About 30 percent of Medicare beneficiaries enroll in private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans but do so at a relatively high-cost. This paper explores the advantages and challenges of introducing competitive bidding among MA plans (Plan One) or among MA plans and Fee-for-Service (Plan Two or Premium Support). We conclude that competitive bidding could reduce the cost of Medicare, especially in den...

despite the fact that iran enjoys a high-potential agricultural sector in production of various products and the important role this sector plays in the development of non oil-based exports, a large amount of the government budget is being spent on the vegetable oil and oilseed rape (as animal food) import. for this reason, during the recent years the production of oil-based products is conside...

Since China has been Iran's most important trading partner in recent years, the present study has attempted to investigate the effect of bilateral real exchange rate fluctuations on the trade relationship between Iran and China during the period 1992-2017. To investigate this relationship, the business data in the export and import sectors were divided into 15 major commodity segments, and the ...

Here we present a new module concept for Petri nets that is based on the component concepts of Continuous Software Engineering (CSE). According to that concept two distinguished interfaces are required. These are import and export interfaces. The import describes the assumptions on the environment, e.g. in terms of used components. The export gives an abstraction of the functionality and presen...

Heat shock protein 70s (Hsp70s) are encoded by a multigene family and are located in different cellular compartments. They have broad-ranging functions, including involvement in protein trafficking, prevention of protein aggregation, and assistance in protein folding. Hsp70s work together with their cochaperones, J domain proteins and nucleotide exchange factors (e.g., GrpEs), in a functional c...

Metadata Registries (MDR) are information systems defined to manage and publish metadata related to information and data models. An inherent part of the data models registered within an MDR is the vocabularies used to assign values to data elements. These vocabularies relate to concepts that can be managed by Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS). This paper discusses how an MDR can import and t...

Peroxisomes are multifunctional organelles of all human cells, responsible for a variety of essential biochemical and metabolic processes including alpha- and beta-oxidation of specific fatty acids, plasmalogen biosynthesis and glyoxylate detoxification. Inborn errors of biogenesis or in the ability to synthesize or properly traffic specific enzymes to peroxisomes result in devastating human di...

Using firm-level data on the sales and sourcing patterns of Japanese affiliates, this paper suggests that very little foreign direct investment (FDI) falls neatly into the standard bins of horizontal, vertical and export-platform FDI. Most affiliates import some intermediates and export some output, suggesting a pattern that might be called “networked FDI.” This suggests that the nature of FDI ...

one of the import indices of food security evaluation is food import capacity index. ratio of total exports to food imports is often thought to be a measure of the capacity of a country to finance its food imports using revenues from exports of goods and services. this study investigates food import capacity effects on rural households food security by calculated ahfci (aggregate household food...

The literature on ERPT has not considered product-level comparative advantage (CA) as a source of heterogeneous firm productivity. However, a firm’s production choice may determine its productivity level and also its pricing decision as both the degree of market power and the fixed costs of exporting vary across products. This paper empirically analyses the export pricing behaviour of Chinese a...