3,887 research outputs found
The binding constraint on firms'growth in developing countries
Firms in developing countries face numerous and serious constraints on their growth, ranging from corruption to lack of infrastructure to inability to access finance. Countries lack the resources to remove all the constraints at once and so would be better off removing the most binding one first. This paper uses data from World Bank Enterprise Surveys in 2006-10 to identify the most binding constraints on firm operations in developing countries. While each country faces a different set of constraints, these constraints also vary by firm characteristics, especially firm size. Across all countries, access to finance is among the most binding constraints; other obstacles appear to matter much less. This result is robust for all regions. Smaller firms must rely more on their own funds to invest and would grow significantly faster if they had greater access to external funds. As a result, a low level of financial development skews the firm size distribution by increasing the relative share of small firms. The results suggest that financing constraints play a significant part in explaining the"missing middle"-- the failure of small firms in developing countries to grow into medium-size or large firms.Access to Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Microfinance,Debt Markets,Banks&Banking Reform
Convexity in source separation: Models, geometry, and algorithms
Source separation or demixing is the process of extracting multiple
components entangled within a signal. Contemporary signal processing presents a
host of difficult source separation problems, from interference cancellation to
background subtraction, blind deconvolution, and even dictionary learning.
Despite the recent progress in each of these applications, advances in
high-throughput sensor technology place demixing algorithms under pressure to
accommodate extremely high-dimensional signals, separate an ever larger number
of sources, and cope with more sophisticated signal and mixing models. These
difficulties are exacerbated by the need for real-time action in automated
decision-making systems.
Recent advances in convex optimization provide a simple framework for
efficiently solving numerous difficult demixing problems. This article provides
an overview of the emerging field, explains the theory that governs the
underlying procedures, and surveys algorithms that solve them efficiently. We
aim to equip practitioners with a toolkit for constructing their own demixing
algorithms that work, as well as concrete intuition for why they work
Pairing effect on the giant dipole resonance width at low temperature
The width of the giant dipole resonance (GDR) at finite temperature T in
Sn-120 is calculated within the Phonon Damping Model including the neutron
thermal pairing gap determined from the modified BCS theory. It is shown that
the effect of thermal pairing causes a smaller GDR width at T below 2 MeV as
compared to the one obtained neglecting pairing. This improves significantly
the agreement between theory and experiment including the most recent data
point at T = 1 MeV.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures to be published in Physical Review
Genetic and Modifiable Risk Factors Contributing to Cisplatin-Induced Toxicities
Effective administration of traditional cytotoxic chemotherapy is often limited by off-target toxicities. This clinical dilemma is epitomized by cisplatin, a platinating agent that has potent antineoplastic activity due to its affinity for DNA and other intracellular nucleophiles. Despite its efficacy against many adult-onset and pediatric malignancies, cisplatin elicits multiple off-target toxicities that can not only severely impact a patient’s quality of life, but also lead to dose reductions or the selection of alternative therapies that can ultimately affect outcomes. Without an effective therapeutic measure by which to successfully mitigate many of these symptoms, there have been attempts to identify a priori those individuals who are more susceptible to developing these sequelae through studies of genetic and nongenetic risk factors. Older age is associated with cisplatin induced ototoxicity, neurotoxicity and nephrotoxicity. Traditional genome-wide association studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms in ACYP2 and WFS1 associated with cisplatin-induced hearing loss. However, validating associations between specific genotypes and cisplatin-induced toxicities with enough stringency to warrant clinical application remains challenging. This review summarizes the current state of knowledge with regard to specific adverse sequelae following cisplatin-based therapy with a focus on ototoxicity, neurotoxicity, nephrotoxicity, myelosuppression and nausea/emesis. We discuss variables (genetic and nongenetic) contributing to these detrimental toxicities, and currently available means to prevent or treat their occurrence
A Variational Approach to the Evolution of Radial Basis Functions for Image Segmentation
In this paper we derive differential equations for evolving radial basis functions (RBFs) to solve segmentation problems. The differential equations result from applying variational calculus to energy functionals designed for image segmentation. Our methodology supports evolution of all parameters of each RBF, including its position, weight, orientation, and anisotropy, if present. Our framework is general and can be applied to numerous RBF interpolants. The resulting approach retains some of the ideal features of implicit active contours, like topological adaptivity, while requiring low storage overhead due to the sparsity of our representation, which is an unstructured list of RBFs. We present the theory behind our technique and demonstrate its usefulness for image segmentation
Tunneling into Nonequilibrium Luttinger Liquid with Impurity
We evaluate tunneling rates into/from a voltage biased quantum wire
containing weak backscattering defect. Interacting electrons in such a wire
form a true nonequilibrium state of the Luttinger liquid (LL). This state is
created due to inelastic electron backscattering leading to the emission of
nonequilibrium plasmons with typical frequency . The
tunneling rates are split into two edges. The tunneling exponent at the Fermi
edge is positive and equals that of the equilibrium LL, while the exponent at
the side edge is negative if Coulomb interaction is not too strong.Comment: 4+ pages, 5 figure
A characterization of compact complex tori via automorphism groups
We show that a compact Kaehler manifold X is a complex torus if both the
continuous part and discrete part of some automorphism group G of X are
infinite groups, unless X is bimeromorphic to a non-trivial G-equivariant
fibration. Some applications to dynamics are given.Comment: title changed, to appear in Math. An
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