Previous empirical work on the determinants of preferential trade agreement (PTA) membership assumes a country’s PTA participation to leave other countries’ willingness to participate unaffected. More precisely, the presumption is that new PTAs do neither influence the formation of other new PTAs in the future nor do they affect the subsequent enlargement of existing ones. This view is at odds ...

-This paper describes an automatic color sorting system for hardwood edge-glued panel parts. The color sorting system simultaneously examines both faces of a panel part and then determines which face has the “better” color given specified color uniformity and priority defined by management. The real-time color sorting system software and hardware are briefly described. An actual working system ...

Despite the widespread adoption of new information technologies, a “digital divide” still exists, excluding many from enjoying the benefits, especially those who live in developing countries. A digital divide is defined as an access gap that is measured by the disparities in subscriber penetration levels and technological gaps reflected in technological discrepancies between countries and regio...

The Cosmetic Ingredient Review Expert Panel (Panel) reviewed the safety of nylon polymers, which function in cosmetics primarily as bulking and opacifying agents. The Panel reviewed relevant animal and human data related to these large polymers and determined that they are not likely to penetrate the skin. Whatever residual monomers may be present were not present at a sufficient level to cause...

Trust in the citizens of a potential partner country may affect the decision to trade with or to migrate to a foreign country. This paper employs panel data to examine the causal impact of such bilateral trust on international trade and migration patterns. We apply instrumental variables (IV) approaches that capture the exogenous variance of bilateral trust separately with eight indicators of g...

Background: Haematotoxicity occurs following acute and chronic low dose exposures to lead. This study aimed to assess the association between occupational lead exposure and haematological parameters among roadside and organized panel beaters in Enugu Metropolis, Nigeria, 2018-19.  Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional and analytical study of 428 roadside and organized panel beaters...

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new likelihood-based panel cointegration test in the presence of a linear time trend in the data generating process. This new test is an extension of the likelihood ratio (LR) test of Saikkonen & Lütkepohl (2000) for trend-adjusted data to the panel data framework, and is called the panel SL test. The idea is first to take the average of the individual ...

DISSERTATION Testing Simulation and Structural Models with Applications to Energy Demand. Principal advisors: Maximilian Auffhammer (co-chair) and Michael Hanemann (co-chair). JOB MARKET PAPER " Daylight Time and Energy: Evidence from an Australian Experiment, " with R. Kellogg. Rising energy prices and environmental concerns are driving countries to consider extending Daylight Saving Time (DST...

Using panel data, this paper tests whether public and private capital have a positive and significant effect on aggregate output and labor productivity for Mexico during the 1960-2001 period. The richer information set made possible by the sectorial data enables this study to utilize the methodologically sound “group-mean” Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) procedure developed by Ped...

The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the determinants of tourism demand by utilizing panel data for the period of 1995-2011 from top 20 countries sending tourists to Turkey. Econometric results obtained from panel cointegration analysis show that macroeconomic factors as such income, prices, supply capacity, exchange rate and political stability play a significant role in determi...