Protection of Intellectual Property Rights in a Transition Economy

Market perestroika and integration into the world economy require strengthening protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in transition economies like Russia. This paper examines patterns and emerging trends in piracy and protection of IPRs in Russia and analyzes the economic effects of strengthening IPRs in the context of Russia's market transition. In the early 1990s, Russia brought IPR legislation up to international standards. Yet IPR enforcement remains weak, and piracy of foreign software, trademarks, audio- and videocassettes flourishes. Ineffective IPR protection stifles innovation, trade, and direct foreign investment, and may become an obstacle to Russia's future membership in the World Trade Organization.intellectual property rights, Russia, piracy, transition economy

Is Africa Integrated in the Global Economy?

The popular impression that Africa has not integrated into world trade, as suggested by the evolution in simple indicators, has been called into question recently by more formal analysis. This paper refines and generalizes this analysis and lends support to the popular view of disintegration, but only for countries in Francophone Africa. These countries are currently underexploiting their trading opportunities and have witnessed disintegration over time, a trend that is most pronounced in their trade with technologically advanced countries. There is some evidence, on the other hand, that countries in Anglophone Africa are reversing the trend of disintegration, particularly in their trade with advanced countries. Copyright 2003, International Monetary Fund

Three Cycles: Housing, Credit and Real Activity

We examine the characteristics and comovement of cycles in house prices, credit, real activity and interest rates in advanced economies during the past 25 years, using a dynamic generalised factor model. House price cycles generally lead credit and business cycles over the long term, while in the short to medium run the relationship varies across countries. Interest rates tend to lag other cycles at all time horizons. While global factors are important, the U.S. business cycle, house price cycle and interest rate cycle tend to lead the respective cycles in other countries over all time horizons. However, the U.S. credit cycle leads mostly over the long term.Macro-financial linkages, house prices, credit, business cycle

FedSelect: Customized Selection of Parameters for Fine-Tuning during Personalized Federated Learning

Recent advancements in federated learning (FL) seek to increase client-level performance by fine-tuning client parameters on local data or personalizing architectures for the local task. Existing methods for such personalization either prune a global model or fine-tune a global model on a local client distribution. However, these existing methods either personalize at the expense of retaining important global knowledge, or predetermine network layers for fine-tuning, resulting in suboptimal storage of global knowledge within client models. Enlightened by the lottery ticket hypothesis, we first introduce a hypothesis for finding optimal client subnetworks to locally fine-tune while leaving the rest of the parameters frozen. We then propose a novel FL framework, FedSelect, using this procedure that directly personalizes both client subnetwork structure and parameters, via the simultaneous discovery of optimal parameters for personalization and the rest of parameters for global aggregation during training. We show that this method achieves promising results on CIFAR-10.Comment: We are still expanding this wor

Trade Liberalization and Industry Protection in Russia

This paper presents an endogenous growth model for two regions with assymetric initial stocks of knowledge. The novel features of the paper lie in modelling the differentiation of regions into an innovator and an imitator as endogenous, and analyzing optimal intellectual property rights (IPRs) for the imitator's catching-up. Weak IPR protection and a high imitation rate allow the initially knowledge-scarce imitator region to accumulate sufficient knowledge and switch to innovation, at which time tight IPRs become socially optimal. Policy implications for the international harmonization of IPRs under are assessed in light of the theoretical results.innovation, imitation, intellectual property rights

Contemporary analysis of Reexcision and Conversion to Mastectomy Rates and associated Healthcare Costs For Women Undergoing Breast-Conserving Surgery

PURPOSE: This study was designed to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of population-level reoperation rates and incremental healthcare costs associated with reoperation for patients who underwent breast-conserving surgery (BCS). METHODS: This is a retrospective cohort study using Merative™ MarketScan RESULTS: The commercial cohort included 17,129 women with a median age of 55 (interquartile range [IQR] 49-59) years, and the Medicare cohort included 6977 women with a median age of 73 (IQR 69-78) years. Overall reoperation rates were 21.1% (95% confidence interval [CI] 20.5-21.8%) for the commercial cohort and 14.9% (95% CI 14.1-15.7%) for the Medicare cohort. In both cohorts, reoperation rates decreased as age increased, and conversion to mastectomy was more prevalent among younger women in the commercial cohort. The mean healthcare costs during 1 year of follow-up from the initial BCS were $95,165 for the commercial cohort and$36,313 for the Medicare cohort. Reoperations were associated with 24% higher costs in both the commercial and Medicare cohorts, which translated into $21,607 and$8559 incremental costs, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The rates of reoperation after BCS have remained high and have contributed to increased healthcare costs. Continuing efforts to reduce reoperation need more attention

Market Response to Policy Initiatives during the Global Financial Crisis

This paper examines the impact of macroeconomic and financial sector policy announcements in the United States, the United Kingdom, the euro area, and Japan during the recent crisis on interbank credit and liquidity risk premia. Announcements of interest rate cuts, liquidity support, liability guarantees, and recapitalization were associated with a reduction of interbank risk premia, albeit to a different degree during the subprime and global phases of the crisis. Decisions not to reduce interest rates and bail out individual banks in an ad hoc manner had adverse repercussions, both domestically and abroad. The results are robust to controlling for the surprise content of announcements and using alternative measures of financial distress.

Identification and Functional Analysis of Healing Regulators in Drosophila

© 2015 Álvarez-Fernández et al. Wound healing is an essential homeostatic mechanism that maintains the epithelial barrier integrity after tissue damage. Although we know the overall steps in wound healing, many of the underlying molecular mechanisms remain unclear. Genetically amenable systems, such as wound healing in Drosophila imaginal discs, do not model all aspects of the repair process. However, they do allow the less understood aspects of the healing response to be explored, e.g., which signal(s) are responsible for initiating tissue remodeling? How is sealing of the epithelia achieved? Or, what inhibitory cues cancel the healing machinery upon completion? Answering these and other questions first requires the identification and functional analysis of wound specific genes. A variety of different microarray analyses of murine and humans have identified characteristic profiles of gene expression at the wound site, however, very few functional studies in healing regulation have been carried out. We developed an experimentally controlled method that is healing-permissive and that allows live imaging and biochemical analysis of cultured imaginal discs. We performed comparative genome-wide profiling between Drosophila imaginal cells actively involved in healing versus their non-engaged siblings. Sets of potential wound-specific genes were subsequently identified. Importantly, besides identifying and categorizing new genes, we functionally tested many of their gene products by genetic interference and overexpression in healing assays. This non-saturated analysis defines a relevant set of genes whose changes in expression level are functionally significant for proper tissue repair. Amongst these we identified the TCP1 chaperonin complex as a key regulator of the actin cytoskeleton essential for the wound healing response. There is promise that our newly identified wound-healing genes will guide future work in the more complex mammalian wound healing response.CAF and FP were supported by the EU FP6 STREP project WOUND and ST held a Spanish FPU PhD studentship. Research in the EMB laboratory is funded by grants of the EU (FP6 STREP project WOUND), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (DGI and CONSOLIDER grants) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (SGR)Peer Reviewe