International harmonization of product standards and firm heterogeneity in international trade

As free trade areas have proliferated and statutory tariffs have been dramatically reduced in recent decades, non-tariff barriers (NTBs) to international trade have risen in importance. Destination-specific product standards are one of the major types of NTBs as they impose additional costs on exporters and increase the time required to bring a product to market. This paper examines the response of U.S. manufacturing firms to a reduction of this NTB by looking at the harmonization of European product standards to international norms in the electronics sector. Using a highly detailed dataset that links U.S. international trade transactions to U.S. firms and a new industry-level database of EU product standards, the author finds that harmonization increases U.S. exports to the EU and that this increase is due to more U.S. firms entering the EU market –the extensive margin of trade. New entrants to the EU region are drawn mainly from the most productive set of firms already exporting to developing markets before harmonization -the extensive margin of trade composition. These firms are characterized by being smaller and less productive than the firms that were already exporting to the EU before harmonization. Furthermore, harmonization decreases export sales at existing exporters -the intensive margin of trade. These findings are consistent with a model featuring the role of product standards heterogeneity across market destinations and productivity heterogeneity across firms. These results suggest that working toward a harmonization of product rules across markets could be a supportive policy to encourage small and medium size firms'ability to enter new export markets.Markets and Market Access,E-Business,Information Security&Privacy,Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies

Eco-innovation practices’ adoption in the automotive industry

Eco-innovation is a construct that is gaining increasing interest from academics and researchers since it is commonly considered in the literature as one of the strategies that allow manufacturing companies not only to significantly reduce the negative impacts on the environment but also the generation of pollutants. However, little is known about the adoption of eco-innovation practices in manufacturing companies, particularly in the automotive industry. Therefore, this research has as main objective to fill this gap in the literature and explore the interdependence between eco-innovation of products, processes and management. The study is conducted through a research framework consisting of 3 measurement scales, 14 items and 3 hypotheses and an extensive review of the literature. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed to a sample of 460 companies in the automotive and auto parts industry in Mexico. Data were analyzed through Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Descriptive Statistics and Structural Equation Modelling. The results obtained show that product eco-innovation, process eco-innovation and management eco-innovation are good indicators for the adoption of eco-innovation practices for companies in the automotive and auto parts industry. The paper addresses a research gap in the academic literature in the eco-innovation field by providing evidence on the interdependence between eco-innovation of products, processes and management and the implementation of their practices in the automotive industry.N/

A study of time-based features and regularity of manipulation to improve the detection of eating activity periods during free living

This thesis considers the problem of detecting when people eat by tracking their wrist motion. The goal of this work is to automatically detect the start and stop times of these eating activities. It builds upon previous work done by our research group, which developed an algorithm for automatically detecting peaks in activities associated with food preparation and clean-up. This peak detector is then used for segmenting data. These segments are then classified as eating or non-eating activities using a naive Bayes classifier based on probabilities obtained from computing different features in each segment. The original work introduced 4 features, all of them based on sensor readings. In this thesis we introduce a set of 3 new features to improve the detection of eating and non-eating activity periods: regularity of manipulation, time since last eating activity and cumulative eating time. We discuss the main concepts behind them, introducing the idea of time-based features. We then we test our new features under the framework developed by our group. Detection including regularity of manipulation, in combination with the original 4 features, achieved an overall accuracy of 79%. The accuracy obtained including time since last eating activity reached 69% and cumulative eating time, an overall accuracy of 64%. Finally, we compare these results to the original work and later discuss and characterize results based on our findings

Modeling the AC Electrokinetic Behavior of Semiconducting Spheres

We study theoretically the dielectrophoresis and electrorotation of a semiconducting microsphere immersed in an aqueous electrolyte. To this end, the particle polarizability is calculated from first principles for arbitrary thickness of the Debye layers in liquid and semiconductor. We show that the polarizability dispersion arises from the combination of two relaxation interfacial phenomena: charging of the electrical double layer and the Maxwell–Wagner relaxation. We also calculate the particle polarizability in the limit of thin electrical double layers, which greatly simplifies the analytical calculations. Finally, we show the model predictions for two relevant materials (ZnO and doped silicon) and discuss the limits of validity of the thin double layer approximation

Dipolophoresis and Travelling-Wave Dipolophoresis of Metal Microparticles

We study theoretically and numerically the electrokinetic behavior of metal microparticles immersed in aqueous electrolytes. We consider small particles subjected to non-homogeneous ac electric fields and we describe their motion as arising from the combination of electrical forces (dielectrophoresis) and the electroosmotic flows on the particle surface (induced-charge electrophoresis). The net particle motion is known as dipolophoresis. We also study the particle motion induced by travelling electric fields. We find analytical expressions for the dielectrophoresis and induced-charge electrophoresis of metal spheres and we compare them with numerical solutions. This validates our numerical method, which we also use to study the dipolophoresis of metal cylinders.Spanish Research Agency MCI under contract PGC2018-099217-B-I00

Biocultural Diversity Conservation: A Global Sourcebook

Review of Biocultural Diversity Conservation: A Global Sourcebook. Luisa Maffi and Ellen Woodley. 2010. Earthscan, London. Pp. 304. $57.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-84407-921-6

Improving edge finite element assembly for geophysical electromagnetic modelling on shared-memory architectures

This work presents a set of node-level optimizations to perform the assembly of edge finite element matrices that arise in 3D geophysical electromagnetic modelling on shared-memory architectures. Firstly, we describe the traditional and sequential assembly approach. Secondly, we depict our vectorized and shared-memory strategy which does not require any low level instructions because it is based on an interpreted programming language, namely, Python. As a result, we obtained a simple parallel-vectorized algorithm whose runtime performance is considerably better than sequential version. The set of optimizations have been included to the work-flow of the Parallel Edge-based Tool for Geophysical Electromagnetic Modelling (PETGEM) which is developed as open-source at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Finally, we present numerical results for a set of tests in order to illustrate the performance of our strategy.This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 644202. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme (2014-2020) and from Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation through Rede Nacional de Pesquisa (RNP) under the HPC4E Project (www.hpc4e.eu), grant agreement No. 689772. Authors gratefully acknowledge the support from the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT). All numerical tests were performed on the MareNostrum supercomputer of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (www.bsc.es).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Beyond the information technology agreement : harmonization of standards and trade in electronics

Product standards can have a dual impact on production and trade costs. Standards may impose additional costs on exporters as it may be necessary to adapt products for specific markets (cost-effect). In contrast, standards can reduce exporters'information costs if they convey information on industrial requirements or consumer tastes that would be costly to collect in the absence of standards (informational-effect). Using a new World Bank database of European standards for electronic products, the authors examine the impact of internationally-harmonized European standards on European Union imports. They find that European Union standards for electronic products that are harmonized to international standards have a positive and significant effect on trade. The results suggest that efforts to promote trade in electronic products could be complemented by steps to promote standards harmonization. This might include, for example, re-starting talks to extend the Information Technology Agreement to non-tariff measures and commitments to harmonize national standards in electronic products.Information Security&Privacy,Technology Industry,Scientific Research&Science Parks,Science Education,Labor Policies

The Role of Futures Prices in Pricing Commodity Exports of Developing Countries

The purpose of this thesis is to study the empirical linkages between nearby futures prices for coffee at the New York (NY) Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)/NY Board of Trade (NYBOT) and cash prices (producer and export prices) in selected Latin American countries. This theme was entertained in Fortenbery and Zapata (2004) and subsequently by Fortenbery and Zapata (2004) and Li and Fortenbery (2013). This thesis uses data from January 1990 to May 2013 and adds producer cash prices in addition to export prices, thus expanding the dataset by over a decade and adding local market cash prices relative to the first paper, and also adds Brazil (the largest Arabica coffee exporter) and Colombia (a producer of high quality coffee) to the country mix; all cash prices were provided by the International Coffee Organization. Cointegration methodology is used to study price linkages between nearby futures prices in New York and the above spot prices. Implications for speculative activity are derived in light of the more recent paper above. Cointegration tests suggest that nearby futures market prices in New York are strongly linked with export prices in Brazil and Guatemala as well as with producer prices in Brazil and Honduras. Weak linkages exist for the remaining series of producer and export prices. Finding strong linkages for some markets is consistent with anecdotal evidence on the partial use of ICE/NYBOT futures prices to set domestic producer level prices in some countries. When evaluating the price relationship between producer and export prices in each country, Brazilian producer and export prices were the only ones that resulted to be cointegrated with each other, suggesting that local prices for coffee at different market levels are strongly linked and causal in at least one direction for Brazil. Optimal lag lengths used for the cointegration tests imply that the information transmission between the cointegrated series is slower than expected when compared to some US commodity markets where price changes can be reflected in 1 to 3 days. Impulse response functions from error correction models and vector autoregressive models confirm the causal nature of the relationship between coffee futures prices and cash prices in the four countries. When considering the implications of this research, preliminary results from a very simple regression analysis suggest that, consistent with Li and Fortenbery (2013), increases in intertemporal spreads by noncommercial speculative activity significantly decreases price volatility. This adds to existing evidence that efforts to limit the size of speculative positions may not strongly contribute to commodity price stability. For countries where coffee contributes to significant economic activity, and in which there is a large number of small producers, the gains from using commodity futures markets for coffee price risk management has considerable appeal. Hedging in futures markets, for example, or distributing futures price information to local cash market participants in developing countries could lead to more stable coffee producer’s income and possibly higher prices