Essays in Capital Mobility, Growth, and Macroeconomic Volatility

This dissertation comprises three chapters in international macroeconomics. Specifically, we focus on international financial integration and its linkage to economic growth and volatility. In Chapter 1, we revisit the Feldstein-Horioka (1980) puzzle that saving-investment correlation exhibits a pattern contrary to expectation, being higher among the OECD countries that are more financially integrated and lower among emerging markets economies with less financial integration and greater capital controls. We find that the evolution of FH coefficient is highly consistent with increased financial integration over time, thus resolving the puzzle dynamically. We also explain the cross-country component of the puzzle by showing that financial market imperfections influence how well FH coefficient measures capital mobility. In chapter 2, we study the linkage between financial integration and economic growth. We develop a dynamic stochastic model that generalizes Obstfeld\u27s (1994) model by incorporating the costs from systemic risk besides the well-known benefit from risk-sharing by Obstfeld (1994). We show that potential cost from the systemic risk could lower the benefit from risk diversification in an integrated financial market. By using the stock market data from Taiwan and US to calibrate the model, we find that the predictions of the model are consistent with actual data on growth. In chapter 3, we study the relationship between financial integration and economic volatility. Prior research that has studied this relationship has not explored the potentially distinct effects of capital inflows and capital out flows on volatility. Our contribution is to make this crucial distinction conducting our analysis. We find that non-OECD countries with higher levels of external debt assets are associated with lower consumption volatility, and external debt liabilities are associated with higher consumption volatility. This finding is insignificant for OECD countries

A study of solvent-rich environments for evaporation rate control in the extrusion spin coating process

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (p. 44).Microlithography is a process used in microchip fabrication to transfer a circuitry pattern onto a silicon wafer. An important step in the process is the deposition of a thin coating of photoresist from which the lithographic mask is made. The photoresist layer is typically 1 [micro]m thick with a thickness variation of less than 25[angstroms] (within 3[sigma]). The current industrial process of spin coating can achieve these specifications. However, these standards are achieved at the cost of wasting 95% of the photoresist applied. Extrusion-spin coating is a new coating method that has the potential of wasting as little as 50% of the photoresist applied. Before extrusion-spin coating can be used effectively, however, the coating uniformity must be improved through the reduction of solvent evaporation from the wafer surface. This research project evaluates improvements in coating uniformity resulting from the application of a low to moderate solvent concentration environment. At low dispense volumes of approximately 0.5ml, the standard deviation from the mean of the coating thickness was reduced from 335[angstroms] to 56[angstroms] with the application of a low solvent concentration environment. At the highest solvent concentration level that can be achieved by the experimental apparatus, the extrusion-spin coating had a deviation comparable to the high dispense volume, traditional spin coating technique. In addition, the extrusion-spin coating also had an efficiency that was more than a magnitude higher than that of the spin coating. This study indicates that extrusion-spin coating in a solvent-rich environment is a viable replacement for the spin coating process.by Winston C. Fan.S.B

Multipartite entanglement detection based on generalized state-dependent entropic uncertainty relation for multiple measurements

We present the generalized state-dependent entropic uncertainty relations for multiple measurement settings, and the optimal lower bound has been obtained by considering different measurement sequences. We then apply this uncertainty relation to witness entanglement, and give the experimentally accessible lower bounds on both bipartite and tripartite entanglements. This method of detecting entanglement is applied to physical systems of two particles on a one-dimensional lattice, GHZ-Werner states and W-Werner states. It is shown that, for measurements which are not in mutually unbiased bases, this new entropic uncertainty relation is superior to the previous state-independent one in entanglement detection. The results might play important roles in detecting multipartite entanglement experimentally.Comment: 7 pages,3 figure

Compressing Inertial Motion Data in Wireless Sensing Systems – An Initial Experiment

The use of wireless inertial motion sensors, such as accelerometers, for supporting medical care and sport’s training, has been under investigation in recent years. As the number of sensors (or their sampling rates) increases, compressing data at source(s) (i.e. at the sensors), i.e. reducing the quantity of data that needs to be transmitted between the on-body sensors and the remote repository, would be essential especially in a bandwidth-limited wireless environment. This paper presents a set of compression experiment results on a set of inertial motion data collected during running exercises. As a starting point, we selected a set of common compression algorithms to experiment with. Our results show that, conventional lossy compression algorithms would achieve a desirable compression ratio with an acceptable time delay. The results also show that the quality of the decompressed data is within acceptable range