30,688 research outputs found
Economic, demographic, and institutional determinants of life insurance consumption across countries.
[Dataset available: http://hdl.handle.net/10411/12892]
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Keep walking? Geographical proximity, religion, and relationship banking
We investigate the geographical proximity of firms to their relationship banks. We find that Islamic banks are more remote to their borrowers. We also find that the probability for a firm to connect to a bank substantially decreases in distance, but that the choice along bank characteristics determines how potent distance is in its impact. If the bank in the vicinity is an Islamic bank, distance plays a more muted role, especially in cities with a high conservative party vote and higher trust in religious institutions. Overall, these findings suggest that the presence of banks with certain characteristics in the vicinity may determine the within-firm and across-firm configurations of observable firm-bank connections. (112 words)
Study reveals effect of aluminum on saturation moment of Fe-Ni alloys
Study of saturation magnetization, important in the investigation of the electronic structure of alloys, reveals the effect of aluminum on the saturation moments of iron-nickel alloys. The saturation magnetizations were extrapolated to the absolute zero of temperature for calculating average atomic moments
Transition from a mixed to a pure d-wave symmetry in superconducting optimally doped YBaCuO thin films under applied fields
We have probed the Landau levels of nodal quasi-particles by tunneling along
a nodal direction of (110) oriented YBaCuO thin films with a
magnetic field applied perpendicular to the planes, and parallel to the
film's surface. In optimally doped films and at low temperature, finite energy
nodal states are clearly observed in films thinner than the London penetration
depth. Above a well defined temperature the order parameter reverts to a pure
\emph{d}-wave symmetry.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Innovation and Foreign Investment Behavior of the U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry
This paper deals with the links between the development of new drugs, and particularly of innovative new drugs, and the international activities of U.S. drug companies. While U.S. drug companies have developed new production processes - the most notable being the fermentation process for making penicillin - we concentrate in this paper on new products. Since production costs comprise less than 40 percent of the selling price of drugs and since the person choosing the drug rarely pays for it, growth in company sales and profits comes more from introducing new products than from cutting costs and prices of old products. The main novelty of our study is our examination of "innovative" as contrasted with "imitative" new drugs. Previous studies have generally focused on the total number of new drugs produced each year, but since our interest is in the causes and consequences of innovation, we have concentrated on the products we have rated as innovative. Section I explains our criteria for this distinction and presents our enumeration of the innovative new drugs for each of the 22 companies in our sample. In Section II we discuss trends in the rate of drug innovation and the factors influencing those trends. Section III describes our sample of drug companies and characterizes them with respect to their size, research investment, and innovativeness. Section IV examines the relation of innovativeness to the foreign activities of individual firms. In Section V we analyze, for a sample of 7 new drugs introduced by two companies, the rate at which use of the drugs was diffused among various countries arid the impact of the presence of manufacturing plants on the rate of diffusion.
Parity-Violating Electron Scattering and Neucleon Structure
The measurement of parity violation in the helicity dependence of
electron-nucleon scattering provides unique information about the basic quark
structure of the nucleons. In this review, the general formalism of
parity-violating electron scattering is presented, with emphasis on elastic
electron-nucleon scattering. The physics issues addressed by such experiments
is discussed, and the major goals of the presently envisioned experimental
program are identified. %General aspects of the experimental technique are
reviewed and A summary of results from a recent series of experiments is
presented and the future prospects of this program are also discussed.Comment: 45 pages, 9 figure
Financing Africa: Through the crisis and beyond.
[Dataset available: http://hdl.handle.net/10411/17679]
Near-barrier Fusion Induced by Stable Weakly Bound and Exotic Halo Light Nuclei
The effect of breakup is investigated for the medium weight
Li+Co system in the vicinity of the Coulomb barrier. The strong
coupling of breakup/transfer channels to fusion is discussed within a
comparison of predictions of the Continuum Discretized Coupled-Channels model
which is also applied to He+Co a reaction induced by the borromean
halo nucleus He.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures. A talk given at the FUSION06: International
Conference on Reaction Mechanisms and Nuclear Structure at the Coulomb
barrier, March 19-23, 2006, San Servolo, Venezia, Ital
Temporal extensivity of Tsallis' entropy and the bound on entropy production rate
The Tsallis entropy, which is a generalization of the Boltzmann-Gibbs
entropy, plays a central role in nonextensive statistical mechanics of complex
systems. A lot of efforts have recently been made on establishing a dynamical
foundation for the Tsallis entropy. They are primarily concerned with nonlinear
dynamical systems at the edge of chaos. Here, it is shown by generalizing a
formulation of thermostatistics based on time averages recently proposed by
Carati [A. Carati, Physica A 348, 110 (2005)] that, whenever relevant, the
Tsallis entropy indexed by is temporally extensive: linear growth in time,
i.e., finite entropy production rate. Then, the universal bound on the entropy
production rate is shown to be . The property of the associated
probabilistic process, i.e., the sojourn time distribution, determining
randomness of motion in phase space is also analyzed.Comment: 25 pages, no figure
Infrared Emission from Clusters in the Starforming Disk of He2-10
We have made subarcsecond-resolution images of the central 10" of the
Wolf-Rayet dwarf galaxy He 2-10 at 11.7 microns, using the Long Wavelength
Spectrometer on the Keck Telescope. The spatial distribution of the infrared
emission roughly agrees with that of the rising spectrum radio sources seen by
Kobulnicky & Johnson (1999) and confirms that those sources are compact HII
regions rather than SNR or other objects. The infrared sources are more
extended than the subarcsecond rising spectrum radio sources, although the
entire complex is still less than 5" in extent. On sizescales of 1" the
infrared and radio emission are in excellent agreement, with each source
requiring several hundred to a thousand O stars for excitation. The nebulae lie
in a flattened disk-like distribution about 240 by 100 pc and provide all of
the flux measured by IRAS for the entire galaxy in the 12 micron band; 30% of
the total IRAS flux from the galaxy emanates from one 15-30 pc source. In this
galaxy, intense star formation, probably triggered by an accretion event, is
confined to a central disk which breaks up into distinct nebulae which
presumably mark the sites of young super star clusters.Comment: Accepted for Publication in the Astronomical Journa
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