We investigate voting behavior on human rights in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Our central question is whether countries with a low human rights record systematically oppose human rights resolutions. An instrumental account of voting would suggest that these countries aim to weaken UN human rights resolutions since they could be future targets of these policies. If reputation asp...

Some types of intravaginal practices (IVP) may increase the risk for HIV acquisition. This is particularly worrisome for populations with dual high prevalence of HIV and IVP. Women involved in transactional sex are at increased risk for HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa. Social, cultural and economic influences are strong drivers of IVP in this population. To explore this, we carried out a qu...

In the present study, we used the global transcriptome profile approach to identify dysregulated genes, molecular pathways, and molecular functional alterations in bovine placentas derived from somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) and in vitro embryo production (IVP) pregnancies compared with their artificial insemination (AI) counterparts at day 50 of gestation. For this, day 7 blastocysts der...

We suggest a way to perform parsimonious instrumental variables estimation in the presence of many, and potentially weak, instruments. In contrast to standard methods, our approach yields consistent estimates when the set of instrumental variables complies with a factor structure. In this sense, our method is equivalent to instrumental variables estimation that is based on principal components....

The instrumental variable method consistently estimates the effect of a treatment when there is unmeasured confounding and a valid instrumental variable. A valid instrumental variable is a variable that is independent of unmeasured confounders and affects the treatment but does not have a direct effect on the outcome beyond its effect on the treatment. Two commonly used estimators for using an ...

PURPOSE To compare the effect of pegaptanib versus ranibizumab on exudative age-related macular degeneration (AMD) with small lesion size. METHODS This is a retrospective study of 81 eyes from 78 patients with exudative AMD treated and followed up over 12 months. Patients with baseline best corrected visual acuity (BCVA) under 20/400 and with a greatest linear dimension of lesion over 4500 μm...

Gamete cryopreservation combined with in vitro embryo production (IVP) and cryopreservation of resultant embryos are important technologies for gene banking in domestic animals. Especially, cryopreservation of embryos and oocytes offers the possibility for the preservation of female genetic lines. Although several vitrification protocols have been developed for the cryopreservation of embryos a...

We introduce a generalization of the approximate factor model for which the observable variables belong to a nite number of groups. The error terms of variables that belong to di erent groups are assumed to be at most weakly correlated, but the correlation between the errors of variables that belong to the same group is not restricted. We propose an approximate instrumental variables method to ...