980 research outputs found
Uncovering Offshore Financial Centers: Conduits and Sinks in the Global Corporate Ownership Network
Multinational corporations use highly complex structures of parents and
subsidiaries to organize their operations and ownership. Offshore Financial
Centers (OFCs) facilitate these structures through low taxation and lenient
regulation, but are increasingly under scrutiny, for instance for enabling tax
avoidance. Therefore, the identification of OFC jurisdictions has become a
politicized and contested issue. We introduce a novel data-driven approach for
identifying OFCs based on the global corporate ownership network, in which over
98 million firms (nodes) are connected through 71 million ownership relations.
This granular firm-level network data uniquely allows identifying both
sink-OFCs and conduit-OFCs. Sink-OFCs attract and retain foreign capital while
conduit-OFCs are attractive intermediate destinations in the routing of
international investments and enable the transfer of capital without taxation.
We identify 24 sink-OFCs. In addition, a small set of five countries -- the
Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Singapore and Switzerland -- canalize
the majority of corporate offshore investment as conduit-OFCs. Each conduit
jurisdiction is specialized in a geographical area and there is significant
specialization based on industrial sectors. Against the idea of OFCs as exotic
small islands that cannot be regulated, we show that many sink and conduit-OFCs
are highly developed countries
Market Linked Innovation Systems : Opportunities for Strengthening Agricultural Development in Ethiopia
This study on Strengthening Market Linked Innovation Systems was produced at the request of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Ethiopia. It offers a perspective on how innovation processes and capacities could be further developed in support of Ethiopia’s Economic Growth and Transformation Plan (EGTP) and the Agricultural Growth Programme (AGP). More specifically it provides recommendations to the Netherlands Embassy on strategic priorities in supporting development of agricultural sector in Ethiopia
The anatomy of a population-scale social network
Large-scale human social network structure is typically inferred from digital
trace samples of online social media platforms or mobile communication data.
Instead, here we investigate the social network structure of a complete
population, where people are connected by high-quality links sourced from
administrative registers of family, household, work, school, and next-door
neighbors. We examine this multilayer social opportunity structure through
three common concepts in network analysis: degree, closure, and distance.
Findings present how particular network layers contribute to presumably
universal scale-free and small-world properties of networks. Furthermore, we
suggest a novel measure of excess closure and apply this in a life-course
perspective to show how the social opportunity structure of individuals varies
along age, socio-economic status, and education level. Our work provides new
entry points to understand individual socio-economic failure and success as
well as persistent societal problems of inequality and segregation
Scale-free equilibria of self-gravitating gaseous disks with flat rotation curves
We introduce exact analytical solutions of the steady-state hydrodynamic
equations of scale-free, self-gravitating gaseous disks with flat rotation
curves. We express the velocity field in terms of a stream function and obtain
a third-order ordinary differential equation (ODE) for the angular part of the
stream function. We present the closed-form solutions of the obtained ODE and
construct hydrodynamical counterparts of the power-law and elliptic disks, for
which self-consistent stellar dynamical models are known. We show that the
kinematics of the Large Magellanic Cloud can well be explained by our findings
for scale-free elliptic disks.Comment: AAS preprint format, 21 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in
The Astrophysical Journa
Large X-ray Flares from LMC X-4: Discovery of Milli-hertz Quasi-periodic Oscillations and QPO-modulated Pulsations
We report the discovery of milli-hertz (mHz) quasi-periodic oscillations
(QPOs) and QPO-modulated pulsations during large X-ray flares from the
high-mass X-ray binary pulsar LMC X-4 using data from the Rossi X-Ray Timing
Explorer (RXTE). The lightcurves of flares show that, in addition to ~74 mHz
coherent pulsations, there exist two more time-varying temporal structures at
frequencies of ~0.65-1.35 and ~2-20 mHz. These relatively long-term structures
appear in the power density spectra as mHz QPOs and as well-developed sidebands
around the coherent pulse frequency as well, indicating that the amplitudes of
the coherent pulsation is modulated by those of the mHz QPOs. One interesting
feature is that, while the first flare shows symmetric sidebands around the
coherent pulse frequency, the second flare shows significant excess emission in
the lower-frequency sidebands due to the ~2-20 mHz QPOs. We discuss the origin
of the QPOs using a combination of the beat-frequency model and a modified
version of the Keplerian-frequency model. According to our discussion, it seems
to be possible to attribute the origin of the ~0.65-1.35 and ~2-20 mHz QPOs to
the beating between the rotational frequency of the neutron star and the
Keplerian frequency of large accreting clumps near the corotation radius and to
the orbital motion of clumps at Keplerian radii of 2-10 times 10^9 cm,
respectively.Comment: 12 pages, including 4 figures; accepted by ApJ Letter
Spin-independent origin of the strongly enhanced effective mass in a dilute 2D electron system
We have accurately measured the effective mass in a dilute two-dimensional
electron system in silicon by analyzing temperature dependence of the
Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations in the low-temperature limit. A sharp increase
of the effective mass with decreasing electron density has been observed. Using
tilted magnetic fields, we have found that the enhanced effective mass is
independent of the degree of spin polarization, which points to a
spin-independent origin of the mass enhancement and is in contradiction with
existing theories
Acquired platelet antagonism: off-target antiplatelet effects of malignancy treatment with tyrosine kinase inhibitors
Platelets can contribute to tumor progression and metastasis. Cancer patients are at increased risk of thrombosis, and advanced stages of cancer are associated with thrombocytosis or increased platelet reactivity. Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) are widely used as a targeted strategy for cancer treatment, with the aim of prolonging progression-free survival of the patients. Because of their broad kinase target spectrum, most TKIs inevitably have off-target effects. Platelets rely on tyrosine kinase activity for their activation. Frequently observed side effects are lowering of platelet count and inhibition of platelet functions, whether or not accompanied by an increased bleeding risk. In this review, we aim to give insights into: (i) 38 TKIs that are currently used for the treatment of different types of cancer, either on the market or in clinical trials; (ii) how distinct TKIs can inhibit activation mechanisms in platelets; and (iii) the clinical consequences of the antiplatelet effects of TKI treatment. For several TKIs, the knowledge on affinity for their targets does not align with the published effects on platelets and reported bleeding events. This review should raise awareness of the potential antiplatelet effects of several TKIs, which will be enhanced in the presence of antithrombotic drugs
Agribusiness development in Libya : a fact-finding mission
Libya, a country full of largely unknown beauties to the rest of the world, is very motivated to move fast forward from being a heavily centralised state to a more decentralised and diversified economy with open, well-functioning markets in place. Improving agribusiness governance and creating an enabling environment for agribusiness development are currently topics high on Libya’s agenda. This report is the result of a fact finding mission in frame of a Letter of Intent signed between the Libyan Ministry of Agriculture, Animal and Marine Wealth and the Netherlands’ Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation. Report number CDI-12-025
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