Foreign ownership and productivity: new evidence from the service sector and the R&D lab

This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention to two issues neglected in the existing literature – the role of multinationals in service sectors and the importance of R&D activity conducted by foreign multinationals. We review existing theoretical and empirical work, which largely focuses on manufacturing, before presenting new evidence using establishment level data on production, service and R&D activity for the United Kingdom. We find that multinationals play an important role in service sectors and that entry of foreign multinationals by takeover is more prevalent than greenfield investment. We find that British multinationals have lower levels of labour productivity than foreign multinationals, but the difference is less stark in the service sector than in the production sector, and that British multinationals have lower levels of investment and intermediate use per employee. We also find that foreign-owned multinationals conduct a substantial amount of UK R&D. We discuss the implications of these and other findings for the policy debate on incentives to influence multinational firms’ location choices

AM baseband telemetry systems. Volume 1 - Factors affecting a common pilot system

Coherent demodulation in single and double side bands with frequency modulation telemetry system

AM-baseband telemetry systems. Volume 5 - Summary

Demodulation process for AM baseband telemetry system

Productivity policy

In this Briefing Note, we first present internationally comparative evidence on the UK's productivity performance (Section 2) and some of the underlying "drivers" of productivity identified by the government (Section 3). We then provide an overview of productivity policy under both Labour governments since 1997, and discuss the recent direction of policy in this 2005 Election Briefing area (Section 4). Finally, we discuss the proposals of the three main parties in the area of productivity policy (Section 5)

Am-baseband Telemetry Systems. Volume 4 - Problems Relating to Am-baseband Systems

Distortion of amplitude modulated radio signals passing within passband of bandpass filter

Macroscale and Nanoscale Photoelectrochemical Behavior of p-Type Si(111) Covered by a Single Layer of Graphene or Hexagonal Boron Nitride

Two-dimensional (2D) materials may enable a general approach to the introduction of a dipole at a semiconductor surface as well as control over other properties of the double layer at a semiconductor/liquid interface. Vastly different properties can be found in the 2D materials currently studied due in part to the range of the distribution of density-of-states. In this work, the open-circuit voltage (V_(oc)) of p-Si–H, p-Si/Gr (graphene), and p-Si/h-BN (hexagonal boron nitride) in contact with a series of one-electron outer-sphere redox couples was investigated by macroscale measurements as well as by scanning electrochemical cell microscopy (SECCM). The band gaps of Gr and h-BN (0–5.97 eV) encompass the wide range of band gaps for 2D materials, so these interfaces (p-Si/Gr and p-Si/h-BN) serve as useful references to understand the behavior of 2D materials more generally. The value of V_(oc) shifted with respect to the effective potential of the contacting solution, with slopes (ΔV_(oc)/ΔE_(Eff)) of −0.27 and −0.38 for p-Si/Gr and p-Si/h-BN, respectively, indicating that band bending at the p-Si/h-BN and p-Si/Gr interfaces responds at least partially to changes in the electrochemical potential of the contacting liquid electrolyte. Additionally, SECCM is shown to be an effective method to interrogate the nanoscale photoelectrochemical behavior of an interface, showing little spatial variance over scales exceeding the grain size of the CVD-grown 2D materials in this work. The measurements demonstrated that the polycrystalline nature of the 2D materials had little effect on the results and confirmed that the macroscale measurements reflected the junction behavior at the nanoscale

Prevalence and clinical characteristics of left ventricular dysfunction among elderly patients in general practice setting: cross sectional survey

Objective: To assess the prevalence and clinical characteristics of left ventricular dysfunction among elderly patients in the general practice setting by echocardiographic assessment of ventricular function. Design: Cross sectional survey. Setting: Four centre general practice in Poole, Dorset. Subjects: 817 elderly patients aged 70-84 years. Main outcomes: Echocardiographic assessment of left ventricular systolic function including measurement of ejection fraction by biplane summation method where possible, clinical symptoms, and signs of left ventricular dysfunction. Results: The overall prevalence of left ventricular systolic dysfunction was 7.5% (95% confidence interval 5.8% to 9.5%); mild dysfunction (5.0%) was considerably more prevalent than moderate (1.6%) or severe dysfunction (0.7%). Measurement of ejection fraction was possible in 82% of patients (n=667): in patients categorised as having mild, moderate, or severe dysfunction, the mean ejection fraction was 48% (SD 12.0), 38% (8.1), and 26% (7.9) respectively. At all ages the prevalence was much higher in men than in women (odds ratio 5.1, 95% confidence interval 2.6 to 10.1). No clinical symptom or sign was both sensitive and specific. In around half the patients with ventricular dysfunction (52%, 32/61) heart failure had not been previously diagnosed. Conclusions: Unrecognised left ventricular dysfunction is a common problem in elderly patients in the general practice setting. Appropriate treatment with angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors has the potential to reduce hospitalisation and mortality in these patients, but diagnosis should not be based on clinical history and examination alone. Screening is feasible in general practice, but it should not be implemented until the optimum method of identifying left ventricular dysfunction is clarified, and the cost effectiveness of screening has been shown

Approximate Hermitian-Yang-Mills structures and semistability for Higgs bundles. II: Higgs sheaves and admissible structures

We study the basic properties of Higgs sheaves over compact K\"ahler manifolds and we establish some results concerning the notion of semistability; in particular, we show that any extension of semistable Higgs sheaves with equal slopes is semistable. Then, we use the flattening theorem to construct a regularization of any torsion-free Higgs sheaf and we show that it is in fact a Higgs bundle. Using this, we prove that any Hermitian metric on a regularization of a torsion-free Higgs sheaf induces an admissible structure on the Higgs sheaf. Finally, using admissible structures we proved some properties of semistable Higgs sheaves.Comment: 18 pages; some typos correcte

An algorithm for determining program feasibility of a multi-mode PAM commutator telemetry system Technical report no. 10

Algorithm formulation for evaluation of strapping arrangement programs for PAM multimode commutation system of Saturn telemetry syste

C1-C8 volatile organic compounds in the atmosphere of Hong Kong: Overview of atmospheric processing and source apportionment

We present measurements of C1-C8 volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at four sites ranging from urban to rural areas in Hong Kong from September 2002 to August 2003. A total of 248 ambient VOC samples were collected. As expected, the urban and sub-urban sites generally gave relatively high VOC levels. In contrast, the average VOC levels were the lowest in the rural area. In general, higher mixing ratios were observed during winter/spring and lower levels during summer/fall because of seasonal variations of meteorological conditions. A variation of the air mass composition from urban to rural sites was observed. High ratios of ethyne/CO (5.6 pptv/ppbv) and propane/ethane (0.50 pptv/pptv) at the rural site suggested that the air masses over the territory were relatively fresh as compared to other remote regions. The principal component analysis (PCA) with absolute principal component scores (APCS) technique was applied to the VOC data in order to identify and quantify pollution sources at different sites. These results indicated that vehicular emissions made a significant contribution to ambient non-methane VOCs (NMVOCs) levels in urban areas (65±36%) and in sub-urban areas (50±28% and 53±41%). Other sources such as petrol evaporation, industrial emissions and solvent usage also played important roles in the VOC emissions. At the rural site, almost half of the measured total NMVOCs were due to combustion sources (vehicular and/or biomass/biofuel burning). Petrol evaporation, solvent usage, industrial and biogenic emissions also contributed to the atmospheric NMVOCs. The source apportionment results revealed a strong impact of anthropogenic VOCs to the atmosphere of Hong Kong in both urban/sub-urban and rural areas. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved