a r t i c l e i n f o This paper examines the effects of conversion of one type of physical trade restrictions into another on the intra-country wage inequality in a standard 2 × 2 × 2 Heckscher–Ohlin–Samuelson model. It shows that a conversion of an import-quota into an equivalent voluntary export restraint raises wage-inequality in the country importing the unskilled-labor intensive good and ...

The period from 1995:Q1 to 2000:Q2 was an unusual one for the U.S. economy. Labor productivity growth, which had averaged 1-1/4 percent per year over the previous 20 years, nearly doubled. Over the same boom period, the federal funds rate was remarkably stable--perhaps in response to core inflation rates that mostly fell. From 1952 to 1994, stock-market capitalization fluctuated between 30 and ...

a r t i c l e i n f o We examine oligopoly models of vertical product differentiation in which producing firms face variable costs of quality development. We show that comparing to private oligopoly, mixed oligopoly – whereby state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms coexist – enhances social welfare but reduces firms' profitability. We also demonstrate that Bertrand competition makes fi...

This paper studies the behavior of the economy and the efficacy of monetary policy under zero nominal interest rates, using a model with population growth that nests, as a special case, a more conventional specification in which there is a single infinitely lived representative agent. The paper shows that with a growing population, monetary policy has distributional effects that give rise to a ...

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs, or braincomputer interfaces, BCIs) have caused a lot of excitement in the past few years; they promise to make the lame walk, the mute talk, the blind see, and perhaps even to enhance cognition (Serruya and Kahana, 2008). Already, cochlear implants have proven immensely successful at making the deaf hear: over 150,000 completely deaf people can now participate in...

We investigated how human subjects adapt to forces perturbing the motion of their arms. We found that this kind of learning is based on the capacity of the central nervous system (CNS) to predict and therefore to cancel externally applied perturbing forces. Our experimental results indicate: (i) that the ability of the CNS to compensate for the perturbing forces is restricted to those spatial l...

In recent years haptic interfaces (also know as manipulanda and hand controllers) have been developed for an impressive array of applications. For instance, Mussa-Ivaldi e t al. [ 181 describe a two degree of freedom manipulandum for studies of multijoint human limb movement, Adelstein and Rosen [ 11 a two degree-of-freedom manipulandum for studies of involuntary tremor, and Jones and Hunter [1...

Acute aortic syndrome is defined as interrelated emergency conditions with similar clinical features and challenges, mainly including dissection (AD), intramural haematoma (IMH), penetrating ulcer, traumatic aorta rupture.1Nienaber C.A. Powell J.T. Management of acute syndromes.Eur Heart J. 2012; 33: 26-35Crossref PubMed Scopus (173) Google Scholar At present, reports on the condition type B (T...

25 Humans are able to learn tool-handling tasks, such as carving, demonstrating 26 their competency to make movements in unstable environments with varied 27 directions. When faced with a single direction of instability, humans learn to 28 selectively co-contract their arm muscles tuning the mechanical stiffness of the 29 limb endpoint to stabilize movements. This study examines, for the first ...

16 It has been proposed that the brain predicts the sensory consequences of a movement and compares it to 17 the actual sensory feedback. When the two differ, an error signal is formed, driving adaptation. How 18 does an error in one trial alter performance in the subsequent trial? Here, we show that the sensitivity to 19 error is not constant, but declines as a function of error magnitude. Tha...