Foreign Firms and Indonesian Manufacturing Wages: An Analysis with Panel Data

Wages in domestically- owned Indonesian manufacturing plants taken over by foreign firms increased sharply between the year before takeover and two years after takeover, relative to plants remaining in domestic ownership. Blue- collar wage levels in these plants had been less than 10 per cent above and white- collar wages more than 10 per cent below those in their industries a year before takeover. Two years after takeover both were more than 50 per cent above average. Wages in foreign plants taken over by domestic owners tended to rise less than average for their industries, although they remained above the domestic average. Thus, foreign firms did not select particularly high- wage plants to take over and it was foreign takeovers, rather than takeovers in general, that led to large wage increases and high wages. An econometric analysis of the whole panel found that both foreign ownership throughout the period and foreign takeover resulted in higher wages relative to domestically- owned plants. The wage effects for white- collar employees were typically around twice those for blue- collar employees. Foreign takeovers were associated with large increases in blue- collar employment and both foreign and domestic takeovers with declines in white- collar employment. However, the employment changes were not strongly related to the wage changes.FDI; Foreign ownership; Indonesia; Wages

FDI and Growth in East Asia: Lessons for Indonesia

Foreign direct investment has been important in the economic growth and global economic integration of developing countries over the last decades. Both Northeast and Southeast Asia, especially the latter, have been part of this development with increasing inflows of FDI and greater foreign participation in their economies. However, Indonesia has been an outlier within the region, with lower inflows of FDI than other countries, especially in manufacturing, and with lower inflows than could be expected from its size and other country characteristics. The inflows of FDI that have taken place have benefited Indonesia and we use the Asian experience to provide some suggestions as to what measures would increase FDI. A relatively poor business environment with inefficient institutions seems to be an important explanation behind the low inflows of FDI.East Asia; Northeast Asia; Southeast Asia; Indonesia; Foreign Direct Investment; Multinational Firms

Foreign Direct Investment and Wages in Indonesian Manufacturing

This paper asks two types of questions. One is about the behavior of foreign-owned firms in Indonesian labor markets and the other is about the effect of the presence of foreign-owned firms on Indonesian wages. We ask first whether foreign-owned plants pay a higher price for labor, that is, more than locally-owned plants for workers of a given quality, as we can measure it. We then ask whether foreign-owned plants pay a higher price for labor given the characteristics of the plants such as their size, industry, and location. The answer is that foreign firms do pay a higher price, and even a higher price given their plant characteristics. The second set of questions is whether a larger presence of foreign-owned plants results in higher wages in locally-owned plants and overall. Higher foreign presence leads to higher wages in locally-owned plants. Since the foreign plants also pay higher wages than locally-owned ones, the two factors together mean that higher foreign presence raises the general wage level in a province and industry.

South-South FDI and Development in East Asia

This paper attempts to measure the size of South-South FDI in developing East Asia and the trends in it, and the characteristics of the investing countries and the investments themselves. It also summarizes the findings of studies in individual countries of the effects of these investments. The studies of individual countries will be used to try to find some consensus on differences between South-South FDI and North-South FDI. Among the comparisons of the two types of FDI we try to summarize are be findings about their industrial composition, their effects on their host countries and their host-country firms’ productivity, wages, and employment, and how these differ across industries.FDI; East Asia; South-South; Economic development

Foreign Firms and Indonesian Manufacturing Wages: An Analysis With Panel Data

Wages in domestically- owned Indonesian manufacturing plants taken over by foreign firms increased sharply between the year before takeover and two years after takeover, relative to plants remaining in domestic ownership. Blue- collar wage levels in these plants had been less than 10 per cent above and white- collar wages more than 10 per cent below those in their industries a year before takeover. Two years after takeover both were more than 50 per cent above average. Wages in foreign plants taken over by domestic owners tended to rise less than average for their industries, although they remained above the domestic average. Thus, foreign firms did not select particularly high- wage plants to take over and it was foreign takeovers, rather than takeovers in general, that led to large An econometric analysis of the whole panel found that both foreign ownership throughout the period and foreign takeover resulted in higher wages relative to domestically- owned plants. The wage effects for white- collar employees were typically around twice those for blue- collar employees. Foreign takeovers were associated with large increases in blue- collar employment and both foreign and domestic takeovers with declines in white- collar employment. However, the employment changes were not strongly related to the wage changes.

A Robust Low-Complexity MIMO Detector for Rank 4 LTE/LTE-A Systems

This paper deals with MIMO detection for rank 4 LTE systems. The paper revolves around a previously known detector [1, by Inkyu Lee, TCOM'2010] which we shall refer to as RCSMLD (Reduced-Constellation-Size-Maximum-Likelihood-Detector). However, a direct application of the scheme in [1, by Inkyu Lee, TCOM'2010] to LTE/LTE-A rank 4 test cases results in unsatisfactory performance. The first contribution of the paper is to introduce several modifications that can jointly be applied to the basic RCSMLD scheme which, taken together, result in excellent performance. Our second contribution is the development of a highly efficient hardware structure for RCSMLD that allows for an implementation with very few multiplications.Comment: Accepted for publication in PIMRC-2014, Washington DC, US

Monte Carlo Update for Chain Molecules: Biased Gaussian Steps in Torsional Space

We develop a new elementary move for simulations of polymer chains in torsion angle space. The method is flexible and easy to implement. Tentative updates are drawn from a (conformation-dependent) Gaussian distribution that favors approximately local deformations of the chain. The degree of bias is controlled by a parameter b. The method is tested on a reduced model protein with 54 amino acids and the Ramachandran torsion angles as its only degrees of freedom, for different b. Without excessive fine tuning, we find that the effective step size can be increased by a factor of three compared to the unbiased b=0 case. The method may be useful for kinetic studies, too.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Design of Surface Modifications for Nanoscale Sensor Applications

Nanoscale biosensors provide the possibility to miniaturize optic, acoustic and electric sensors to the dimensions of biomolecules. This enables approaching single-molecule detection and new sensing modalities that probe molecular conformation. Nanoscale sensors are predominantly surface-based and label-free to exploit inherent advantages of physical phenomena allowing high sensitivity without distortive labeling. There are three main criteria to be optimized in the design of surface-based and label-free biosensors: (i) the biomolecules of interest must bind with high affinity and selectively to the sensitive area; (ii) the biomolecules must be efficiently transported from the bulk solution to the sensor; and (iii) the transducer concept must be sufficiently sensitive to detect low coverage of captured biomolecules within reasonable time scales. The majority of literature on nanoscale biosensors deals with the third criterion while implicitly assuming that solutions developed for macroscale biosensors to the first two, equally important, criteria are applicable also to nanoscale sensors. We focus on providing an introduction to and perspectives on the advanced concepts for surface functionalization of biosensors with nanosized sensor elements that have been developed over the past decades (criterion (iii)). We review in detail how patterning of molecular films designed to control interactions of biomolecules with nanoscale biosensor surfaces creates new possibilities as well as new challenges

Finite energy shifts in SU(n) supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on T^3xR at weak coupling

We consider a semi-classical treatment, in the regime of weak gauge coupling, of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in a space-time of the form T^3xR with SU(n)/Z_n gauge group and a non-trivial gauge bundle. More specifically, we consider the theories obtained as power series expansions around a certain class of normalizable vacua of the classical theory, corresponding to isolated points in the moduli space of flat connections, and the perturbative corrections to the free energy eigenstates and eigenvalues in the weakly interacting theory. The perturbation theory construction of the interacting Hilbert space is complicated by the divergence of the norm of the interacting states. Consequently, the free and interacting Hilbert furnish unitarily inequivalent representation of the algebra of creation and annihilation operators of the quantum theory. We discuss a consistent redefinition of the Hilbert space norm to obtain the interacting Hilbert space and the properties of the interacting representation. In particular, we consider the lowest non-vanishing corrections to the free energy spectrum and discuss the crucial importance of supersymmetry for these corrections to be finite.Comment: 31 pages, 1 figure, v4 Minor changes, references correcte