The market reaction to syndicated loan announcements before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of corporate governance

This study examines the wealth effects of syndicated loan announcements before and after the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak. Using a sample of 637 loan announcements by European borrowers, we find significantly higher wealth gains during the pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic period. The results suggest that the certification of multiple lenders loans conveys a positive signal for the borrowers' creditworthiness during the pandemic-driven economic meltdown. We further show that certain corporate governance mechanisms, such as board size, gender diversity, and CEO duality and compensation, are related differently to borrowers' excess returns before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The results are robust to alternative model specifications that control for different estimation models and event windows. They also hold after addressing self-selection bias.

Multimodal Speaker Diarization

We present a novel probabilistic framework that fuses information coming from the audio and video modality to perform speaker diarization. The proposed framework is a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) that is an extension of a factorial Hidden Markov Model (fHMM) and models the people appearing in an audiovisual recording as multimodal entities that generate observations in the audio stream, the video stream, and the joint audiovisual space. The framework is very robust to different contexts, makes no assumptions about the location of the recording equipment, and does not require labeled training data as it acquires the model parameters using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. We apply the proposed model to two meeting videos and a news broadcast video, all of which come from publicly available data sets. The results acquired in speaker diarization are in favor of the proposed multimodal framework, which outperforms the single modality analysis results and improves over the state-of-the-art audio-based speaker diarization.

Total Antioxidant Status and Erythrocyte Superoxide Dismutase Activity in Patients with Chronic Hepatitis B and C

Damage of hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV)-infected hepatocytes is mediated by both a direct cytopathic effect of the viruses and by immunologic response of T-cells, However, other mechanisms such as oxidative stress, may also be involved in cellular damage. We conducted a study to investigate the status of superoxide dismutase activity (SOD) and the total antioxidant status (TAS) in a consecutive cohort of patients infected with HBV and HCV infections, including HBV patients in the chronic inactive state of the disease. The latter were included in an attempt to determine whether antioxidant status is affected even in cases where an obvious viral activity is absent. TAS and SOD were measured in 55 patients (43 HBV, 12 HCV) and 25 healthy controls. 17 out of 43 patients had chronic inactive HBV state, 15 had chronic hepatitis Band 11 had HBV-related cirrhosis. In the HCV group, 6 patients had chronic hepatitis C and 6 HCV-related cirrhosis. Erythrocyte SOD activity was determined in haemolysate from red blood cells using a kinetic spectrophotometer method. TAS was measured by a colorimetric assay. The mean TAS and SOD values in the total number of patients (1.20±0.12 mmol/L and 1040±255 Ulg Hb, respectively) were significantly lower (p<0.001) compared to healthy controls (1.57±0.13 mmol/L and 1491±420 D/g Hb), Comparisons between groups showed significantly lower (p<0.001) TAS and SOD values in each subgroup of patients compared to healthy controls. A significant positive correlation was found between TAS and SOD in the total number ofpatients (n= 55, p<0.01), in the chronic hepatitis group (n=21, p=0.01) and in the total group of HBV patients (n=43, p<0.01). We demonstrated a significant reduced antioxidant capacity in patients with chronic HBV and HCV as indicated by low TAS and SOD. These findings were independent of the virological, biochemical and clinical status of the patients, including those with chronic inactive HBV state. This could suggest that the tissue-related consequences of oxidative stress might start from the inactive stage of liver viral diseases. However, our observations should be viewed with caution and need to be tested in a larger numbers of patients in order to determine prospectively whether these findings have pathophysiological and/or clinical significance.