86,875 research outputs found
Reprogrammed mitochondria: a central hub of cancer cell metabolism
No full textMitochondria represent the metabolic hub of normal cells and play this role also in cancer but with different functional purposes. While cells in differentiated tissues have the prerogative of maintaining basal metabolism and support the biosynthesis of specialized products, cancer cells have to rewire the metabolic constraints imposed by the differentiation process. They need to balance the bioenergetic supply with the anabolic requirements that entail the intense proliferation rate, including nucleotide and membrane lipid biosynthesis. For this aim, mitochondrial metabolism is reprogrammed following the activation of specific oncogenic pathways or due to specific mutations of mitochondrial proteins. The main process leading to mitochondrial metabolic rewiring is the alteration of the tricarboxylic acid cycle favoring the appropriate orchestration of anaplerotic and cataplerotic reactions. According to the tumor type or the microenvironmental conditions, mitochondria may decouple glucose catabolism from mitochondrial oxidation in favor of glutaminolysis or disable oxidative phosphorylation for avoiding harmful production of free radicals. These and other metabolic settings can be also determined by the neo-production of oncometabolites that are not specific for the tissue of origin or the accumulation of metabolic intermediates able to boost pro-proliferative metabolism also impacting epigenetic/transcriptional programs. The full characterization of tumor-specific mitochondrial signatures may provide the identification of new biomarkers and therapeutic opportunities based on metabolic approaches
The effects of monetary policy shocks in credit and labor markets with search and matching frictions
No full textBy introducing search and matching frictions in both the labor and the credit markets into a cash in advance New Keynesian DSGE model, we provide a novel explanation of the incomplete pass-through from policy rates to loan rates. We show that this phenomenon is ineradicable if banks possess some power in the bargaining over the loan rate of interest, if the cost of posting job vacancies is positive and if firms and bank sustain costs when searching for lines of credit and when posting credit vacancies, respectively. We also show that the presence of credit market frictions moderates the reactions of output and wages to a monetary shock, and that the transmission of monetary policy shocks to output and inflation is more relevant than suggested by the recent literature
Prospect Theory and sentiment-driven fluctuations
No full textIn this paper we aim to present a novel channel through which the volatility of the monetary/financial sector
affects the instability of the real macroeconomic variables originated by self-fulfilling market sentiments. To
this aim, we insert some elements of Prospect Theory in the preferences of agents living in an overlapping generations
economy where consumers’ heterogeneity and firms’ imperfect information on the level of aggregate
demand allow market sentiments to affect the equilibrium path of the economy under rational expectations.
In this environment, greater heterogeneity in the household’s narrow framing parameter and in the degree of
competition in goods markets favor the emergence of self-fulfilling equilibria by exacerbating the coordination
problem generated by a pair-wise matching process taking place in the labor market. Furthermore, the more
dispersed are agents’ deviations from standard rationality the higher is the volatility of the economy due to
sentiment fluctuations. Finally, a higher volatility of the money/financial market, by increasing the effect of
Prospect Theory on households’ choices under risk, increases the noise of the signal upon which firms make
their hiring decisions; this, in its turn, generates greater variability in market sentiments and hence in real
economic activity
Macroeconomic equilibrium and nominal price rigidities under imperfect rationality
No full textWe introduce some elements of Prospect Theory into a general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition and real wage rigidities due to wage bargaining, or efficiency wages. We show that an increase in workers’ loss aversion: (i) reduces the equilibrium wage and in this way increases potential output; (ii) induces workers to work/ consume less and in this way decreases potential output. Sharper loss aversion may hence increase or decrease potential output according to the relative strength of these two effects. We also show that if loss aversion reduces equilibrium output, it also enhances the effect of nominal price rigidities
Should central banks lean against the bubble? The monetary policy conundrum under credit frictions and capital accumulation
No full textWe develop an OLG model with productive capital accumulation, frictional financial markets, sticky prices and a form of heterogeneity among households which splits them between borrowers and lenders in the credit market. In the spirit of Galí, J., 2014. Monetary policy and rational asset price bubbles. Am. Econ. Rev. 104, 721–752, we use this framework to study the consequences of different monetary policy rules, focusing in particular on the so-called “leaning against the wind” policy, according to which the central bank sets the nominal rate so as to prevent the formation of asset price bubbles in the financial markets. Our framework can generate stationary equilibria with rational asset bubbles of different types. In some of these equilibria, the presence of bubbly assets can increase the values of stationary capital and output, whereas in others it reduces them, and we determine three main channels through which the stationary value of the bubble (relative to GDP) can shift the economy in one of the two types of stationary equilibria. We then run numerical simulations to evaluate the dynamic behavior of a bubbly economy in response to different monetary policy rules. Our main conclusion is that, under credit frictions and sticky prices, a “leaning against the wind” policy is desirable only if the reactions of the central bank to inflation and output deviations from their targets are small. If this was not the case, the central bank could run the risk of increasing bubble volatility and rapidly turn the expansionary shock into a recession
A Monte Carlo method for the diffusion of information between mobile agents
No full textA new model for the local spread of some token (e.g. malware between mobile computing devices, information in a mobile social network, rumors in a moving crowd) is introduced. The diffusion of the information is analyzed both empirically by aMonteCarlo method and analytically by mean field theory, revealing the existence of a phase transition. The results are compared and found in strong qualitative agreement
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