3,528 research outputs found
The economic analysis of multinationals and foreign direct investment: a review.
This article provides an up-to-date, comprehensive synthesis and evaluation of the existing literatura on multinational firms and foreign direct investment. Unlike most previous reviews it combines severalinsights showing their inconsistencies and complementarities. Through a chronological description it presents the main strands since the earliest perfect competition studies from the 1960s till some new recent contributions such as the knowledge-capital model, heterogeneous firms models, and internalisation issues. The paper also offers a new perspective, by reviewing the available computable general equilibrium models that include multinationals and foreign direct investment.Multinational enterprises, Foreign direct investment, Computable general equilibrium models.
Systematic Differential Renormalization to All Orders
We present a systematic implementation of differential renormalization to all
orders in perturbation theory. The method is applied to individual Feynamn
graphs written in coordinate space. After isolating every singularity. which
appears in a bare diagram, we define a subtraction procedure which consists in
replacing the core of the singularity by its renormalized form givenby a
differential formula. The organizationof subtractions in subgraphs relies in
Bogoliubov's formula, fulfilling the requirements of locality, unitarity and
Lorentz invariance. Our method bypasses the use of an intermediate
regularization andautomatically delivers renormalized amplitudes which obey
renormalization group equations.Comment: TEX, 20 pages, UB-ECM-PF 93/4, 1 figureavailable upon reques
Simulation of many-qubit quantum computation with matrix product states
Matrix product states provide a natural entanglement basis to represent a
quantum register and operate quantum gates on it. This scheme can be
materialized to simulate a quantum adiabatic algorithm solving hard instances
of a NP-Complete problem. Errors inherent to truncations of the exact action of
interacting gates are controlled by the size of the matrices in the
representation. The property of finding the right solution for an instance and
the expected value of the energy are found to be remarkably robust against
these errors. As a symbolic example, we simulate the algorithm solving a
100-qubit hard instance, that is, finding the correct product state out of ~
10^30 possibilities. Accumulated statistics for up to 60 qubits point at a slow
growth of the average minimum time to solve hard instances with
highly-truncated simulations of adiabatic quantum evolution.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, final versio
Fine-grained entanglement loss along renormalization group flows
We explore entanglement loss along renormalization group trajectories as a
basic quantum information property underlying their irreversibility. This
analysis is carried out for the quantum Ising chain as a transverse magnetic
field is changed. We consider the ground-state entanglement between a large
block of spins and the rest of the chain. Entanglement loss is seen to follow
from a rigid reordering, satisfying the majorization relation, of the
eigenvalues of the reduced density matrix for the spin block. More generally,
our results indicate that it may be possible to prove the irreversibility along
RG trajectories from the properties of the vacuum only, without need to study
the whole hamiltonian.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures; minor change
Optimal control of multiscale systems using reduced-order models
We study optimal control of diffusions with slow and fast variables and
address a question raised by practitioners: is it possible to first eliminate
the fast variables before solving the optimal control problem and then use the
optimal control computed from the reduced-order model to control the original,
high-dimensional system? The strategy "first reduce, then optimize"--rather
than "first optimize, then reduce"--is motivated by the fact that solving
optimal control problems for high-dimensional multiscale systems is numerically
challenging and often computationally prohibitive. We state sufficient and
necessary conditions, under which the "first reduce, then control" strategy can
be employed and discuss when it should be avoided. We further give numerical
examples that illustrate the "first reduce, then optmize" approach and discuss
possible pitfalls
Universality in the entanglement structure of ferromagnets
Systems of exchange-coupled spins are commonly used to model ferromagnets.
The quantum correlations in such magnets are studied using tools from quantum
information theory. Isotropic ferromagnets are shown to possess a universal
low-temperature density matrix which precludes entanglement between spins, and
the mechanism of entanglement cancellation is investigated, revealing a core of
states resistant to pairwise entanglement cancellation. Numerical studies of
one-, two-, and three-dimensional lattices as well as irregular geometries
showed no entanglement in ferromagnets at any temperature or magnetic field
strength.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
Computing free energy differences using conditioned diffusions
We derive a Crooks-Jarzynski-type identity for computing free energy differences between metastable states that is based on nonequilibrium diffusion processes. Furthermore we outline a brief derivation of an infinite-dimensional stochastic partial differential equation that can be used to efficiently generate the ensemble of trajectories connecting the metastable states
Configuration-Space Location of the Entanglement between Two Subsystems
In this paper we address the question: where in configuration space is the
entanglement between two particles located? We present a thought-experiment,
equally applicable to discrete or continuous-variable systems, in which one or
both parties makes a preliminary measurement of the state with only enough
resolution to determine whether or not the particle resides in a chosen region,
before attempting to make use of the entanglement. We argue that this provides
an operational answer to the question of how much entanglement was originally
located within the chosen region. We illustrate the approach in a spin system,
and also in a pair of coupled harmonic oscillators. Our approach is
particularly simple to implement for pure states, since in this case the
sub-ensemble in which the system is definitely located in the restricted region
after the measurement is also pure, and hence its entanglement can be simply
characterised by the entropy of the reduced density operators. For our spin
example we present results showing how the entanglement varies as a function of
the parameters of the initial state; for the continuous case, we find also how
it depends on the location and size of the chosen regions. Hence we show that
the distribution of entanglement is very different from the distribution of the
classical correlations.Comment: RevTex, 12 pages, 9 figures (28 files). Modifications in response to
journal referee
Three-Dimensional Quantification of Cellular Traction Forces and Mechanosensing of Thin Substrata by Fourier Traction Force Microscopy
We introduce a novel three-dimensional (3D) traction force microscopy (TFM)
method motivated by the recent discovery that cells adhering on plane surfaces
exert both in-plane and out-of-plane traction stresses. We measure the 3D
deformation of the substratum on a thin layer near its surface, and input this
information into an exact analytical solution of the elastic equilibrium
equation. These operations are performed in the Fourier domain with high
computational efficiency, allowing to obtain the 3D traction stresses from raw
microscopy images virtually in real time. We also characterize the error of
previous two-dimensional (2D) TFM methods that neglect the out-of-plane
component of the traction stresses. This analysis reveals that, under certain
combinations of experimental parameters (\ie cell size, substratums' thickness
and Poisson's ratio), the accuracy of 2D TFM methods is minimally affected by
neglecting the out-of-plane component of the traction stresses. Finally, we
consider the cell's mechanosensing of substratum thickness by 3D traction
stresses, finding that, when cells adhere on thin substrata, their out-of-plane
traction stresses can reach four times deeper into the substratum than their
in-plane traction stresses. It is also found that the substratum stiffness
sensed by applying out-of-plane traction stresses may be up to 10 times larger
than the stiffness sensed by applying in-plane traction stresses
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