Financial stress and sovereign debt composition

"Published online: 19 Oct 2015"

Consumption, wealth, stock and housing returns: evidence from emerging markets

We test the predictive ability of the transitory deviations of consumption from its common trend with aggregate wealth and labour income, cay, for both future equity and housing risk premia in emerging market economies. Using quarterly data for 31 markets, our country-level evidence shows that forecasting power of cay vis-à-vis stock returns is high for Brazil, China, Colombia, Israel, Korea, Latvia and Malaysia. As for housing returns, the empirical evidence suggests that financial and housing assets are perceived as complements in the case of Chile, Russia, South Africa and Thailand, and as substitutes in Argentina, Brazil, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico and Taiwan. Using a panel econometric framework, we find that the cross-country heterogeneity observed in asset return predictability does not accrue to regional location, but can be attributed to differences in the degree of equity market development and in the level of income.

Tapping the wealth of microbial data in high-throughput metabolic model reconstruction

Genome-scale metabolic models are valuable tools in the metabolic engineering process, based on the ability of these models to integrate diverse sources of data to produce global predictions of organism behavior. At the most basic level, these models require only a genome sequence to construct, and once built, they may be used to predict essential genes, culture conditions, pathway utilization, and the modifications required to enhance a desired organism behavior. In this chapter, we address two key challenges associated with the reconstruction of metabolic models: (a) leveraging existing knowledge of microbiology, biochemistry, and available omics data to produce the best possible model; and (b) applying available tools and data to automate the reconstruction process. We consider these challenges as we progress through the model reconstruction process, beginning with genome assembly, and culminating in the integration of constraints to capture the impact of transcriptional regulation. We divide the reconstruction process into ten distinct steps: (1) genome assembly from sequenced reads; (2) automated structural and functional annotation; (3) phylogenetic tree-based curation of genome annotations; (4) assembly and standardization of biochemistry database; (5) genome-scale metabolic reconstruction; (6) generation of core metabolic model; (7) generation of biomass composition reaction; (8) completion of draft metabolic model; (9) curation of metabolic model; and (10) integration of regulatory constraints. Each of these ten steps is documented in detail.