Macro determinants of FDI inflows to Japan:an analysis of source country characteristics

This paper examines the source country determinants of FDI into Japan. The paper highlights certain methodological and theoretical weaknesses in the previous literature and offers some explanations for hitherto ambiguous results. Specifically, the paper highlights the importance of panel data analysis, and the identification of fixed effects in the analysis rather than simply pooling the data. Indeed, we argue that many of the results reported elsewhere are a feature of this mis-specification. To this end, pooled, fixed effects and random effects estimates are compared. The results suggest that FDI into Japan is inversely related to trade flows, such that trade and FDI are substitutes. Moreover, the results also suggest that FDI increases with home country political and economic stability. The paper also shows that previously reported results, regarding the importance of exchange rates, relative borrowing costs and labour costs in explaining FDI flows, are sensitive to the econometric specification and estimation approach. The paper also discusses the importance of these results within a policy context. In recent years Japan has sought to attract FDI, though many firms still complain of barriers to inward investment penetration in Japan. The results show that cultural and geographic distance are only of marginal importance in explaining FDI, and that the results are consistent with the market-seeking explanation of FDI. As such, the attitude to risk in the source country is strongly related to the size of FDI flows to Japan. © 2007 The Authors Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Functional source separation applied to induced visual gamma activity

Objective of this work was to explore the performance of a recently introduced source extraction method, FSS (Functional Source Separation), in recovering induced oscillatory change responses from extra-cephalic magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals. Unlike algorithms used to solve the inverse problem, FSS does not make any assumption about the underlying biophysical source model; instead, it makes use of task-related features (functional constraints) to estimate source/s of interest. FSS was compared with blind source separation (BSS) approaches such as Principal and Independent Component Analysis, PCA and ICA, which are not subject to any explicit forward solution or functional constraint, but require source uncorrelatedness (PCA), or independence (ICA). A visual MEG experiment with signals recorded from six subjects viewing a set of static horizontal black/white square-wave grating patterns at different spatial frequencies was analyzed. The beamforming technique Synthetic Aperture Magnetometry (SAM) was applied to localize task-related sources; obtained spatial filters were used to automatically select BSS and FSS components in the spatial area of interest. Source spectral properties were investigated by using Morlet-wavelet time-frequency representations and significant task-induced changes were evaluated by means of a resampling technique; the resulting spectral behaviours in the gamma frequency band of interest (20-70 Hz), as well as the spatial frequency-dependent gamma reactivity, were quantified and compared among methods. Among the tested approaches, only FSS was able to estimate the expected sustained gamma activity enhancement in primary visual cortex, throughout the whole duration of the stimulus presentation for all subjects, and to obtain sources comparable to invasively recorded data.

Energy efficient transmission protocol for distributed source coding in sensor networks

Distributed source coding (DSC) has recently been considered as an efficient approach to data compression in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Using this coding method multiple sensor nodes compress their correlated observations without inter-node communications. Therefore energy and bandwidth can be efficiently saved. In this paper, we investigate a randombinning based DSC scheme for remote source estimation in WSN and its performance of estimated signal to distortion ratio (SDR). With the introduction of a detailed power consumption model for wireless sensor communications, we quantitatively analyze the overall network energy consumption of the DSC scheme. We further propose a novel energy-aware transmission protocol for the DSC scheme, which flexibly optimizes the DSC performance in terms of either SDR or energy consumption, by adapting the source coding and transmission parameters to the network conditions. Simulations validate the energy efficiency of the proposed adaptive transmission protocol. © 2007 IEEE.

Optical fibre limits:an approach using ASE channel estimation

In this talk we investigate the usage of spectrally shaped amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) in order to emulate highly dispersed wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) signals in an optical transmission system. Such a technique offers various simplifications to large scale WDM experiments. Not only does it offer a reduction in transmitter complexity, removing the need for multiple source lasers, it potentially reduces the test and measurement complexity by requiring only the centre channel of a WDM system to be measured in order to estimate WDM worst case performance. The use of ASE as a test and measurement tool is well established in optical communication systems and several measurement techniques will be discussed [1, 2]. One of the most prevalent uses of ASE is in the measurement of receiver sensitivity where ASE is introduced in order to degrade the optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) and measure the resulting bit error rate (BER) at the receiver. From an analytical point of view noise has been used to emulate system performance, the Gaussian Noise model is used as an estimate of highly dispersed signals and has had consider- able interest [3]. The work to be presented here extends the use of ASE by using it as a metric to emulate highly dispersed WDM signals and in the process reduce WDM transmitter complexity and receiver measurement time in a lab environment. Results thus far have indicated [2] that such a transmitter configuration is consistent with an AWGN model for transmission, with modulation format complexity and nonlinearities playing a key role in estimating the performance of systems utilising the ASE channel emulation technique. We conclude this work by investigating techniques capable of characterising the nonlinear and damage limits of optical fibres and the resultant information capacity limits. REFERENCES McCarthy, M. E., N. Mac Suibhne, S. T. Le, P. Harper, and A. D. Ellis, “High spectral efficiency transmission emulation for non-linear transmission performance estimation for high order modulation formats," 2014 European Conference on IEEE Optical Communication (ECOC), 2014. 2. Ellis, A., N. Mac Suibhne, F. Gunning, and S. Sygletos, “Expressions for the nonlinear trans- mission performance of multi-mode optical fiber," Opt. Express, Vol. 21, 22834{22846, 2013. Vacondio, F., O. Rival, C. Simonneau, E. Grellier, A. Bononi, L. Lorcy, J. Antona, and S. Bigo, “On nonlinear distortions of highly dispersive optical coherent systems," Opt. Express, Vol. 20, 1022-1032, 2012.