Summary of Egan v. Chambers, 129 Nev. Adv. Op. 25

The Court reexamined whether NRS 41A.071\u27s affidavit-of-merit requirement applies to claims for professional negligence, which it had answered only a few years ago in Fierle v. Perez. The Court held that the plain and unambiguous language of NRS 41A.071 indicates that professional negligence actions are not subject to its affidavit-of-merit requirement, which applies only to medical or dental malpractice actions

Exports Versus Horizontal Foreign Direct Investment with Profit Shifting

We study a firm which serves two unequally-sized markets and must choose where to locate its first production plant, and whether to open a second plant to serve the other market through local sales rather than exports. An exporter pays taxes only to the country where it locates its single production plant. A double- plant multinational pays taxes in both countries, but may shift taxable profits across countries, at a cost. We show that the usual proximity-concentration trade- off between fixed and trade costs is modified, depending on both the average tax of, and the tax difference between, the two countries. Moreover, in contrast to a standard result of the FDI literature, we find that increased market size asymmetry may make it more likely that the firm engages in horizontal FDI. From a global welfare viewpoint, it is always desirable to control the firm's profit shifting when the multinational structure is taken as given. However, the fact that the firm may react by changing its production structure may be a reason not to control profit shifting activities

Ruin problems for risk processes with dependent phase-type claims

We consider continuous time risk processes in which the claim sizes are dependent and non-identically distributed phase-type distributions. The class of distributions we propose is easy to characterize and allows to incorporate the dependence between claims in a simple and intuitive way. It is also designed to facilitate the study of the risk processes by using a Markov-modulated fluid embedding technique. Using this technique, we obtain simple recursive procedures to determine the joint distribution of the time of ruin, the deficit at ruin and the number of claims before the ruin. We also obtain some bounds for the ultimate ruin probability. Finally, we provide a few examples of multivariate phase-type distributions and use them for numerical illustration

Duration-dependent stochastic fluid processes and solar energy revenue modeling

We endow the classical stochastic fluid process with a duration-dependent Markovian arrival process (DMArP). We show that this provides a flexible model for the revenue of a solar energy generator. In particular, it allows for heavy-tailed interarrival times and for seasonality embedded into the state-space. It generalizes the calendar-time inhomogeneous stochastic fluid process. We provide descriptors of the first return of the revenue process. Our main contribution is based on the uniformization approach, by which we reduce the problem of computing the Laplace transform to the analysis of the process on a stochastic Poissonian grid. Since our process is duration dependent, our construction relies on translating duration form its natural grid to the Poissonian grid. We obtain the Laplace transfrom of the project value based on a novel concept of $n$-bridge and provide an efficient algorithm for computing the duration-level density of the $n$-bridge. Other descriptors such as the Laplace transform of the ruin process are further provided

Chimeric recombinant rotavirus-like particles as a vehicle for the display of heterologous epitopes

In order to improve the presentation and immunogenicity of single epitopes, virus-like particles (VLPs) are being used as platforms for the display of foreing epitopes on their surface. The rotavirus major capsid protein VP6 has the ability to self-assemble into empty non-infectious VLPs. In the present study, we analyzed the use of double layered VLPs (made up of VP2 and VP6 rotavirus proteins) as carriers to display a 14 amino acid epitope fused to three different aminoacidic regions of VP6 exposed on the surface of VLPs. Although all chimeric protein were correctly expressed in insect cells, only one of them resulted in spontaneous assembly of VLPs displaying the heterologous epitope on their surface, confirmed by sandwich ELISA and electron microscopy. Furthermore, the injection of chimeric VLPs into mice elicited higher antibody titers than the monomeric chimeric protein. Our results identify an specific amino acid region of VP6 which allows the insertion of at least a 14 amino acid heterolgous epitope and demonstrate its potential as immunogenic carrier

The effects of female labor force participation on obesity

This paper assesses whether a causal relationship exists between recent increases in female labor force participation and the increased prevalence of obesity amongst women. The expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the 1980s and 1990s have been established by prior literature as having generated variation in female labor supply, particularly amongst single mothers. Here, we use this plausibly exogenous variation in female labor supply to identify the effect of labor force participation on obesity status. We use data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and replicate labor supply effects of the EITC expansions found in previous literature. This validates employing a difference-in-differences estimation strategy in the NHIS data, as has been done in several other data sets. Depending on the specification, we find that increased labor force participation can account for at most 19% of the observed change in obesity prevalence over our sample period. Our preferred specification, however, suggests that there is no causal link between increased female labor force participation and increased obesity.Women - Employment ; Obesity ; Tax credits