The Politics of Financial Development - The Role of Interest Groups and Government Capabilities

Although financial development is good for long-term growth, not all countries pursue policies that render full financial development. This paper builds on an extensive political economy literature to construct a theoretical model showing that the intensity of opposition to financial development by incumbents depends on both their degree of credit dependency and the role of governments in credit markets. Empirical evidence for this claim is provided, and the results suggest that lower opposition to financial development leads to an effective increase in credit markets’ development only in those countries that have high government capabilities. Moreover, improvements in government capabilities have a significant impact on credit market development only in those countries where credit dependency is high (thus, opposition is low). This paper therefore contributes to this rich literature by providing a unified account of credit market development that includes two of its main determinants, traditionally considered in isolation.Financial development, Interest groups, Political economy, Government capabilities

Experiment-friendly kinetic analysis of single molecule data in and out of equilibrium

We present a simple and robust technique to extract kinetic rate models and thermodynamic quantities from single molecule time traces. SMACKS (Single Molecule Analysis of Complex Kinetic Sequences) is a maximum likelihood approach that works equally well for long trajectories as for a set of short ones. It resolves all statistically relevant rates and also their uncertainties. This is achieved by optimizing one global kinetic model based on the complete dataset, while allowing for experimental variations between individual trajectories. In particular, neither a priori models nor equilibrium have to be assumed. The power of SMACKS is demonstrated on the kinetics of the multi-domain protein Hsp90 measured by smFRET (single molecule F\"orster resonance energy transfer). Experiments in and out of equilibrium are analyzed and compared to simulations, shedding new light on the role of Hsp90's ATPase function. SMACKS pushes the boundaries of single molecule kinetics far beyond current methods.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Four layer bandage compared with short stretch bandage for venous leg ulcers: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials with data from individual patients

<p><b>Objective:</b> To compare the effectiveness of two types of compression treatment (four layer bandage and short stretch bandage) in people with venous leg ulceration.</p> <p><b>Design:</b> Systematic review and meta-analysis of patient level data.</p> <p><b>Data:</b> sources Electronic databases (the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, the Cochrane Wounds Group Specialised Register, Medline, Embase, CINAHL, and National Research Register) and reference lists of retrieved articles searched to identify relevant trials and primary investigators. Primary investigators of eligible trials were invited to contribute raw data for re-analysis.</p> <p><b>Review:</b> methods Randomised controlled trials of four layer bandage compared with short stretch bandage in people with venous leg ulceration were eligible for inclusion. The primary outcome for the meta-analysis was time to healing. Cox proportional hazards models were run to compare the methods in terms of time to healing with adjustment for independent predictors of healing. Secondary outcomes included incidence and number of adverse events per patient.</p> <p><b>Results:</b> Seven eligible trials were identified (887 patients), and patient level data were retrieved for five (797 patients, 90% of known randomised patients). The four layer bandage was associated with significantly shorter time to healing: hazard ratio (95% confidence interval) from multifactorial model based on five trials was 1.31 (1.09 to 1.58), P=0.005. Larger ulcer area at baseline, more chronic ulceration, and previous ulceration were all independent predictors of delayed healing. Data from two trials showed no evidence of a difference in adverse event profiles between the two bandage types.</p> <p><b>Conclusions:</b> Venous leg ulcers in patients treated with four layer bandages heal faster, on average, than those of people treated with the short stretch bandage. Benefits were consistent across patients with differing prognostic profiles.</p&gt

The impact of immigration on international trade: a meta‐analysis

Since the early 1990s many studies have been conducted on the impact of international migration on international trade, predominantly from the host country perspective. Because most studies have adopted broadly the same specification, namely a log‐linear gravity model of export and import flows augmented with the logarithm of the stock of immigrants from specific source countries as an additional explanatory variable, the resulting elasticities are broadly comparable and yield a set of estimates that is well suited to meta‐analysis. We therefore compile and analyze in this paper the distribution of immigration elasticities of imports and exports across 48 studies that yielded 300 estimates. The results confirm that immigration boosts trade, but its impact is lower on trade in homogeneous goods. An increase in the number of immigrants by 10 percent increases the volume of trade by about 1‐2 percent The migrant elasticity of imports is on average similar to that of exports. The estimates are affected by the choice of some covariates, the nature of the data (cross‐section or panel) and the estimation technique. Elasticities vary between countries in ways that cannot be explained by study characteristics; host country differences in immigration policies do apparently matter for the trade impact. The trade‐enhancing impact of migration appears to be greater for migration between countries of different levels of development than between developed countries

Exploring the potential for cross-nesting structures in airport-choice analysis: A case-study of the Greater London area

The analysis of air-passengers’ choices of departure airport in multi-airport regions is a crucial component of transportation planning in many large metropolitan areas, and has been the topic of an increasing number of studies over recent years. In this paper, we advance the state of the art of modelling in this area of research by making use of a Cross-Nested Logit (CNL) structure that allows for the joint representation of inter-alternative correlation along the three choice dimensions of airport, airline and access-mode. The analysis uses data collected in the Greater London area, which arguably has the highest levels of inter-airport competition of any multi-airport region; the authors of this paper are not aware of any previous effort to jointly analyse the choice of airport, airline and access-mode in this area. The results of the analysis reveal significant influences on passenger behaviour by access-time, access-cost, flight-frequency and flight-time. A structural comparison of the different models shows that the cross-nested structure offers significant improvements over simple Nested Logit (NL) models, which in turn outperform the Multinomial Logit (MNL) model used as the base model

Fusion of Heterogeneous Earth Observation Data for the Classification of Local Climate Zones

This paper proposes a novel framework for fusing multi-temporal, multispectral satellite images and OpenStreetMap (OSM) data for the classification of local climate zones (LCZs). Feature stacking is the most commonly-used method of data fusion but does not consider the heterogeneity of multimodal optical images and OSM data, which becomes its main drawback. The proposed framework processes two data sources separately and then combines them at the model level through two fusion models (the landuse fusion model and building fusion model), which aim to fuse optical images with landuse and buildings layers of OSM data, respectively. In addition, a new approach to detecting building incompleteness of OSM data is proposed. The proposed framework was trained and tested using data from the 2017 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest, and further validated on one additional test set containing test samples which are manually labeled in Munich and New York. Experimental results have indicated that compared to the feature stacking-based baseline framework the proposed framework is effective in fusing optical images with OSM data for the classification of LCZs with high generalization capability on a large scale. The classification accuracy of the proposed framework outperforms the baseline framework by more than 6% and 2%, while testing on the test set of 2017 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest and the additional test set, respectively. In addition, the proposed framework is less sensitive to spectral diversities of optical satellite images and thus achieves more stable classification performance than state-of-the art frameworks.Comment: accepted by TGR