The impact of institutional quality on foreign direct investment: empirical analysis based on mediating and moderating effects

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between institutional quality and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows using panel data of 42 G20 countries from 2005 to 2020. The results indicate a positive association between them. Mediating analyses reveal that institutional quality attracts FDI inflows by increasing trade openness, accelerating industrial structure optimization, and encouraging technological innovation. Furthermore, financial development, tax level, and natural resource abundance moderates the positive association between institutional quality and FDI inflows. Among them, financial development and natural resource abundance strengthen the promoting role of institutional quality in attracting FDI; the tax level weakens this process. These findings have implications for policymakers seeking to make full use of favourable institutions to achieve sustainable growth of FDI

Content adaptive sparse illumination for Fourier ptychography

Fourier Ptychography (FP) is a recently proposed technique for large field of view and high resolution imaging. Specifically, FP captures a set of low resolution images under angularly varying illuminations and stitches them together in Fourier domain. One of FP's main disadvantages is its long capturing process due to the requisite large number of incident illumination angles. In this letter, utilizing the sparsity of natural images in Fourier domain, we propose a highly efficient method termed as AFP, which applies content adaptive sparse illumination for Fourier ptychography by capturing the most informative parts of the scene's spatial spectrum. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the reported framework with both simulations and real experiments. Results show that the proposed AFP could shorten the acquisition time of conventional FP by around 30%-60%

Recent advances in engineering characteristics of near-fault ground motions and seismic effects of building structures

Severe damages of civil infrastructures under near-fault ground motions have impelled the community of earthquake engineering to pay intensive attention and investigation to their engineering characteristics and structural seismic effects. This paper reviews the recent research advances of authors in the engineering characteristics of near-fault ground motions and seismic responses and base-isolated performance analysis of building structures. Firstly, two non-structure-specific intensity measures, such as improved effective peak acceleration and velocity (IEPA, IEPV) were proposed. Two frequency content parameters were also suggested, namely the mean period of Hilbert marginal spectrum Tmh, and coefficient of variance of dominant instantaneous frequency of Hilbert spectrum Hcov which reflects the frequency nonstationary degree of ground motions. Meanwhile, a new stochastic model to synthesize near-fault impulsive ground motions with the feature of the strongest pulse was established. Then, the chaotic and fractal/multifractal characteristics of strong earthquake ground motions were analyzed deeply to explore their complexity from a novel perspective of nonlinear dynamics, and the inherent relation between fractal dimensions and period parameters of near-fault motions was exposed. Moreover, the mechanism of interstory deformation of tall building was illustrated based on engineering properties of pulse-like ground motions and generalized drift spectral analysis. Finally, the influence of ground motion properties on the seismic responses and performance of tall structures and base isolated buildings was revealed