Can Consumer Credit Stimulate Consumer Confidence? Evidence from the Time-Varying Aspect

This study discusses the nexus between consumer credit (CC) and consumer confidence (CF) in the case of China with a bootstrap rolling-window causality test. The new empirical results demonstrate that CC improves CF in specific periods by loosening liquidity constraints and increasing consumer power temporarily. Meanwhile, a negative link is also found, which can be explained by policy adjustment and financial instabilities. On the contrary, CF negatively influences CC in some periods, reflecting consumers' attitudes toward the future would change borrowing behaviors. But this relationship would be disrupted by government intervention and public events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The contribution is that time-varying, multiple-directional and dynamic causalities are captured, which enriches the theoretical framework between CC and CF. Therefore, the government must design and adjust loaning policies against specific circumstances and transmit positive signs to consumers. Future study needs to pay attention to different types of CC and try to reveal their heterogeneous influences on CF. In addition, the effect evaluation for CC policy is also another focus in the next research.

Oil prices and the green bond market: Evidence from time-varying and quantile-varying aspects

This paper investigates the link between crude oil prices (COP) and green bonds through a rolling-window Granger-causality test. The positive, negative, and uncorrelated impacts of COP on the green bond index (GBI) are captured with the same sample. The positive effects show that the prosperity of the green bond market is promoted by the high COP, demonstrating that green bonds can avoid shocks from COP. Nevertheless, due to the high profits of the green energy industry and the excess supply on the oil market, the negative impact between COP and GBI is also found. These results are not completely consistent with the price correlation model between oil and green bonds. Furthermore, the positive impact of the GBI on COP shows that green bonds cannot moderate the oil crisis due to COVID-19, instability in the international political environment, and the immaturity of green bonds market. In addition, depending on the quantile Granger-causality test, only high COP affects the GBI, and this asymmetric feature is attributed to increasing production costs and environmental protection pressure. Understanding the nexus between COP and the GBI is of practical significance for bond issuers, regulators, and investors. © 2022 Borsa Ä°stanbul Anonim Åžirketi

Multimodal Semantic Mismatch Detection in Social Media Posts

Short videos have become the most popular form of social media in recent years. In this work, we focus on the threat scenario where video, audio, and their text description are semantically mismatched to mislead the audience. We develop self-supervised methods to detect semantic mismatch across multiple modalities, namely video, audio and text. We use state-of-the-art language, video and audio models to extract dense features from each modality, and explore transformer architecture together with contrastive learning methods on a dataset of one million Twitter posts from 2021 to 2022. Our best-performing method benefits from the robustness of Noise-Contrastive loss and the context provided by fusing modalities together using a cross-transformer. It outperforms state-of-the-art by over 9% in accuracy. We further characterize the performance of our system on topic-specific datasets containing COVID-19 and Russia-Ukraine related tweets, and shows that it outperforms state-of-the-art by over 17% in accuracy.

Higher Proinflammatory Cytokines Are Associated with Increased Antibody Titer After a Third Dose of SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine in Solid Organ Transplant Recipients

Purpose: Solid organ transplant recipients (SOTRs) are at increased risk for severe COVID-19 and exhibit lower antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. This study aimed to determine if pre-vaccination cytokine levels are associated with antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. Method(s): A cross-sectional study was performed among 58 SOTRs before and after two-dose mRNA vaccine series, 35 additional SOTRs before and after a third vaccine dose, with comparison to 16 healthy controls (HCs). Anti-spike antibody was assessed using the IgG Euroimmun ELISA. Electrochemiluminescence detectionbased multiplexed sandwich immunoassays were used to quantify plasma cytokine and chemokine concentrations (n=20 analytes). Concentrations between SOTRs and HCs, stratified by ultimate antibody response to the vaccine, were compared using Wilcoxon-rank-sum test with false discovery rates (FDR) computed to correct for multiple comparisons. Result(s): In the study population, 100% of HCs, 59% of SOTRs after two doses and 63% of SOTRs after three doses had a detectable antibody response. Multiple baseline cytokines were elevated in SOTRs versus HCs. There was no significant difference in cytokine levels between SOTRs with high vs low-titer antibodies after two doses of vaccine. However, as compared to poor antibody responders, SOTRs who went on to develop a high-titer antibody response to a third dose of vaccine had significantly higher pre-third dose levels of several innate immune cytokines including IL-17, IL-2Ra, IL-6, IP-10, MIP-1alpha, and TNF-alpha (FDR <0.05). Conclusion(s): A specific inflammatory profile or immune state may identify which SOTRs are likely to develop stronger sero-response and possible protection after a third dose of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.