Does exchange rate volatility matter for international sales? Evidence from US firm level data

We explore the effect of exchange rate volatility on firms’ foreign sales using destination-specific US firm-level data at different quantiles of the conditional distribution. Results show that the sign and significance of the effect depend on the economic conditions, firm characteristics, the sector that the firms operate and the quantile of the conditional distribution. Hence, using aggregated data, utilizing mean-regression methods and ignoring firm-specific factors can explain the mixed results provided by the existing literature. © 201

Social sciences research in neglected tropical diseases 2: A bibliographic analysis

The official published version of the article can be found at the link below.Background There are strong arguments for social science and interdisciplinary research in the neglected tropical diseases. These diseases represent a rich and dynamic interplay between vector, host, and pathogen which occurs within social, physical and biological contexts. The overwhelming sense, however, is that neglected tropical diseases research is a biomedical endeavour largely excluding the social sciences. The purpose of this review is to provide a baseline for discussing the quantum and nature of the science that is being conducted, and the extent to which the social sciences are a part of that. Methods A bibliographic analysis was conducted of neglected tropical diseases related research papers published over the past 10 years in biomedical and social sciences. The analysis had textual and bibliometric facets, and focussed on chikungunya, dengue, visceral leishmaniasis, and onchocerciasis. Results There is substantial variation in the number of publications associated with each disease. The proportion of the research that is social science based appears remarkably consistent (<4%). A textual analysis, however, reveals a degree of misclassification by the abstracting service where a surprising proportion of the "social sciences" research was pure clinical research. Much of the social sciences research also tends to be "hand maiden" research focused on the implementation of biomedical solutions. Conclusion There is little evidence that scientists pay any attention to the complex social, cultural, biological, and environmental dynamic involved in human pathogenesis. There is little investigator driven social science and a poor presence of interdisciplinary science. The research needs more sophisticated funders and priority setters who are not beguiled by uncritical biomedical promises

Does Deep Tectonic Tremor Occur in the Central‐Eastern Mediterranean Basin?

Tectonic tremor has been observed at the roots of many fault systems around the Pacific rim, including convergent and transform plate boundaries. The extent to which deep tremor signals are prevalent along fault systems elsewhere, including the Mediterranean basin, has not yet been documented in detail. A body of evidence suggests that tremor triggered during the surface waves of teleseismic events may commonly occur where ambient tremor during episodic tremor and slip episodes occur, suggesting triggered tremor provides a useful tool to identify regions with ambient tremor. We perform a systematic search of triggered tremor associated with large teleseismic events between 2010 and 2020 at four major fault systems within the central-eastern Mediterranean basin, namely the Hellenic and Calabrian subduction zones, and the North Anatolian and Kefalonia transform faults. In addition, we search for ambient tremor during a slow slip event in the eastern Sea of Marmara along a secondary branch of the North Anatolian Fault, and two slow slip events beneath western Peloponnese (Hellenic Subduction Zone). We find no unambiguous evidence for deep triggered tremor, nor ambient tremor. The absence of triggered tremor at the Hellenic and Calabrian subduction zones supports an interpretation of less favorable conditions for tremorgenesis in the presence of old and cold slabs. The absence of tremor along the transform faults may be due to an absence of the conditions commonly promoting tremorgenesis in such settings, including high-fluid pressures and low-differential stresses between the down-dip limit of the seismogenic layer and the continental Moho

Homogeneous transit timing analyses of ten exoplanet systems

We study the transit timings of 10 exoplanets in order to investigate potential transit timing variations in them. We model their available ground-based light curves, some presented here and others taken from the literature, and homogeneously measure the mid-transit times. We statistically compare our results with published values and find that the measurement errors agree. However, in terms of recovering the possible frequencies, homogeneous sets can be found to be more useful, of which no statistically relevant example has been found for the planets in our study. We corrected the ephemeris information of all 10 planets we studied and provide these most precise light elements as references for future transit observations with space-borne and ground-based instruments. We found no evidence for secular or periodic changes in the orbital periods of the planets in our sample, including the ultra-short period WASP-103 b, whose orbit is expected to decay on an observable time-scale. Therefore, we derive the lower limits for the reduced tidal quality factors (Q(*)') for the host stars based on best-fitting quadratic functions to their timing data. We also present a global model of all available data for WASP-74 b, which has a Gaia parallax-based distance value similar to 25 per cent larger than the published value