Economic, demographic, and institutional determinants of life insurance consumption across countries.

[Dataset available: http://hdl.handle.net/10411/12892]

Keep walking? Geographical proximity, religion, and relationship banking

We investigate the geographical proximity of firms to their relationship banks. We find that Islamic banks are more remote to their borrowers. We also find that the probability for a firm to connect to a bank substantially decreases in distance, but that the choice along bank characteristics determines how potent distance is in its impact. If the bank in the vicinity is an Islamic bank, distance plays a more muted role, especially in cities with a high conservative party vote and higher trust in religious institutions. Overall, these findings suggest that the presence of banks with certain characteristics in the vicinity may determine the within-firm and across-firm configurations of observable firm-bank connections. (112 words)

Study reveals effect of aluminum on saturation moment of Fe-Ni alloys

Study of saturation magnetization, important in the investigation of the electronic structure of alloys, reveals the effect of aluminum on the saturation moments of iron-nickel alloys. The saturation magnetizations were extrapolated to the absolute zero of temperature for calculating average atomic moments

Transition from a mixed to a pure d-wave symmetry in superconducting optimally doped YBa2_2Cu3_3O7−x_{7-x} thin films under applied fields

We have probed the Landau levels of nodal quasi-particles by tunneling along a nodal direction of (110) oriented YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{7-x}$ thin films with a magnetic field applied perpendicular to the $CuO_2$ planes, and parallel to the film's surface. In optimally doped films and at low temperature, finite energy nodal states are clearly observed in films thinner than the London penetration depth. Above a well defined temperature the order parameter reverts to a pure \emph{d}-wave symmetry.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Innovation and Foreign Investment Behavior of the U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry

This paper deals with the links between the development of new drugs, and particularly of innovative new drugs, and the international activities of U.S. drug companies. While U.S. drug companies have developed new production processes - the most notable being the fermentation process for making penicillin - we concentrate in this paper on new products. Since production costs comprise less than 40 percent of the selling price of drugs and since the person choosing the drug rarely pays for it, growth in company sales and profits comes more from introducing new products than from cutting costs and prices of old products. The main novelty of our study is our examination of "innovative" as contrasted with "imitative" new drugs. Previous studies have generally focused on the total number of new drugs produced each year, but since our interest is in the causes and consequences of innovation, we have concentrated on the products we have rated as innovative. Section I explains our criteria for this distinction and presents our enumeration of the innovative new drugs for each of the 22 companies in our sample. In Section II we discuss trends in the rate of drug innovation and the factors influencing those trends. Section III describes our sample of drug companies and characterizes them with respect to their size, research investment, and innovativeness. Section IV examines the relation of innovativeness to the foreign activities of individual firms. In Section V we analyze, for a sample of 7 new drugs introduced by two companies, the rate at which use of the drugs was diffused among various countries arid the impact of the presence of manufacturing plants on the rate of diffusion.

Parity-Violating Electron Scattering and Neucleon Structure

The measurement of parity violation in the helicity dependence of electron-nucleon scattering provides unique information about the basic quark structure of the nucleons. In this review, the general formalism of parity-violating electron scattering is presented, with emphasis on elastic electron-nucleon scattering. The physics issues addressed by such experiments is discussed, and the major goals of the presently envisioned experimental program are identified. %General aspects of the experimental technique are reviewed and A summary of results from a recent series of experiments is presented and the future prospects of this program are also discussed.Comment: 45 pages, 9 figure

Financing Africa: Through the crisis and beyond.

[Dataset available: http://hdl.handle.net/10411/17679]

Near-barrier Fusion Induced by Stable Weakly Bound and Exotic Halo Light Nuclei

The effect of breakup is investigated for the medium weight $^{6}$Li+$^{59}$Co system in the vicinity of the Coulomb barrier. The strong coupling of breakup/transfer channels to fusion is discussed within a comparison of predictions of the Continuum Discretized Coupled-Channels model which is also applied to $^{6}$He+$^{59}$Co a reaction induced by the borromean halo nucleus $^{6}$He.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures. A talk given at the FUSION06: International Conference on Reaction Mechanisms and Nuclear Structure at the Coulomb barrier, March 19-23, 2006, San Servolo, Venezia, Ital

Temporal extensivity of Tsallis' entropy and the bound on entropy production rate

The Tsallis entropy, which is a generalization of the Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy, plays a central role in nonextensive statistical mechanics of complex systems. A lot of efforts have recently been made on establishing a dynamical foundation for the Tsallis entropy. They are primarily concerned with nonlinear dynamical systems at the edge of chaos. Here, it is shown by generalizing a formulation of thermostatistics based on time averages recently proposed by Carati [A. Carati, Physica A 348, 110 (2005)] that, whenever relevant, the Tsallis entropy indexed by $q$ is temporally extensive: linear growth in time, i.e., finite entropy production rate. Then, the universal bound on the entropy production rate is shown to be $1/|1-q|$ . The property of the associated probabilistic process, i.e., the sojourn time distribution, determining randomness of motion in phase space is also analyzed.Comment: 25 pages, no figure

Evaluating the Impacts of a Multi-Year Arts Integration Program on Student Outcomes

My dissertation evaluates the first year of a three-year intervention, the Windgate School Partnership Program (WSPP), where participating schools participate in three week-long arts integration units taught by resident artists and two educational tours at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art led by museum educators. The WSPP looks to affect students’ academic and non-academic outcomes through an arts-integration program that includes two key features, artist residencies and field trips. A recent meta-analysis of arts integration studies suggests a moderately positive effect on many student outcomes (Ludwig et al., 2017). I use a mixed-methods research design to measure and describe the first-year results. In this mixed-methods study, I examine the following research questions: what non-academic outcomes are associated with participation in the WSPP; what academic outcomes are associated with participation in the WSPP; what the program looks like for participants; and what the participants think of the first year of the program. For the quantitative portion of this study, I examine how this program affects students’ academic and non-academic skills. Because the program is implemented uniformly in participating schools’ third grade cohort, I use an adjacent cohort, the school’s prior-year third grade cohort, to serve as a comparison group for the treatment third graders. In addition to estimating the average effect of the intervention, I conducted a phenomenological case study to provide a description of what the program entailed and what the program experience was for participants. The findings from these two arms of my research study indicate a significant, negative effect associated with program treatment on students’ desire to participate in creating art in the future and their self-reported levels of empathy toward others. There were marginally significant, negative effects associated with treatment on students’ desire to consume art as well as their self-reported level of tolerance toward others. From the findings of the qualitative study, students spend the majority of their classroom time participating in visual arts or dance/theater arts activities that support the subject matter for each week in the classroom. Students were engaged and the classroom teachers were supportive. During the field trips, museum educators engaged students’ interest and thinking with a skillful questioning regimen as well as activities that reinforced the content. Students, classroom teachers, resident artists, and museum educators all describe generally positive views on the first year experience; some potential areas of improvement include reworking the classroom teachers’ professional development as well as improving the communication between the two main program providers, the resident artists and museum educators. From these findings, I suggest future policy recommendations when implementing arts integration collaboration programs