Imbalances For the Long Run

Net exports and current account balances among developed countries, which contributed to the so called “global imbalances”, are highly persistent. Despite success along many dimensions, international business cycle models have difficulty replicating these salient, low-frequency features of international capital flows. In particular, net exports and current account balances are much more persistent in the data than in standard models. We document these important empirical facts about international capital flows. Further, we show that we can account for them with a parsimonious one-good two-country model with small, persistent differences in per capita GDP growth, matching those we observe among developed countries

Current Account Fact and Fiction

With US trade and current account deficits approaching 6% of GDP, some have argued that the country is "on the comfortable path to ruin" and that the required "adjustment'' may be painful. We suggest instead that things are fine: although national saving is low, the ratios of household and consolidated net worth to GDP remain high. In our view, the most striking features of the world at present are the low rates of investment and growth in some of the richest countries, whose surpluses account for about half of the US deficit. The result is that financial capital is flowing out of countries with low investment and growth and into the US and other fast-growing countries. Oil exporters account for much of the rest.

Automatic translation of scientific documents in the HAL archive

© 2012. Published by ELRA. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/703_Paper.pdfThis paper describes the development of a statistical machine translation system between French and English for scientific papers. This system will be closely integrated into the French HAL open archive, a collection of more than 100.000 scientific papers. We describe the creation of in-domain parallel and monolingual corpora, the development of a domain specific translation system with the created resources, and its adaptation using monolingual resources only. These techniques allowed us to improve a generic system by more than 10 BLEU points

Collaborative machine translation service for scientific texts

© 2012 The Authors. Published by ACL. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E12-2003French researchers are required to frequently translate into French the description of their work published in English. At the same time, the need for French people to access articles in English, or to international researchers to access theses or papers in French, is incorrectly resolved via the use of generic translation tools. We propose the demonstration of an end-to-end tool integrated in the HAL open archive for enabling efficient translation for scientific texts. This tool can give translation suggestions adapted to the scientific domain, improving by more than 10 points the BLEU score of a generic system. It also provides a post-edition service which captures user post-editing data that can be used to incrementally improve the translations engines. Thus it is helpful for users which need to translate or to access scientific texts

Do compensation plans with performance targets provide better incentives?

YesGuided by academic literature, industry practice and policy recommendations, we analyze a wide range of option and restricted stock plans with exercise and vesting conditions that may be contingent on stock price performance. To assess the effectiveness of these plans at attracting and providing incentives to executives, we create compensation plans with fixed firm cost and executive valuation and calculate their expected total lifetime incentives. We show that performance vesting targets provide the least cost effective incentives, performance exercise targets provide the largest risk incentives, option plans are generally superior to restricted stock plans, and calendar vesting is only efficient up to a maximum of three years. Performance exercise targets can increase the expected total lifetime incentives provided by compensation plans, but in general, standard options with short vesting periods provide the most cost effective pay-for-performance incentives

Circulating Human Eosinophils Share a Similar Transcriptional Profile in Asthma and Other Hypereosinophilic Disorders

Eosinophils are leukocytes that are released into the peripheral blood in a phenotypically mature state and are capable of being recruited into tissues in response to appropriate stimuli. Eosinophils, traditionally considered cytotoxic effector cells, are leukocytes recruited into the airways of asthma patients where they are believed to contribute to the development of many features of the disease. This perception, however, has been challenged by recent findings suggesting that eosinophils have also immunomodulatory functions and may be involved in tissue homeostasis and wound healing. Here we describe a transcriptome-based approach-in a limited number of patients and controls-to investigate the activation state of circulating human eosinophils isolated by flow cytometry. We provide an overview of the global expression pattern in eosinophils in various relevant conditions, e.g., eosinophilic asthma, hypereosinophilic dermatological diseases, parasitosis and pulmonary aspergillosis. Compared to healthy subjects, circulating eosinophils isolated from asthma patients differed in their gene expression profile which is marked by downregulation of transcripts involved in antigen presentation, pathogen recognition and mucosal innate immunity, whereas up-regulated genes were involved in response to non-specific stimulation, wounding and maintenance of homeostasis. Eosinophils from other hypereosinophilic disorders displayed a very similar transcriptional profile. Taken together, these observations seem to indicate that eosinophils exhibit non-specific immunomodulatory functions important for tissue repair and homeostasis and suggest new roles for these cells in asthma immunobiology