4,182 research outputs found
Corruption and trade protection: evidence from panel data
This paper provides new estimates of the effects of corruption and poor institutions on trade protection. It exploits data on several measures of trade protection including import duty, international trade taxes, and the trade-GDP ratio. The paper complements the literature on the relationship between corruption and trade reform. It deviates from the previous literature in several ways. First, unobserved heterogeneity among countries have been controlled with properly specified fixed effects exploiting the time dimension present in the dataset. Secondly, instead of using tariff and non-tariff barriers, more general measures of trade protection have been used. The issue of endogeneity of corruption with respect to trade policy has been addressed using proper instruments for corruption used in previous studies. Moreover, two separate institutional measures have been used in the same regression to estimate their comparative impacts on trade policy. In general, we find that corruption and lack of contract enforcement have strong impacts to increase trade protection and negative effects on trade openness.Corruption ; Tariff ; International trade
Political economy determinants of non-agricultural trade policy
The authors investigate several existing political economy hypotheses on trade policy using cross-country trade-protection data for non-agricultural goods. The authors find that a left-leaning political regime leads to pro-labor trade policies only for a subset of trade policy measures. In addition, they find that income inequality and country-level corruption appear to be important determinants of trade policy. For various measures of trade protection, it appears that corruption tends to hurt labor interests by increasing trade protection in labor-abundant countries and reducing trade protection in capital-abundant countries. This finding suggests that corruption, among other factors, may move trade policy away from the desires of the median voter.International trade ; Corruption ; Tariff
Energy dissipation and switching delay in stress-induced switching of multiferroic devices in the presence of thermal fluctuations
Switching the magnetization of a shape-anisotropic 2-phase multiferroic
nanomagnet with voltage-generated stress is known to dissipate very little
energy ( 1 aJ for a switching time of 0.5 ns) at 0 K temperature.
Here, we show by solving the stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation that
switching can be carried out with 100% probability in less than 1 ns
while dissipating less than 2 aJ at {\it room temperature}. This makes
nanomagnetic logic and memory systems, predicated on stress-induced magnetic
reversal, one of the most energy-efficient computing hardware extant. We also
study the dependence of energy dissipation, switching delay, and the critical
stress needed to switch, on the rate at which stress is ramped up or down
Political asymmetry and common external tariff in a customs union
We present a three-nation model, where two of the nations are members of a Customs Union (CU) and maintain a common external tariff (CET) on the third (non-member) nation. The producing lobby is assumed to be union-wide and lobbies both governments to influence the CET. The CET is determined jointly by the CU. We follow the political support function approach, where the CU seeks to maximize a weighted sum of the constituents? payoff functions, the weights reflecting the influence of the respective governments in the CU. A central finding of this paper is that the CET rises monotonically with the degree of asymmetry in the weights if the two countries are equally susceptible to lobbying. If the weights are the same, but the respective governments are asymmetric in their susceptibilities to lobbying, the CET also rises monotonically with this asymmetry. However, an increase in one type of asymmetry, in the presence of the other type of asymmetry, may reduce the CET.Tariff
Switching dynamics of a magnetostrictive single-domain nanomagnet subjected to stress
The temporal evolution of the magnetization vector of a single-domain
magnetostrictive nanomagnet, subjected to in-plane stress, is studied by
solving the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation. The stress is ramped up linearly
in time and the switching delay, which is the time it takes for the
magnetization to flip, is computed as a function of the ramp rate. For high
levels of stress, the delay exhibits a non-monotonic dependence on the ramp
rate, indicating that there is an {\it optimum} ramp rate to achieve the
shortest delay. For constant ramp rate, the delay initially decreases with
increasing stress but then saturates showing that the trade-off between the
delay and the stress (or the energy dissipated in switching) becomes less and
less favorable with increasing stress. All of these features are due to a
complex interplay between the in-plane and out-of-plane dynamics of the
magnetization vector induced by stress
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