14,684 research outputs found
Technology Transfer through Imports
While there is general agreement that technology differences must figure prominently in any successful account of the cross-country income variation, not much is known on the source of these technology differences. This paper examines cross-country income differences in terms of factor accumulation, domestic R&D, and foreign technological spillovers. The empirical analysis encompasses seventeen industrialized countries in four continents over three decades, at a level disaggregated enough to identify innovations in a number of key high-tech sectors. International technology transfer is found to play a crucial part in accounting for income differences. We also relate technology transfer to imports, showing that imports are often a major channel. At the same time, our analysis highlights that international technology transfer varies importantly across industries and countries.
Freund-Rubin Revisited
We utilise the duality between M theory and Type IIA string theory to show
the existence of Freund-Rubin compactifications of M theory on 7-manifolds with
singularities supporting chiral fermions. This leads to a concrete way to study
phenomenologically interesting quantum gravity vacua using a holographically
dual three dimensional field theory.Comment: reference adde
Analysing International Trade Patterns: Comparative Advantage for the World’s Major Economies
Using disaggregate product data classified by the Harmonized System code, this paper computes the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) for seven major economies that, when combined, contributed more than 80% of global manufacturing exports in 1996-97 and 2006-07. Results show that in the last decade, Canada, the US, and Japan have lost their share of global exports, while China has increased its share three-fold. These losses occurred mainly for low-tech products for the US, but medium and high-tech (MHT) products for Canada and Japan. However, MHT products comprise the highest share of Japanese exports (70%) compared to Canada (which has the lowest share, approximately half of Japan’s). Canada is the only economy whose contribution to global MHT exports is lower than that of global total exports. Japan also has the highest share of RCA-based MHT exports of other East Asian countries (OEACs) and the US. China has the highest share of non-RCA- based MHT exports. Finally, the trade patterns for OEACs and Mexico did not change greatly in any dimension in the last decade. However, products with RCA have changed substantially in all economies, with the highest in Mexico
Dynamic Poisson Factorization
Models for recommender systems use latent factors to explain the preferences
and behaviors of users with respect to a set of items (e.g., movies, books,
academic papers). Typically, the latent factors are assumed to be static and,
given these factors, the observed preferences and behaviors of users are
assumed to be generated without order. These assumptions limit the explorative
and predictive capabilities of such models, since users' interests and item
popularity may evolve over time. To address this, we propose dPF, a dynamic
matrix factorization model based on the recent Poisson factorization model for
recommendations. dPF models the time evolving latent factors with a Kalman
filter and the actions with Poisson distributions. We derive a scalable
variational inference algorithm to infer the latent factors. Finally, we
demonstrate dPF on 10 years of user click data from arXiv.org, one of the
largest repository of scientific papers and a formidable source of information
about the behavior of scientists. Empirically we show performance improvement
over both static and, more recently proposed, dynamic recommendation models. We
also provide a thorough exploration of the inferred posteriors over the latent
variables.Comment: RecSys 201
Kahler Independence of the G2-MSSM
The G2-MSSM is a model of particle physics coupled to moduli fields with
interesting phenomenology both for colliders and astrophysical experiments. In
this paper we consider a more general model - whose moduli Kahler potential is
a completely arbitrary G2-holonomy Kahler potential and whose matter Kahler
potential is also more general. We prove that the vacuum structure and spectrum
of BSM particles is largely unchanged in this much more general class of
theories. In particular, gaugino masses are still supressed relative to the
gravitino mass and moduli masses. We also consider the effects of higher order
corrections to the matter Kahler potential and find a connection between the
nature of the LSP and flavor effects.Comment: Final version, matches the version published in JHE
Testing Conditional Independence of Discrete Distributions
We study the problem of testing \emph{conditional independence} for discrete
distributions. Specifically, given samples from a discrete random variable on domain , we want to distinguish,
with probability at least , between the case that and are
conditionally independent given from the case that is
-far, in -distance, from every distribution that has this
property. Conditional independence is a concept of central importance in
probability and statistics with a range of applications in various scientific
domains. As such, the statistical task of testing conditional independence has
been extensively studied in various forms within the statistics and
econometrics communities for nearly a century. Perhaps surprisingly, this
problem has not been previously considered in the framework of distribution
property testing and in particular no tester with sublinear sample complexity
is known, even for the important special case that the domains of and
are binary.
The main algorithmic result of this work is the first conditional
independence tester with {\em sublinear} sample complexity for discrete
distributions over . To complement our upper
bounds, we prove information-theoretic lower bounds establishing that the
sample complexity of our algorithm is optimal, up to constant factors, for a
number of settings. Specifically, for the prototypical setting when , we show that the sample complexity of testing conditional
independence (upper bound and matching lower bound) is
\[
\Theta\left({\max\left(n^{1/2}/\epsilon^2,\min\left(n^{7/8}/\epsilon,n^{6/7}/\epsilon^{8/7}\right)\right)}\right)\,.
\
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