Financial Development and TFP Growth: Cross-Country and Industry-Level Evidence

This paper estimates the impact of financial development on industry-level total factor productivity (TFP) growth using a largely unexploited panel of 77 countries with data for 26 manufacturing industries for the years 1963 to 2003. A significant relationship is found between financial development and industry-level TFP growth when controlling for country-time and industry-time fixed effects. The results are both statistically and economically significant. TFP growth can accelerate up to 0.6 percent per year, depending on the external finance requirement of industries, following a one standard deviation increase in financial development. The results are robust to different samples and specifications.Financial development, TFP growth, Volatility

Enhancing smart environments with mobile robots

Sensor networks are becoming popular nowadays in the development of smart environments. Heavily relying on static sensor and actuators, though, such environments usually lacks of versatility regarding the provided services and interaction capabilities. Here we present a framework for smart environments where a service robot is included within the sensor network acting as a mobile sensor and/or actuator. Our framework integrates on-the-shelf technologies to ensure its adaptability to a variety of sensor technologies and robotic software. Two pilot cases are presented as evaluation of our proposal.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

An assisted navigation method for telepresence robots

Telepresence robots have emerged as a new means of interaction in remote environments. However, the use of such robots is still limited due to safety and usability issues when operating in human-like environments. This work addresses these issues by enhancing the robot navigation through a collaborative control method that assists the user to negotiate obstacles. The method has been implemented in a commercial telepresence robot and a user study has been conducted in order to test the suitability of our approach.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

On the characterization of algebraically integrable plane foliations

We give a characterization theorem for non-degenerate plane foliations of degree different from 1 having a rational first integral. Moreover, we prove that the degree of a non-degenerate foliation as above provides the minimum number, , of points in the projective plane through which pass infinitely many algebraic leaves of the foliatio

δ-Sequences and Evaluation Codes de ned by Plane Valuations at Infinity

We introduce the concept of δ-sequence. A δ-sequence ∆ generates a well-ordered semigroup S in Z2 or R. We show how to construct (and compute parameters) for the dual code of any evaluation code associated with a weight function defined by ∆ from the polynomial ring in two indeterminates to a semigroup S as above. We prove that this is a simple procedure which can be understood by considering a particular class of valuations of function fields of surfaces, called plane valuations at infinity. We also give algorithms to construct an unlimited number of δ-sequences of the diferent existing types, and so this paper provides the tools to know and use a new large set of codes