The export intensity of foreign affiliates in transition economies - the importance of the organization of production

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Monopolistic Competition, International Trade and Firm Heterogeneity - a Life Cycle Perspective

This paper presents a dynamic international trade model based on monopolistic competition, where observed intra-industry differences at a given point in time reflect different stages of the firm’s life cycle. New product varieties of still higher quality enter the market every period rendering old varieties obsolescent in a process of creative destruction. For given technology (variety) production costs decrease after an infant period due to learning. It is shown that several patterns of exports may arise depending primarily on the size of fixed trade costs. At a given point in time firms therefore differ due to different age, although all firms are symmetric in a life cycle perspective. The paper thus offers an alternative view on firm heterogeneity compared with other recent papers, where productivity differences appear as an outcome of a stochastic process.Product innovations; learning; creative destruction; firm heterogeneity; export performance

Lyngbygruppens indsats for at redder jøder i Humlebæk og Gilleleje i oktober 1943

The rescue of about 7,000 Jews from Denmark to Sweden in October 1943 is legendary, and has become world-famous not least due to Aage Bertelsen’s book October 43. He and his wife headed the so-called Lyngby group that was hiding Jews before arranging their transportation to Sweden from Humlebak and Smidstrup (Gilleleje). The group consisted of two sections: First, Dr. Ebba Standbygaard headed a local resistance group related to the political party Dansk Samling, and to the sabotage organization Holger Danske and the SOE. The other section, to which Bertelsen belonged, consisted of high school teachers who had relations to Dansk Studiering, an organization aiming to distribute illegal information. Two Jews were important for the creation of the group. One was Walter A. Berendsohn, former professor of Scandinavian literature at the University of Hamburg, who settled in Lyngby in 1933 after Hitler came to power in Germany. The other was the veterinarian David Sompolinsky, a member of the ultra orthodox synagogue in Copenhagen. It is possible to determine that members of the ultra orthodox synagogue and their relatives and friends were among the approximately 700 Jews rescued by the Lyngby group. The group collaborated with a group of doctors and students, and therefore the number of people who were rescued by the Lyngby group may be higher. Bertelsen escaped to Sweden on September 16, 1943, and he became the chairman of the board of trustees of the Danish School in Lund. Due to informers, most of the Lyngby rescuers fled to Sweden, and some ended up in concentration camps. Two of them were mistreated so badly that they died shortly after the liberation

Niels og Harald Bohr, forfølgelsen af jødiske videnskabsmænds og udviklingen af atombomben i USA

After Hitler came to power in January 1933, the Nazis immediately purged Jewish mathematicians and physicists from German universities. The most severe actions were dismissals from the university in Göttingen, where the institutes of mathematics and physics virtually ceased to exist. The professors who lost their positions were the leading scholars in their fields, including no fewer than 20 Nobel laureates. Their colleagues in other countries established rescue committees. In Denmark the historian Aage Friis created a committee that rescued scholars, in which Niels Bohr was active. With the help from the Rockefeller Foundation (among others), he and his brother Harald provided a temporary safe haven for refugees in Denmark, before they found employment at American universities. Among the physicists they assisted were Hilde Levi, James Franck, George von Hevesy, Otto Robert Frisch, Lise Meitner, George Placzek, and Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb”. In 1939, Niels Bohr discovered that fission related to the isotope Uranium-235, and later Otto Frisch and Rudolf Ernst Peierls calculated that it was possible to produce an atomic bomb, as it required only a couple of pounds of U-235. A large number of émigré scientists ended up in the research laboratory at Los Alamos, working on the atomic bomb. After Niels Bohr fled to Sweden in September 1943, he and his son Aage also went to Los Alamos in 1944. The scientists were against using the atomic bomb against Japan, but the decision to use the bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki was in the hands of the US government. Niels Bohr returned to Denmark on August 25, 1945. He died on November 18, 1962. In 1963 Heisenberg wrote in his obituary that “Bohr’s influence on physics and the physicists in our century is much greater than [that of] anybody else, including Albert Einstein.

Work Hours, Social Value of Leisure and Globalisation

We examine how openness interacts with the coordination of consumption-leisure decisions in determining the equilibrium working hours and wage rate when there are leisure externalities (e.g., due to social interactions). The latter are modelled by allowing a workers marginal utility of leisure to be increasing in the leisure time taken by other workers. Coordination takes the form of internalising the leisure externality and other relevant constraints (e.g., labour demand). The extent of openness is measured by the degree of capital mobility. We find that: coordination lowers equilibrium work hours and raises the wage rate; there is a U-shaped (inverse-U-shaped) relationship between work hours (wages) and the degree of coordination; coordination is welfare improving; and, the gap between the coordinated and uncoordinated work hours (and the corresponding wage rates) is affected by the extent and nature of openness.coordination; corporatism; openness; capital mobility; social multiplier; welfare; work hours

Size of the group IVA iron meteorite core: Constraints from the age and composition of Muonionalusta

The group IVA fractionally crystallized iron meteorites display a diverse range of metallographic cooling rates. These have been attributed to their formation in a metallic core, approximately 150 km in radius, that cooled to crystallization in the absence of any appreciable insulating mantle. Here we build upon this formation model by incorporating several new constraints. These include (i) a recent U-Pb radiometric closure age of <2.5 Myr after solar system formation for the group IVA iron Muonionalusta, (ii) new measurements and modeling of highly siderophile element compositions for a suite of IVAs, and (iii) consideration of the thermal effects of heating by the decay of the short-lived radionuclide 60Fe. Our model for the thermal evolution of the IVA core suggests that it was approximately 50 - 110 km in radius after being collisionally exposed. This range is due to uncertainties in the initial abundance of live 60Fe incorporated into the IVA core. Our models define a relationship between cooling rate and closure age, which is used to make several predictions that can be tested with future measurements. In general, our results show that diverse cooling rates and early U-Pb closure ages can only coexist on mantle-free bodies and that energy released by the decay of 60Fe reduces the core size necessary to produce diverse metallographic cooling rates. The influence of 60Fe on cooling rates has largely been neglected in previous core formation models; accounting for this heat source can affect size estimates for other iron meteorite cores that cooled to crystallization in the presence of live 60Fe. Candidates for such a scenario of early, mantle-free formation include the iron IIAB, IIIAB and IVB groups.Comment: 30 pages, 3 figures, accepted to Earth and Planetary Science Letter

Melting and differentiation of early-formed asteroids: The perspective from high precision oxygen isotope studies

A number of distinct methodologies are available for determining the oxygen isotope composition of minerals and rocks, these include laser-assisted fluorination, secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS)and UV laser ablation. In this review we focus on laser-assisted fluorination, which currently achieves the highest levels of precision available for oxygen isotope analysis. In particular, we examine how results using this method have furthered our understanding of early-formed differentiated meteorites. Due to its rapid reaction times and low blank levels, laser-assisted fluorination has now largely superseded the conventional externally-heated Ni “bomb” technique for bulk analysis. Unlike UV laser ablation and SIMS analysis, laser-assisted fluorination is not capable of focused spot analysis. While laser fluorination is now a mature technology, further analytical improvements are possible via refinements to the construction of sample chambers, clean-up lines and the use of ultra-high resolution mass spectrometers. High-precision oxygen isotope analysis has proved to be a particularly powerful technique for investigating the formation and evolution of early-formed differentiated asteroids and has provided unique insights into the interrelationships between various groups of achondrites. A clear example of this is seenin samples that lie close to the terrestrial fractionation line (TFL). Based on the data from conventional oxygen isotope analysis, it was suggested that the main-group pallasites, the howardite eucrite diogenite suite (HEDs) and mesosiderites could all be derived from a single common parent body. However,high precision analysis demonstrates that main-group pallasites have a Δ17O composition that is fully resolvable from that of the HEDs and mesosiderites, indicating the involvement of at least two parent bodies. The range of Δ17O values exhibited by an achondrite group provides a useful means of assessing the extent to which their parent body underwent melting and isotopic homogenization. Oxygen isotope analysis can also highlight relationships between ungrouped achondrites and the more well-populated groups. A clear example of this is the proposed link between the evolved GRA 06128/9 meteorites and the brachinites. The evidence from oxygen isotopes, in conjunction with that from other techniques, indicates that we have samples from approximately 110 asteroidal parent bodies (∼60 irons, ∼35 achondrites and stony-iron, and ∼15 chondrites) in our global meteorite collection. However, compared to the likely size of the original protoplanetary asteroid population, this is an extremely low value. In addition, almost all of the differentiated samples (achondrites, stony-iron and irons) are derived from parent bodies that were highly disrupted early in their evolution. High-precision oxygen isotope analysis of achondrites provides some important insights into the origin of mass-independent variation in the early Solar System. In particular, the evidence from various primitive achondrite groups indicates that both the slope 1 (Y&R) and CCAM lines are of primordial significance. Δ17O differences between water ice and silicate-rich solids were probably the initial source of the slope 1 anomaly. These phases most likely acquired their isotopic composition as a result of UV photo-dissociation of CO that took place either in the early solar nebula or precursor giant molecular cloud. Such small-scale isotopic heterogeneities were propagated into larger-sized bodies, such as asteroids and planets, as a result of early Solar System processes, including dehydration, aqueous alteration,melting and collisional interactions