Is Competition for FDI Bad for Regional Welfare?

We investigate the impact on regional welfare of policy competition for FDI when a multinational firm can strategically react to differences in statutory corporate tax rates and shift taxable profits to lower-tax jurisdictions. We show that competing governments may have an incentive to tax discriminate between domestic and multinational firms even in the presence of profit shifting opportunities for the latter. In particular, tax competition leads to higher welfare for the region as a whole than lump-sum subsidy competition when the difference in statutory corporate tax rates and/or their average is high enough. We also find that policy competition increases regional welfare by changing the firm's investment decision when profit shifting motivations might induce the firm to locate in the least profitable country.

Yield and Dynamics of Tri-Trophic Food Chains

Strong relationships between top productivity and dynamic behavior of tri-trophic food chains are pointed out by analyzing the classical Rosenzweig-MacArthur model. On one hand, food chains are subdivided into under-supplied and over-supplied, the first being those in which a marginal increase of nutrient supply to the bottom produces a marginal increase of mean top productivity. On the other hand, a detailed bifurcation analysis proves that dynamics complexity first increases with nutrient supply (from stationary to low-frequency cyclic regime and, finally, to chaos) and then decreases (from chaos to high-frequency cyclic regime). A careful comparison of the two analyses supports the conclusion that food chains cycling at high-frequency are over-supplied, while all others are under-supplied. A straightforward consequence of this result is that maximization of top productivity requires a chaotic regime. This regime turns out to be very often on the edge of a potential catastrophic collapse of food yield. In other words, optimality implies very complex and dangerous dynamics, as stated long ago for di-trophic food chains by Rosenzweig in his famous paper on the paradox of enrichment

Belyakov homoclinic bifurcations in a tritrophic food chain model

Complex dynamics of the most frequently used tritrophic food chain model are investigated in this paper. First it is shown that the model admits a sequence of pairs of Belyakov bifurcations (codimension-two homoclinic orbits to a critical node). Then fold and period-doubling cycle bifurcation curves associated to each pair of Belyakov points are computed and analyzed. The overall bifurcation scenario explains why stable limit cycles and strange attractors with dierent geometries can coexist. The analysis is conducted by combining numerical continuation techniques with theoretical arguments

Singular Homoclinic Bifurcations in Tri-trophic Food Chains

The Rosenzweig-MacArthur food chain model is proved to have homoclinic orbits. The proof is in two steps. First we use a geometric approach based on singular perturbation and detect singular homoclinic orbits as well as parameter combinations for which these orbits exist. Then we show, numerically, that for slightly different parameter values there exist also non singular homoclinic orbits which tend toward the singular ones when the time responses of the three trophic levels are extremely diversified. The analysis is performed systematically, without exploiting too deeply the mathematical structure of the Rosenzweig-MacArthur model. This is done intentionally, in order to facilitate readers interested more in the methodology than in the application to food chains

Prognostic and theranostic applications of positron emission tomography for a personalized approach to metastatic castration‐resistant prostate cancer

Metastatic castration‐resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) represents a condition of pro-gressive disease in spite of androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), with a broad spectrum of mani-festations ranging from no symptoms to severe debilitation due to bone or visceral metastatization. The management of mCRPC has been profoundly modified by introducing novel therapeutic tools such as antiandrogen drugs (i.e., abiraterone acetate and enzalutamide), immunotherapy through sipuleucel‐T, and targeted alpha therapy (TAT). This variety of approaches calls for unmet need of biomarkers suitable for patients’ pre‐treatment selection and prognostic stratification. In this sce-nario, imaging with positron emission computed tomography (PET/CT) presents great and still unexplored potential to detect specific molecular and metabolic signatures, some of whom, such as the prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA), can also be exploited as therapeutic targets, thus combining diagnosis and therapy in the so‐called “theranostic” approach. In this review, we per-formed a web‐based and desktop literature research to investigate the prognostic and theranostic potential of several PET imaging probes, such as18F‐FDG,18F‐choline and68Ga‐PSMA‐11, also covering the emerging tracers still in a pre‐clinical phase (e.g., PARP‐inhibitors’ analogs and the radioligands binding to gastrin releasing peptide receptors/GRPR), highlighting their potential for defining personalized care pathways in mCRPC

Automated joint skull-stripping and segmentation with Multi-Task U-Net in large mouse brain MRI databases

Skull-stripping and region segmentation are fundamental steps in preclinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies, and these common procedures are usually performed manually. We present Multi-task U-Net (MU-Net), a convolutional neural network designed to accomplish both tasks simultaneously. MU-Net achieved higher segmentation accuracy than state-of-the-art multi-atlas segmentation methods with an inference time of 0.35 s and no pre-processing requirements. We trained and validated MU-Net on 128 T2-weighted mouse MRI volumes as well as on the publicly available MRM NeAT dataset of 10 MRI volumes. We tested MU-Net with an unusually large dataset combining several independent studies consisting of 1782 mouse brain MRI volumes of both healthy and Huntington animals, and measured average Dice scores of 0.906 (striati), 0.937 (cortex), and 0.978 (brain mask). Further, we explored the effectiveness of our network in the presence of different architectural features, including skip connections and recently proposed framing connections, and the effects of the age range of the training set animals. These high evaluation scores demonstrate that MU-Net is a powerful tool for segmentation and skull-stripping, decreasing inter and intra-rater variability of manual segmentation. The MU-Net code and the trained model are publicly available at https://github.com/Hierakonpolis/MU-Net

Ownership and control in a competitive industry

We study a differentiated product market in which an investor initially owns a controlling stake in one of two competing firms and may acquire a non-controlling or a controlling stake in a competitor, either directly using her own assets, or indirectly via the controlled firm. While industry profits are maximized within a symmetric two product monopoly, the investor attains this only in exceptional cases. Instead, she sometimes acquires a noncontrolling stake. Or she invests asymmetrically rather than pursuing a full takeover if she acquires a controlling one. Generally, she invests indirectly if she only wants to affect the product market outcome, and directly if acquiring shares is profitable per se. --differentiated products,separation of ownership and control,private benefits of control

Territorialidad y laudo forense. El caso “Misión Esteros” (Formosa, Argentina)

En los últimos años los pueblos indígenas de América Latina vienen demandando al Estado el reconocimiento legal de las tierras que ellos han habitado tradicionalmente. En Argentina, un ejemplo de ello lo constituye la solicitud realizada al Laboratorio de Antropología Forense del Museo de La Plata por la Comunidad Wichi “Pajarito” para realizar un peritaje forense en un antiguo cementerio en el Paraje Esteros (Formosa) a fin de legalizar y reivindicar sus derechos legítimos sobre las tierras que ocuparan en la antigua Misión. En este marco se acordó un plan de trabajo que consistió en la excavación arqueológica de inhumaciones, el relevamiento somatométrico de la población actual y la obtención de muestras de ADN antiguo y actual. Los restos óseos exhumados correspondientes a un individuo fueron trasladados temporalmente al Laboratorio de Antropología Forense del Museo de La Plata. En el análisis ulterior se aplicaron técnicas bioantropológicas macro y microscópicas para la estimación de edad y sexo; análisis métrico para estimar la estatura, asimismo fueron utilizadas técnicas moleculares para determinar su filiación.

Graft-versus-host disease, but not graft-versus-leukemia immunity, is mediated by GM-CSF–licensed myeloid cells

Allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (allo-HCT) not only is an effective treatment for several hematologic malignancies but can also result in potentially life-threatening graft-versus-host disease (GvHD). GvHD is caused by T cells within the allograft attacking nonmalignant host tissues; however, these same T cells mediate the therapeutic graft-versus-leukemia (GvL) response. Thus, there is an urgent need to understand how to mechanistically uncouple GvL from GvHD. Using preclinical models of full and partial MHC-mismatched HCT, we here show that the granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) produced by allogeneic T cells distinguishes between the two processes. GM-CSF drives GvHD pathology by licensing donor-derived phagocytes to produce inflammatory mediators such as interleukin-1β and reactive oxygen species. In contrast, GM-CSF did not affect allogeneic T cells or their capacity to eliminate leukemic cells, retaining undiminished GvL responses. Last, tissue biopsies and peripheral blood mononuclear cells from patients with grade IV GvHD showed an elevation of GM-CSF–producing T cells, suggesting that GM-CSF neutralization has translational potential in allo-HCT