Money for the Auto Industry: Consistent with WTO Rules?

No industry save financial services has been harder hit by the current recession than the automobile industry. Employment in the US auto industry dropped 9 percent between 2007 and 2008, while auto sales fell 18 percent over the same period. The credit freeze has only added to the distress, since financing is required for most vehicle purchases. These have rippled throughout the economy, jeopardizing jobs at the automakers themselves and in numerous dependent firms, such as parts manufacturers. Similar downturns have hit automakers and their supporting industries around the globe. In response to these troubles, the major US automakers--General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler--have appealed to the government for financial aid, and they are now seeking an additional $20 billion. A variety of measures to support the auto industry have been debated, including using funds from the Trouble Assets Relief Program to assist the financing arms of the automakers, tax credits for new vehicle purchases, and bailouts of auto-parts firms. Countries in North America, Europe, and Asia with large auto industries have considered similar proposals. Concerns have been raised regarding whether these plans violate World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and what effects they may have on world trade. Claire Brunel and Gary Clyde Hufbauer consider auto-bailout proposals in the United States and abroad and examine whether these plans are WTO compliant. While a WTO case could be brought under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, this is unlikely both because of the environmental requirements of the bailouts and because most countries that could potentially bring a case against the United States subsidize their own auto industries. Another possibility is that a US firm could bring a case against a foreign automaker under US countervailing duty laws. A successful case, however, is unlikely to lead to the elimination of the contested subsidy, but would instead establish a duty on exports from the country in question, further fragmenting world trade. This highlights the ultimate danger of auto bailouts and aid: The auto industry, much like shipbuilding and steel, may gradually leave the realm of WTO disciplines, with large-scale subsidies becoming the norm. If an important industry like autos can remove itself from WTO disciplines, a dangerous precedent would be set and the world trading system seriously weakened.

Modeling Cache Coherence to Expose Interference (Artifact)

To facilitate programming, most multi-core processors feature automated mechanisms maintaining coherence between each core\u27s cache. These mechanisms introduce interference, that is, delays caused by concurrent access to a shared resource. This type of interference is hard to predict, leading to the mechanisms being shunned by real-time system designers, at the cost of potential benefits in both running time and system complexity. We believe that formal methods can provide the means to ensure that the effects of this interference are properly exposed and mitigated. Consequently, we propose a nascent framework relying on timed automata to model and analyze the interference caused by cache coherence

Modeling Cache Coherence to Expose Interference

To facilitate programming, most multi-core processors feature automated mechanisms maintaining coherence between each core\u27s cache. These mechanisms introduce interference, that is, delays caused by concurrent access to a shared resource. This type of interference is hard to predict, leading to the mechanisms being shunned by real-time system designers, at the cost of potential benefits in both running time and system complexity. We believe that formal methods can provide the means to ensure that the effects of this interference are properly exposed and mitigated. Consequently, this paper proposes a nascent framework relying on timed automata to model and analyze the interference caused by cache coherence

On How to Identify Cache Coherence: Case of the NXP QorIQ T4240

Architectures used in safety critical systems have to pass certain certification standards, which require sufficient proof that they will behave as expected. Multi-core processors make this challenging by featuring complex interactions between the tasks they run. A lot of these interactions are made without explicit instructions from the program designers. Furthermore, they can have strong negative impacts on performance (and potentially affect correctness). One important such source of interactions is cache coherence, which speeds up operations in most cases, but can also lead to unexpected variations in execution time if not fully understood. Architecture documentations often lack details on the implementation of cache coherence. We thus propose a strategy to ascertain that the platform does indeed implement the cache coherence protocol its user believes it to. We also apply this strategy to the NXP QorIQ T4240, resulting in the identification of a protocol (MESIF) other than the one this architecture’s documentation led us to believe it was using (MESI)

What’s on the Table? The Doha Round as of August 2009

The Doha Round is the longest-running trade liberalization negotiation in the postwar era. Despite its longevity, the end is not yet in sight as parties disagree on the depth of liberalization necessary in agriculture and nonagricultural market access (NAMA). This rift is prolonging the Round's completion and hindering the discussion of other important issues on the negotiating agenda, particularly services. To shed light on the debate concerning the benefits from Doha, this paper first estimates, using three metrics, the potential gains from liberalization in agriculture and NAMA resulting from the specific "modalities" set forth in papers drafted by the chairs of the Doha negotiating groups. Next, the study estimates the benefits that could result from sector initiatives in chemicals, electronic/electrical goods, and environmental goods that go beyond the tariff cuts outlined in the negotiating modalities. Finally, prospective gains from liberalization of services barriers and improvements in trade facilitation are also analyzed. Overall, we estimate that the boost to global exports from concluding the Doha Round could range between $180 billion and$520 billion annually. Likewise, the potential GDP gains are significant, between $300 billion and$700 billion annually, and well balanced between developed and developing countries.International Trade, World Trade Organization, Doha Round, Tariff Liberalization, Nontariff Barrier Liberalization.International Trade, World Trade Organization, Doha Round, Tariff Liberalization, Nontariff Barrier Liberalization.

Minimax estimation of the conditional cumulative distribution function under random censorship

International audienceConsider an i.i.d. sample $(X_i,Y_i)$, $i=1, \dots, n$ of observations and denote by $F(x,y)$ the conditional cumulative distribution function of $Y_i$ given $X_i=x$. We provide a data driven nonparametric strategy to estimate $F$. We prove that, in term of the integrated mean square risk on a compact set, our estimator performs a squared-bias variance compromise. We deduce from this an upper bound for the rate of convergence of the estimator, in a context of anisotropic function classes. A lower bound for this rate is also proved, which implies the optimality of our estimator. Then our procedure can be adapted to positive censored random variables $Y_i$'s, i.e. when only $Z_i=\inf(Y_i, C_i)$ and \delta_i=\1_{\{Y_i\leq C_i\}} are observed, for an i.i.d. censoring sequence $(C_i)_{1\leq i\leq n}$ independent of $(X_i,Y_i)_{1\leq i\leq n}$. Simulation experiments illustrate the method

Modeling Cache Coherence to Expose

International audienceTo facilitate programming, most multi-core processors feature automated mechanisms maintaining coherence between each core's cache. These mechanisms introduce interference, that is, delays caused by concurrent access to a shared resource. This type of interference is hard to predict, leading to the mechanisms being shunned by real-time system designers, at the cost of potential benefits in both running time and system complexity. We believe that formal methods can provide the means to ensure that the effects of this interference are properly exposed and mitigated. Consequently, this paper proposes a nascent framework relying on timed automata to model and analyze the interference caused by cache coherence

Do Cross-border Patents Promote Trade?

While we would expect that cross-border patents are used to protect a technology that is made available in another country, that technology could either be produced locally or imported. International patent filings could therefore be either complements or substitutes to international trade. This study combines data on patenting and trade for 149 countries and 249 industries between 1974 and 2006 with a “three-way” panel data model that addresses several biases emphasized in the trade literature in order to provide a systematic analysis of how bilateral trade responds to cross-border patent filings. We find that cross-border patents have a positive (complementary) overall effect on the patent-filing country’s exports to the patent-granting country and no effect overall on imports flowing in the opposite direction. These effects vary substantially across industry groups, with patents promoting significantly more export growth in industries with a high demand elasticity and in industries that are relatively more downstream in supply chains. We also find that patents, once obtained, are associated with increased trade even in jurisdictions with weak intellectual property regimes

Do Cross-border Patents Promote Trade?

While we would expect that cross-border patents are used to protect a technology that is made available in another country, that technology could either be produced locally or imported. International patent filings could therefore be either complements or substitutes to international trade. This study combines data on patenting and trade for 149 countries and 249 industries between 1974 and 2006 with a "three-way" PPML panel data model that addresses several biases emphasized in the trade literature in order to provide a systematic analysis of how bilateral trade responds to cross-border patent filings. We find that cross-border patents have a positive (complementary) overall effect on the patent-filing country's exports to the patent-granting country and no effect overall on imports flowing in the opposite direction. These effects vary substantially across industries and destination markets. Patents promote significantly more bilateral export growth--and significantly less bilateral import growth--in less-differentiated industries and are found to have stronger effects on exports to more distant destinations. These findings support the interpretation that cross-border patents are mainly used to protect cost and/or quality innovations from being adopted by producers of competing products in the patent-granting country