198 research outputs found
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
- …