Speeding Up the Product Cycle: The Role of Host Country Reforms

We study the effects of policy reforms in the South on the decisions of intrafirm and arm's length production transfers by Northern firms. We show theoretically that relaxing ownership controls and improving contract enforcement can induce multinational companies to expand product varieties to host developing countries, and that a combination of the two reforms has an amplifying effect on product transfers. Consistent with these implications, we find that ownership liberalization and judicial quality played an important role in raising the extensive margin of processing exports in China for the period of 1997-2007. Our findings imply that institutional reforms in developing countries can effectively speed up the product cycle.product cycle, ownership structure, contract environment, export variety, processing trade, China

Agriculture and Aggregate Productivity: A Quantitative Cross-Country Analysis

A decomposition of aggregate labor productivity based on internationally comparable data from FAO and Penn World Tables reveals that high labor shares and low productivity in agriculture are mainly responsible for poor countries current position in the world income distribution. Using a two-sector general equilibrium model, we argue that di erences in total factor productivity (TFP) and barriers to using modern intermediate inputs in agricultural production can largely account for the observed cross-country di erences in both the labor share and productivity in agriculture. Furthermore, our model with agriculture can account for 89% of the observed aggregate labor productivity di erences across countries, performing much better than a one-sector growth model with the same exogenous di erences in TFP.Agriculture, Land, Subsistence, Intermediate Input, Barriers, Productivity, International Comparisons.

Why Are Saving Rates So High in China?

In this paper, we define "The Chinese Saving Puzzle" as the persistently high national saving rate at 34-53 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the past three decades and a surge in the saving rate by 11 percentage points from 2000-2008. Using data from the Flow of Funds Accounts (FFA) and Urban Household Surveys (UHS) supplemented by the findings from existing studies, we analyze the sources and causes of China's high and rising saving rates in the government, corporate, and household sectors. Although the causes of China's high saving are complex, we suggest that the evolving economic, demographic, and policy trends in the internal and external environments of the Chinese economy will likely lead to a decline in national saving in the foreseeable future.demographic structure, aggregate saving, international comparison, household behavior, China

Why Are Saving Rates so High in China?

In this paper, we define “The Chinese Saving Puzzle” as the persistently high national saving rate at 34–53 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the past three decades and a surge in the saving rate by 11 percentage points from 2000–2008. Using data from the Flow of Funds Accounts (FFA) and Urban Household Surveys (UHS) supplemented by the findings from existing studies, we analyze the sources and causes of China’s high and rising saving rates in the government, corporate, and household sectors. Although the causes of China’s high saving are complex, we suggest that the evolving economic, demographic, and policy trends in the internal and external environments of the Chinese economy will likely lead to a decline in national saving in the foreseeable future.

Volatility and Economic Systems: Evidence from A Large Transitional Economy

This is the first paper to study the role played by economic transition in reducing output volatility. A dramatic decline in aggregate output volatility in China from central planning to market-oriented reforms in the past half century is documented in this paper. The output volatility measured by the standard deviation of real gross domestic product (GDP) growth over the specified rolling windows declined by 73% from 1953-1977 to 1978-2008. The sharpest reduction occurred in 1978 when China began to initiate a series of market reforms. Since the inception of these reforms, the volatility continued to decline, dropping more than 30% from 1978-1994 to 1995-2008. During the planning period, the co-movements in the provincial output, which reflected the systemic risks associated with the highly centralized economic and political systems in China, were found to be the primary source of the high output volatility

Strength, stiffness and ductility of concrete-filled steel columns under axial compression

YesExtensive experimental and theoretical studies have been conducted on the compressive strength of concrete-filled steel tubular (CFST) columns, but little attention has been paid to their compressive stiffness and deformation capacity. Despite this, strength prediction approaches in existing design codes still have various limitations. A finite element model, which was previously proposed by the authors and verified using a large amount of experimental data, is used in this paper to generate simulation data covering a wide range of parameters for circular and rectangular CFST stub columns under axial compression. Regression analysis is conducted to propose simplified models to predict the compressive strength, the compressive stiffness, and the compressive strain corresponding to the compressive strength (ductility) for the composite columns. Based on the new strength prediction model, the capacity reduction factors for the steel and concrete materials are recalibrated to achieve a target reliability index of 3.04 when considering resistance effect only

Topology of Knotted Optical Vortices

Optical vortices as topological objects exist ubiquitously in nature. In this paper, by making use of the $\phi$-mapping topological current theory, we investigate the topology in the closed and knotted optical vortices. The topological inner structure of the optical vortices are obtained, and the linking of the knotted optical vortices is also given.Comment: 11 pages, no figures, accepted by Commun. Theor. Phys. (Beijing, P. R. China

Charge transport through dicarboxylic-acid-terminated alkanes bound to graphene-gold nanogap electrodes

Graphene-based electrodes are attractive for single-molecule electronics due to their high stability and conductivity and reduced screening compared with metals. In this paper, we use the STM-based matrix isolation I(s) method to measure the performance of graphene in single-molecule junctions with one graphene electrode and one gold electrode. By measuring the length dependence of the electrical conductance of dicarboxylic-acid-terminated alkanes, we find that transport is consistent with phase-coherent tunneling, but with an attenuations factor βN = 0.69 per methyl unit, which is lower than the value measured for Au-molecule-Au junctions. Comparison with density-functional-theory calculations of electron transport through graphene-molecule-Au junctions and Au-molecule-Au junctions reveals that this difference is due to the difference in Fermi energies of the two types of junction, relative to the frontier orbitals of the molecules. For most molecules, their electrical conductance in graphene-molecule-Au junctions is higher than that in Au-molecule-Au junctions, which suggests that graphene offers superior electrode performance, when utilizing carboxylic acid anchor groups