To probe differential control of substrate specificities for 4-nitrophenyl-α-L-arabinofuranoside (4NPA) and 4-nitrophenyl-β-D-xylopyranoside (4NPX), residues of the glycone binding pocket of GH43 β-D-xylosidase/α-L-arabinofuranosidase from Selenomonas ruminantium were individually mutated to alanine. Although their individual substrate specificities (kcat/Km) 4NPX and (kcat/Km) 4NPA are lowered...

11 12 13 14 Department of Neurology, F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center, Children’s Hospital, Boston, 15 300 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115 16 and 17 Program in Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School, 18 220 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115 19 20 21 § these authors contributed equally to this work 22 23 *To whom correspondence should be addressed: 24 Phone: 617-919-2685, Fax: 617-730-0242 25 chin...

This paper estimates a new open economy macroeconomic model for South Korea to determine the output effect of currency devaluations. Three transmission mechanisms are considered: the expenditure-switching, the balance sheet, and a monetary channel associated to a nominal exchange rate target. Devaluations are defined as an increase in this target. This allows to isolate the effects of an explic...

We address three questions: (i) Can classical models be reconciled with the fact that many crises are marked by high rates of depreciation and small increases in seignorage revenue? (ii) What are the implications of different financing methods for post-crisis rates of inflation and depreciation? (iii) How do governments pay for the fiscal costs associated with currency crises? To study these qu...

This paper establishes the link of microstructure and macroeconomic factors with the timevarying conditional correlation of foreign exchange and excess equity returns. By using the proposed DCC model with exogenous variables, capital flows and interest rate differentials are shown to be significant determinants of this correlation which is inclusive of the short-run variation of both asset retu...

This paper employs an unobserved component model that incorporates a set of economic fundamentals to obtain the Euro-Dollar permanent equilibrium exchange rates (PEER) for the period 1975Q1 to 2008Q4. The results show that for most of the sample period, the Euro-Dollar exchange rate closely followed the values implied by the PEER. The only significant deviations from the PEER occurred in the ye...

Inflation targeting is gaining popularity as a framework for conducting monetary policy. At the same time many countries employ some sort of foreign exchange intervention policy assuming that these two policies can coexist. This paper attempts to show that both policies are not sustainable. Israel is a classic test case. We test our hypothesis using information from the financial markets. The r...

A major puzzle in international finance is the well-documented inability of models based on monetary fundamentals to produce better out-of-sample forecasts of the nominal exchange rate than a naive random walk. While this literature has generally employed statistical measures of forecast accuracy, we investigate whether there is any economic value to the predictive power of monetary fundamental...

This paper applies an established bid-ask spread decomposition model to spot foreign exchange market in order to assess the impact of European Monetary Union (EMU). Additionally, the paper presents and tests a modified decomposition model which is specifically adapted to the features of order-driven markets. The latter model provides much improved performance. Price clustering is introduced as ...

In addition to transferring about 16 percent of GDP from exporters to importers, Uzbekistan’s quasi-fiscal multiple exchange rate regime generates identifiable welfare losses of 2–8 percent of GDP on import markets and up to 15 percent on export markets. These excess burdens have increased substantially with the growing difference among exchange rates. The welfare analysis allows some conclusio...