In 1981, the Atlantic Council's Energy Policy Committee, in collaboration with the Japanese Committee for Energy Policy Promotion and the Japanese Institute of Energy Economics, published a joint policy paper entitled 'U.S.-Japan Energy Relationships in the 1980s.'.

Economists and legal scholars routinely posit an implicit contract between Japanese firms and their principal lender. Under this arrangement, the bank implicitly agrees to rescue the firm when times turn bad. Out of court, it rescues the firm from insolvency. Not only does it save the investments specific to the troubled firm, it lowers the use of costly bankruptcy proceedings and cuts the costs of those bankruptcy procedures firms do occasionally invoke. Given the creditor-shareholder conflicts of interest that arise as (...) firms approach insolvency, such arrangements would seem unstable. Yet according to a long sociological tradition, conflicts of interest matter less in Japan than in the West. According to the emerging economic and legal tradition, Japanese economic actors do face those conflicts, but keep them in check through reputational concerns, close-knit ties, and government supervision. Using two datasets of troubled firms from the 1970s and 1980s, we ask whether Japanese main banks in fact rescue distressed borrowers. We find no evidence that they do: large Japanese firms fail; when large firms approach insolvency, main banks do not increase the share of the firm’s debt they bear; stronger ties between distressed firms and their main bank do not facilitate loans; and troubled firms do not try to preserve their main bank relationship. All told, the claim that Japanese banks ever implicitly agreed to rescue firms is sheer myth. That Japanese banks let troubled firms fail is no recent development; it has been thus for decades. Conflicts of interest do indeed matter in Japan and long have. They matter enough to prevent precisely the incentive-incompatible rescue deals that scholars in the field so routinely posit. (shrink)

This study is aimed to address the problems associated with questionnaire-based research. Twelve hypothetical cases are presented and checked for ethical validity. The problems are categorized under seven headings: Whether the participation of the subject is truly voluntary; whether consent to participate in the study has been obtained or proxy consent is required; whether consent to participate has been obtained from "authentic" participants and their privacy is protected; whether participants are fully informed before they consent to participate; whether the validity (...) of questionnaire-based research has been determined in terms of its possible harm; how the roles of the research ethics committee are defined; and what content should be presented in reports and articles. It is important that the ethics of questionnaire-based research should be reviewed with consideration to maintaining a balance between the protection of a subject's human rights and the promotion of research for the improvement of medical science and health care. (shrink)

The identification of Smad proteins as molecular components of the transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) signaling cascade has enhanced our understanding of how ligand-mediated activation of TGF-β receptors leads to modulation of target gene transcription. Recent studies have identified a distinct, structurally related class of Smads which inhibits, rather than transduces, TGF-β family signals. The molecular mechanism of action and the exact signaling pathways that are targeted by antagonistic Smads are not completely understood. These proteins appear to participate in autoregulatory negative (...) feedback loops in which signaling initiated by specific TGF-β family ligands induces the expression of an inhibitory Smad that then functions to modulate the amplitude or duration of signaling. Negative feedback circuits such as these play important roles in fine-tuning the activity of multifunctional signaling molecules during embryonic patterning and in response to pathologic stimuli in adults. BioEssays 21:382–390, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Specificities of enzymes involved in plant specialized metabolism, including flavonoid biosynthesis, are generally promiscuous. This enzyme promiscuity has served as an evolutionary basis for new enzyme functions and metabolic pathways in land plants adapting to environmental challenges. This phenomenon may lead, however, to inefficiency in specialized metabolism and adversely affect metabolite‐mediated plant survival. How plants manage enzyme promiscuity for efficient specialized metabolism is, thus, an open question. Recent studies of flavonoid biosynthesis addressing this issue have revealed a conserved strategy, namely, (...) a homolog of chalcone isomerase with no catalytic activity binds to chalcone synthase, a key flavonoid pathway enzyme, to narrow (or rectify) the enzyme's highly promiscuous product specificity. Reducing promiscuity via specific protein–protein interactions among metabolic enzymes and proteins may be a solution adopted by land plants to achieve efficient operation of specialized metabolism, while the intrinsic promiscuity of enzymes has likely been retained incidentally. (shrink)

Trata-se de uma resenha da tradução de Celi Hirata das Questões sobre a Liberdade, a Necessidade e o Acaso de Thomas Hobbes.