A perfect-competition model is developed to analyze duality in specialization and technology such as in the men’s clothing industry, an industry with highly seasonal nature of the business cycle. We show that when the market fluctuation is large enough, some firms will specialize in one good with the advantage of static efficiency, while other firms will generalize in multi-variety production a...

This study shows that R&D cooperations can be used as an instrument to coordinate drug development portfolios among participating firms, which has crucial implications on the number of drugs offered on the market. Our study puts special attention to the fact that R&D cooperations, formed at different stages throughout the drug development process, have different impacts on the technology and pr...

Glass fiber reinforced plastics are finding its increased applications in various engineering fields such as aerospace, automobile, electronics and other industries. This paper discusses the use of fuzzy logic for modeling turning parameters in turning of glass fiber reinforced plastics by carbide tool (K-20). Experiments were conducted based on the established Taguchi‟s Design of Experiments (...

The paper examines the impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on the survival of business start-ups. FDI has potential for both negative displacement/competition effects as well as positive knowledge spillover and linkage effects on new ventures. We find a net positive effect for the whole dataset. However, a major contribution of the paper is to outline and test an argument that this effect...

In this work we investigate two crucial dimensions of firms’ structure and dynamics, that is profitability and productivity performance. The empirical distributions and the associated persistence over time are explored through a set of parametric and non parametric exercises performed on an large panel of Italian firms active in both Manufacturing and Services during the period 1998-2003. The m...

In laser cutting, the cut quality is of great importance. Multiple non-linear effects of process parameters and their interactions make very difficult to predict cut quality. In this paper, artificial intelligence (AI) approach was applied to predict the surface roughness in CO2 laser cutting. To this aim, artificial neural network (ANN) model of surface roughness was developed in terms of cutt...

There is extensive empirical evidence pointing to the existence of sunk costs to exporting. Only higher productivity firms can profitably cover these and enter export markets. This is the standard explanation for the regularity with which econometric analyses reports that exporters are more productive than non-exporters. But what happens to their productivity trajectory once they have entered? ...

Two new RNA structures portray how non-Watson-Crick base pairs and metal ions can produce a unique RNA shape suitable for recognition by proteins. The crystal structures of a 62 nt domain of E. coli 5S ribosomal RNA and a duplex dodecamer encompassing an internal loop E have been determined at 3.0 and 1.5 A, respectively. This loop E region is distorted by three "cross-strand purine stacks" and...

L-(aS, 5S)-a-Amino-3-chloro-4,5-dihydro-5-isoxazoleacetic acid (AT-125), an antitumor drug isolated from Streptomyces sviceus, is an active site-directed affinity analog of glutamine, I t selectively inactivates the glutamine-dependent activities of two bacterial glutamine amidotransferases, anthranilate synthase and glutamate synthase. A reversible noncovalent complex is formed prior to irreve...

This paper analyzes the relationship of ownership concentration and firm performance in the context of different institutional environments in 28 Central and Eastern European transition economies. Using the BEEPS data for the period from 2002 to 2009 we find an inverted u-shaped relation of ownership concentration and firm performance for those firms that operate in non-EU-member countries as w...