The Ifo Investment Survey (IS) asks firms in the German manufacturing sector about the importance of technical factors, sales, finance, profit expectations, and macroeconomic policy for their investment activity in a given year. Using the survey responses to these questions, we construct measures of aggregate technology and non-technology shocks to quantify their contributions to aggregate inve...

In this paper we evaluate the relative performance of linear, non-linear and time-varying models for about 500 macroeconomic variables for the countries in the Euro area, using a real-time forecasting methodology. It turns out that linear models work well for about 35% of the series under analysis, time-varying models for another 35% and non-linear models for the remaining 30% of the series. Th...

We have developed a reliable procedure for the purification of envelope membranes from cauliflower (Brassica oleracea L.) bud plastids and sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus L.) cell amyloplasts. After disruption of purified intact plastids, separation of envelope membranes was achieved by centrifugation on a linear sucrose gradient. A membrane fraction, having a density of 1.122 grams per cubic cen...

Although the Dixit-Stiglitz aggregator is the workhorse specification of monopolistic competition, this framework and related variants are fundamentally inconsistent with a key stylized fact from empirical studies of consumer behavior and product marketing, namely, that the price elasticity of demand for a given brand is primarily determined by the extensive margin (i.e., changes in the number ...

Union-wide Aggregates versus National Data Based Monetary Policies: Does it Matter for the Eurosystem?* The effectiveness of alternative loss functions assigned to the common central bank of a monetary union is studied. The alternative policy objectives are a function of the degree of aggregation of decision variables. We consider, respectively, the policy based on the union-wide aggregates and...

In order to investigate the effects ethanol-diesel blends and altitude on the performance and emissions of diesel engine, the comparative experiments were carried out on the bench of turbo-charged diesel engine fueled with pure diesel (as prototype) and ethanol-diesel blends (E10, E15, E20 and E30) under different atmospheric pressures (81 kPa, 90 kPa and 100 kPa). The experimental results indi...

We examine two important aspects of Australia’s terms of trade using 135 years of annual data up to 2003/04. Since Australia predominantly exports commodities and imports manufactures, the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis suggests that there should be a negative trend in the terms of trade. But the trend is no more than −0.1 per cent per annum, less than the trend decline in world commodity prices re...

The complete nucleotide sequences of eight Human enterovirus B (HEV-B) strains were determined, representing five serotypes, E6, E7, E11, CVB3 and CVB5, which were isolated in the former Soviet Union between 1998 and 2002. All strains were mosaic recombinants and only the VP2-VP3-VP1 genome region was similar to that of the corresponding prototype HEV-B strains. In seven of the eight strains st...

Enterovirus (EV) 71 has emerged as a primary cause of severe neurologic enterovirus infection in the aftermath of the global polio eradication effort. Eleven subgenotypes of EV71 exist, the C4 subgenotype being associated with large outbreaks in Asia with high mortality rates. This subgenotype has rarely been reported in Europe. In the period between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2013 a total ...

The main objective of this study is to analyze the different ratio of emulsified fuels on the performance, emission and combustion characteristics of four stroke single cylinder kirloskar TV-I direct injection compression ignition engine and compared with diesel fuel under different engine loads with constant engine speed of 1500 rpm. Four kinds of test fuels were prepared namely 80% diesel, 10...