Testing policy effectiveness during COVID-19: An NK-DSGE analysis.

We examine the effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policy in mitigating the impact of COVID-19 in India using the NK-DSGE framework. In terms of policy effectiveness, our findings imply that expansionary monetary policy is effective in reviving economic growth both from the demand side and supply side. In contrast, expansionary fiscal policy is effective only from the supply side. Our findings recommend the implementation of optimal policy mix in a coordinated and staggered framework for effective mitigation of ill-effects of the COVID-19, such as reviving employment and capacity utilization to its pre-pandemic level with minimal inflationary effects.

Perceptual cGAN for MRI Super-resolution.

Capturing high-resolution magnetic resonance (MR) images is a time consuming process, which makes it unsuitable for medical emergencies and pediatric patients. Low-resolution MR imaging, by contrast, is faster than its high-resolution counterpart, but it compromises on fine details necessary for a more precise diagnosis. Super-resolution (SR), when applied to low-resolution MR images, can help increase their utility by synthetically generating high-resolution images with little additional time. In this paper, we present an SR technique for MR images that is based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), which have proven to be quite useful in producing sharp-looking details in SR. We introduce a conditional GAN with perceptual loss, which is conditioned upon the input low-resolution image, which improves the performance for isotropic and anisotropic MRI super-resolution. Clinical Relevance- MR image super-resolution has the potential for improving image acquisition speed to save the time of the clinicians, while guaranteeing high-quality images.

Has COVID-19 intensified the oil price-exchange rate nexus?

This paper extends the existing empirical literature by investigating whether the COVID-19 crisis has strengthened the dynamic relationships between oil price and exchange rate. We find significant breaks in the relationships wherein a common break is detected around the COVID-19 outbreak period. Of note, the interactions between the two markets intensified since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, our findings imply that the investors and policymakers are taking stock of the valuable information from the unanticipated occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, diversification in the form of portfolio switches towards foreign currency-denominated assets may be effective in the case of a depreciation of the domestic currency.