6,952 research outputs found
Product cycles, innovation and exports: A study of Indian pharmaceuticals
This paper sheds light on the product cycle and neotechnology theories of trade in the context of generic pharmaceuticals. The paper studies the export performance of 177 Indian pharmaceutical firms for the post- liberalization period 1991-2004. The results indicate that technology proxied by foreign patent rights has a positive impact on exports. This suggests that developing countries with innovation skills for process innovations are capable of penetrating international markets in the later stages of the product cycle by using patents, which were the barriers to trade in the early stages of the product cycle. Thus, Indian pharmaceutical firms adept at reverse-engineering of brandname drugs have an opportunity to enter the global generic market for off-patent drugs.Product cycle, Exports, Foreign patents, Pharmaceuticals
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Sunspots and monetary policy
A monetary economy subject to expectational sunspots is prone to
instability, in the sense of multiple rational expectations equilibria. We
show how to modify the policy rule to guarantee stability in the presence
of expectational sunspots. The policy-maker must co-ordinate in ation
dynamics by targeting each of lagged, current and expected in ation.
We show that this solution maps directly into the timeless perspective
by Woodford. Finally, we trace the responses in an arti cial sunspot
economy to the adoption of our rule and illustrate the extent to which
macroeconomic persistence is reduced
Improved Techniques for Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation
Adversarial discriminative domain adaptation (ADDA) is an efficient framework
for unsupervised domain adaptation in image classification, where the source
and target domains are assumed to have the same classes, but no labels are
available for the target domain. We investigate whether we can improve
performance of ADDA with a new framework and new loss formulations. Following
the framework of semi-supervised GANs, we first extend the discriminator output
over the source classes, in order to model the joint distribution over domain
and task. We thus leverage on the distribution over the source encoder
posteriors (which is fixed during adversarial training) and propose maximum
mean discrepancy (MMD) and reconstruction-based loss functions for aligning the
target encoder distribution to the source domain. We compare and provide a
comprehensive analysis of how our framework and loss formulations extend over
simple multi-class extensions of ADDA and other discriminative variants of
semi-supervised GANs. In addition, we introduce various forms of regularization
for stabilizing training, including treating the discriminator as a denoising
autoencoder and regularizing the target encoder with source examples to reduce
overfitting under a contraction mapping (i.e., when the target per-class
distributions are contracting during alignment with the source). Finally, we
validate our framework on standard domain adaptation datasets, such as SVHN and
MNIST. We also examine how our framework benefits recognition problems based on
modalities that lack training data, by introducing and evaluating on a
neuromorphic vision sensing (NVS) sign language recognition dataset, where the
source and target domains constitute emulated and real neuromorphic spike
events respectively. Our results on all datasets show that our proposal
competes or outperforms the state-of-the-art in unsupervised domain adaptation.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Image Processin
Macroeconomic models and the yield curve: An assessment of the fit
Many have questioned the empirical relevance of the Calvo-Yun model. This paper adds a term structure to three widely studied macroeconomic models (Calvo-Yun, hybrid and Svensson). We back out from observations on the yield curve the underlying macroeconomic model that most closely matches the level, slope and curvature of the yield curve. With each model we trace the response of the yield curve to macroeconomic shocks. We assess the fit of each model against the observed behaviour of interest rates and find limited support for the Calvo-Yun model in terms of fit with the observed yield curve, we find some support for the hybrid model but the Svensson model performs best
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Inflation Targeting, Transparency and Interest Rate Volatility: Ditching 'Monetary Mystique' in the UK
Monetary authorities often seem reluctant to discuss the conduct of monetary policy. There is a concern that greater openness in monetary policy-making may lead to volatility in financial markets, and specifically in interest rates. To date there is very little direct empirical evidence; however, recent changes in the monetary policy framework in the UK provide an opportunity to gain some insight on this issue. First, the authors present a model of monetary policy showing that the volatility that would otherwise occur to aggregate prices is transmitted to the rate of interest in a tightly specified nominal regime. Under some circumstances, information flows may add to volatility; if volatility is harmful, then central bankers may be right to be reticent. However, the evidence suggests that even though volatility has risen in the recent past, there is no evidence that this volatility is directly attributable to increased information flows per se
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The effect of visual impairment on quality of life of children aged 3-16 years
Background: It is well known that visual impairment (VI) has a detrimental effect on Quality of Life (QoL) in adults.
Little is known about the effects of VI in childhood.
Aims: To evaluate the effects of VI on QoL of children. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study containing
a comparison arm for children with VI.
Methods: QoL in children with VI (n¼24, age 10.1362.89, 18 male, 6 female) was compared with an age-matched comparison group (n¼24, age 9.8362.81, 18 male, 6 female) using the Low Vision Quality of Life Questionnaire. Factors (distance and near visual acuity and age) that could be used as predictors of QoL were assessed. These were measured with standard clinical tests.
Results: Children with VI had significantly lower QoL scores than the comparison group (p<0.001), resulting in a 35.6% reduction in total QoL score. QoL scores in children with VI were correlated with distance and near visual acuity (p<0.05). 38% of the variance could be predicted by these factors and age.
Conclusions: Consideration of the effects of this reduced QoL must be made. Further studies are needed to establish the benefit to QoL of different habilitation strategies
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