"Does foreign intellectual property rights protection affect U.S. exports and FDI?"

Using GMM models on a panel data of fifty-three countries, we examine whether stronger foreign IPR protection stimulates international transactions of U.S. multinational firms. The empirical results suggest that foreign countries that strengthen their IPR protection, especially those with strong imitative ability, can attract more international transactions from U.S. multinational firms.export, FDI, intellectual property rights, GMM

Botanical Drugs: The Next New New Thing?

While herbal medicines hold great promises for treating diseases, they also have serious limitation in their current forms. Currently the regulatory scheme for herbal medicines in the United States is inadequate and it undercuts the incentives for American industry to develop drug products from herbal medicines. This paper argues that FDA should develop a drug model for herbal medicines. This will help both to mainstream herbal medicines in the United States, and to alleviate the production crisis that the American pharmaceutical industry is facing. This paper also assesses FDA~{!/~}s new Draft Guidance for Botanical Drug Products for its incentivizing effects on the industry

Geometric Singular Perturbation Approach to Steady-State Poisson--Nernst--Planck Systems

This is the published version, also available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1137/S0036139903420931.Boundary value problems of a one-dimensional steady-state Poisson--Nernst--Planck (PNP) system for ion flow through a narrow membrane channel are studied. By assuming the ratio of the Debye length to a characteristic length to be small, the PNP system can be viewed as a singularly perturbed problem with multiple time scales and is analyzed using the newly developed geometric singular perturbation theory. Within the framework of dynamical systems, the global behavior is first studied in terms of limiting fast and slow systems. It is rather surprising that a complete set of integrals is discovered for the (nonlinear) limiting fast system. This allows a detailed description of the boundary layers for the problem. The slow system itself turns out to be a singularly perturbed one, too, which indicates that the singularly perturbed PNP system has three different time scales. A singular orbit (zeroth order approximation) of the boundary value problem is identified based on the dynamics of limiting fast and slow systems. An application of the geometric singular perturbation theory gives rise to the existence and (local) uniqueness of the boundary value problem