Governance Infrastructure and U.S. Foreign Direct Investment

This paper examines the statistical importance of governance infrastructure as a determinant of U.S. foreign direct investment. In broad terms, governance infrastructure represents attributes of legislation, regulation, and legal systems that condition freedom of transacting, security of property rights and transparency of government and legal processes. Our econometric analysis employs a two-stage estimation procedure. In the first stage, the probability that a country is an FDI recipient is estimated. The results indicate that countries that fail to achieve a minimum threshold of effective governance are unlikely to receive any U.S. FDI. Countries that receive no U.S. FDI are typically countries that do not promote free and transparent markets, have ineffective governments, and are often countries whose legal systems are not rooted in English Common Law. In the second stage, the analysis is restricted to those countries that did receive FDI flows. The estimated equations focus on the determinants of the amount of FDI received. Given that a country is a recipient of U.S. FDI, governance infrastructure, including the nature of the legal system, is an important determinant of the amount received.foreign direct investment, capital flows, multinational corporations, infrastructure, governance

Potential Competitive Effects of Vertical Mergers: A How-To Guide for Practitioners

The purpose of this short article is to aid practitioners in analyzing the competitive effects of vertical and complementary product mergers. It is also intended to assist the agencies if and when they undertake revision of the 1984 U.S. Vertical Merger Guidelines. Those Guidelines are out of date and do not reflect current enforcement or economic thinking about the potential competitive effects of vertical mergers. Nor do they provide the tools needed to carry out a modern competitive effects analysis. This article is intended to partially fill the gap by summarizing the various potential competitive harms and benefits that can occur in vertical mergers and the types of economic and factual analysis of competitive effects that can be applied to those mergers during the HSR review process. The analysis in the article also identifies several legal and policy issues that the agencies would consider when they undertake the process of revising the Vertical Merger Guidelines. The Appendix contains a listing and summary of the vertical merger cases challenged by the DOJ and FTC since 1994

Composite video and graphics display for camera viewing systems in robotics and teleoperation

A system for real-time video image display for robotics or remote-vehicle teleoperation is described that has at least one robot arm or remotely operated vehicle controlled by an operator through hand-controllers, and one or more television cameras and optional lighting element. The system has at least one television monitor for display of a television image from a selected camera and the ability to select one of the cameras for image display. Graphics are generated with icons of cameras and lighting elements for display surrounding the television image to provide the operator information on: the location and orientation of each camera and lighting element; the region of illumination of each lighting element; the viewed region and range of focus of each camera; which camera is currently selected for image display for each monitor; and when the controller coordinate for said robot arms or remotely operated vehicles have been transformed to correspond to coordinates of a selected or nonselected camera

Analyzing Large Collections of Electronic Text Using OLAP

Computer-assisted reading and analysis of text has various applications in the humanities and social sciences. The increasing size of many electronic text archives has the advantage of a more complete analysis but the disadvantage of taking longer to obtain results. On-Line Analytical Processing is a method used to store and quickly analyze multidimensional data. By storing text analysis information in an OLAP system, a user can obtain solutions to inquiries in a matter of seconds as opposed to minutes, hours, or even days. This analysis is user-driven allowing various users the freedom to pursue their own direction of research