Governance Infrastructure and U.S. Foreign Direct Investment

This paper examines the statistical importance of governance infrastructure as a determinant of U.S. foreign direct investment. In broad terms, governance infrastructure represents attributes of legislation, regulation, and legal systems that condition freedom of transacting, security of property rights and transparency of government and legal processes. Our econometric analysis employs a two-stage estimation procedure. In the first stage, the probability that a country is an FDI recipient is estimated. The results indicate that countries that fail to achieve a minimum threshold of effective governance are unlikely to receive any U.S. FDI. Countries that receive no U.S. FDI are typically countries that do not promote free and transparent markets, have ineffective governments, and are often countries whose legal systems are not rooted in English Common Law. In the second stage, the analysis is restricted to those countries that did receive FDI flows. The estimated equations focus on the determinants of the amount of FDI received. Given that a country is a recipient of U.S. FDI, governance infrastructure, including the nature of the legal system, is an important determinant of the amount received.foreign direct investment, capital flows, multinational corporations, infrastructure, governance

Rare Case of Delayed Carotid Occlusion Secondary To Gunshot Fragments

Cervical gunshot wounds are traumatic events with vascu-lar and neurological sequelae. These complications typical-ly arise within days to weeks of the initial trauma. There are few known case reports of vascular complications occur-ring decades after initial injury. Here we present the case of a patient with ischemic stroke in the middle cerebral artery (MCA) distribution secondary to complete occlusion of the left common carotid from a penetrating gunshot wound 15 years prior to presentation

Nonparametric estimation of concave production technologies by entropic methods

An econometric methodology is developed for nonparametric estimation of concave production technologies. The methodology, bases on the priciple of maximum likelihood, uses entropic distance and concvex programming techniques to estimate production functions.convex programming, production functions, entropy

Biogenic gas nanostructures as ultrasonic molecular reporters.

Ultrasound is among the most widely used non-invasive imaging modalities in biomedicine, but plays a surprisingly small role in molecular imaging due to a lack of suitable molecular reporters on the nanoscale. Here, we introduce a new class of reporters for ultrasound based on genetically encoded gas nanostructures from microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Gas vesicles are gas-filled protein-shelled compartments with typical widths of 45-250 nm and lengths of 100-600 nm that exclude water and are permeable to gas. We show that gas vesicles produce stable ultrasound contrast that is readily detected in vitro and in vivo, that their genetically encoded physical properties enable multiple modes of imaging, and that contrast enhancement through aggregation permits their use as molecular biosensors