The impact of exports to China on Latin American growth

This article analyzes the relationship between GDP growth in seven major Latin American countries and China’s demand for their exports. GLS panel estimation using annual data for the period 1994-2013 shows that the relationship was both statistically and economically significant. Control variables found to be significant in positively affecting GDP growth include the investment-to-output ratio, the exchange rate, and the terms of trade, and, in negatively affecting it, population growth and the unemployment rate. Consistent with recent literature, foreign direct investment was found not to be significant. A sharp drop in exports to China for many of the countries in the sample in 2015 raises questions about the region’s vulnerability to China’s growth slowdown

The Two-Dimensional, Rectangular, Guillotineable-Layout Cutting Problem with a Single Defect

In this paper, a two-dimensional cutting problem is considered in which a single plate (large object) has to be cut down into a set of small items of maximal value. As opposed to standard cutting problems, the large object contains a defect, which must not be covered by a small item. The problem is represented by means of an AND/OR-graph, and a Branch & Bound procedure (including heuristic modifications for speeding up the search process) is introduced for its exact solution. The proposed method is evaluated in a series of numerical experiments that are run on problem instances taken from the literature, as well as on randomly generated instances.Two-dimensional cutting, defect, AND/OR-graph, Branch & Bound

Threshold Effects of Terms of Trade on Latin American Growth

This paper investigates nonlinear relationships between terms of trade volatility (totvol) and economic growth in 14 Latin American economies from 1997 to 2014. In the 2000s, Latin American countries experienced accelerated economic growth often attributed to commodity price booms. We split the sample into two regimes based on totvol thresholds determined by bootstrap techniques. Fixed-effects, instrumental variable and dynamic panel regressions address endogeneity in trade-growth, subject to traditional economic channels such as domestic investment, population growth, exchange rate, government size, and institutions. We find statistically significant thresholds and stronger trade-growth links during the 2000s commodity boom and in larger economies

Study of the Distillability of Werner States Using Entanglement Witnesses and Robust Semidefinite Programs

We use Robust Semidefinite Programs and Entanglement Witnesses to study the distillability of Werner states. We perform exact numerical calculations which show 2-undistillability in a region of the state space which was previously conjectured to be undistillable. We also introduce bases which yield interesting expressions for the {\em distillability witnesses} and for a tensor product of Werner states with arbitrary number of copies.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figure

Are US-Dollar-Hedged-ETF Investors Aggressive on Exchange Rates? A Panel VAR Approach

Exchange traded funds (ETFs) are a multi-trillion dollar market that epitomizes financialization due to its recent growth. This study examines the behavior of U.S. listed currency hedged ETF investors towards changes in the underlying benchmark and foreign exchange rate from July 2011 to November 2015 using a panel VAR approach. We find that investors are able to anticipate changes in future exchange rates and invest in currency hedged ETFs prior to changes. Granger-causality tests confirm that these investors proactively trade before large real exchange rate movements. These results suggest that the use of financial instruments such as ETFs to hedge against exchange rate volatility may have itself become a source of volatility, which have implications for the further financialization of the ETF industry