition to that, since its expression level decreased in DCM hearts but not IHD hearts, which indicated LRRN4 might be a therapeutic target clinically for DCM disease.

This paper first reviews recent developments in exchange rate regimes, capital account liberalization, interest rate liberalization, and monetary policymaking in the People's Republic of China (PRC). It then observes that the PRC's monetary policy autonomy may have been reduced with falling capital control effectiveness and a rigid exchange regime that is still tightly managed against the United States ( US ) dollar. This hypothesis is investigated empirically using both the Taylor rule and the McCallum-like rule to test whether the PRC's money market interest rate and/or quantity of money supply are being increasingly influenced by the US interest rate or reserve accumulation. The paper concludes that there is considerable evidence suggesting diminishing monetary policy autonomy in the PRC. To regain policy autonomy, the monetary authority needs to substantially increase exchange rate flexibility of the renminbi as long as it continues to pursue capital account opening.

We studied the ground observations of 630.0 nm auroral emission at Zhongshan Station to determine the polar cap boundary with the latitudinal profile of emission intensity. The open-closed field time boundary is assumed to lie at the boundary between polar rain and plasma sheet precipitation. We assume that nonprecipitation-dependent sources of 630.0 nm emission cause a spatially uniform luminosity in the polar cap and that auroral zone luminosity is also spatially uniform. Therefore we determine the location of the polar cap boundary of postnoon sector from the auroral emission data each time by finding the best fit of the observations to a step function in latitude and we produce a time series of the location of the polar cap boundary. The average error of the practice in the paper is less than 0.8 degree.

This paper investigates whether external political pressure for faster renminbi (RMB) appreciation affect both the daily returns and the conditional volatility of the RMB central parity rate. We construct several political pressure indicators pertaining to the RMB exchange rate, with a special emphasis on the US pressure, to test the hypothesis. After controlling for Chinese macroeconomic surprise news, we find that US and non-US political pressure does not have a significant influence on RMB's daily returns. However, evidence suggests that political pressures, and especially those from the US, have statistically significant impacts on the conditional volatility of the RMB. Furthermore, we conduct the same exercise on the 12-month RMB nondeliverable forward rate (NDF). We find that the NDF market is highly responsive to macroeconomic surprise news and there is some evidence that Sino-US bilateral meetings affect the conditional volatility of the RMB NDF.

The present analysis sheds light on the setting up a regional rating agency in Asia in the wake of recent financial crisis. We investigate the policy facing a financial regulator while evaluating whether or not to admit new entrants into the credit rating market. In an incomplete contracting framework, we show that an impartial financial regulatory body (represented by a benevolent supranational organization) can facilitate credit ratings of high quality by allowing for the entry of new rating agencies on a non-single basis than it does for a mere single entry. This finding is caused by increased competition among the rating agencies, which induces higher quality of rating services even should rating agencies still exert below their maximum level of efforts.

This paper investigates whether there is any consistency between banks' financial strength ratings (bank rating) and their risk-return profiles. It is expected that banks with high ratings tend to earn high expected returns for the risks they assume and thereby have a low probability of experiencing financial distress. Bank ratings, a measure of a bank's intrinsic safety and soundness, should therefore be able to capture the bank's ability to manage financial distress while achieving risk-return efficiency. We first estimate the expected returns, risks, and financial distress risk proxy (the inverse z-score), then apply the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to obtain the risk-return efficiency score for each bank, and finally conduct ordered logit regressions of bank ratings on estimated risks, risk-return efficiency, and the inverse z-score by controlling for other variables related to each bank's operating environment. We find that banks with a higher efficiency score on average tend to obtain favorable ratings. It appears that rating agencies generally encourage banks to trade expected returns for reduced risks, suggesting that these ratings are generally consistent with banks' risk-return profiles.

What is the relative contribution of sovereign risks and firm-level credit risks in a firm’srating assignment? Or, stated otherwise, what is the information content of these components in afirm’s rating? This paper intends to examine this issue, which has not been adequately addressed so far,using a tailor-made firm-level database, matching sovereign and firm ratings with firm performanceindicators reportedly used by rating agencies. The paper decomposes factors contributing to a firm’scredit rating by measuring each factor’s relative weight. By matching a firm’s credit risk indicatorswith its corresponding sovereign risk, we are able to disentangle the relative importance of each factorin a firm’s rating assignment.We make three contributions. First, our findings reveal that sovereign risks contribute to amajor part of firms’ ratings in developing countries, whereas such risks play a negligible role inassigning firms’ ratings in developed countries. Second, we show that this result for developingcountries partly depends on the “country ceiling effect”—private ratings are bound upwards by theirsovereign rating—but in these countries idiosyncratic information is irrelevant even for firms whoserating would lie anyhow way below their sovereign. Accordingly, we document that the informationcontent of firm ratings is much smaller in developing countries than in developed countries. Third, weshow that cross-country indicators of information quality, rule of law and other institutional qualityindicators help explain this unsatisfactory situation but do not solve the puzzle entirely. Global ratingagencies need also to improve their rating methodology to meet the challenges of the emerging marketratings.