Foreign ownership and productivity: new evidence from the service sector and the R&D lab

This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention to two issues neglected in the existing literature – the role of multinationals in service sectors and the importance of R&D activity conducted by foreign multinationals. We review existing theoretical and empirical work, which largely focuses on manufacturing, before presenting new evidence using establishment level data on production, service and R&D activity for the United Kingdom. We find that multinationals play an important role in service sectors and that entry of foreign multinationals by takeover is more prevalent than greenfield investment. We find that British multinationals have lower levels of labour productivity than foreign multinationals, but the difference is less stark in the service sector than in the production sector, and that British multinationals have lower levels of investment and intermediate use per employee. We also find that foreign-owned multinationals conduct a substantial amount of UK R&D. We discuss the implications of these and other findings for the policy debate on incentives to influence multinational firms’ location choices

Control of coherent backscattering by breaking optical reciprocity

Reciprocity is a universal principle that has a profound impact on many areas of physics. A fundamental phenomenon in condensed-matter physics, optical physics and acoustics, arising from reciprocity, is the constructive interference of quantum or classical waves which propagate along time-reversed paths in disordered media, leading to, for example, weak localization and metal-insulator transition. Previous studies have shown that such coherent effects are suppressed when reciprocity is broken. Here we show that by breaking reciprocity in a controlled manner, we can tune, rather than simply suppress, these phenomena. In particular, we manipulate coherent backscattering of light, also known as weak localization. By utilizing a non-reciprocal magneto-optical effect, we control the interference between time-reversed paths inside a multimode fiber with strong mode mixing, and realize a continuous transition from the well-known peak to a dip in the backscattered intensity. Our results may open new possibilities for coherent control of classical and quantum waves in complex systemsComment: Comments are welcom

Directional waveguide coupling from a wavelength-scale deformed microdisk laser

We demonstrate uni-directional evanescent coupling of lasing emission from a wavelength-scale deformed microdisk to a waveguide. This is attributed to the Goos-H\"anchen shift and Fresnel filtering effect that result in a spatial separation of the clockwise (CW) and counter-clockwise (CCW) propagating ray orbits. By placing the waveguide tangentially at different locations to the cavity boundary, we may selectively couple the CW (CCW) wave out, leaving the CCW (CW) wave inside the cavity, which also reduces the spatial hole burning effect. The device geometry is optimized with a full-wave simulation tool, and the lasing behavior and directional coupling are confirmed experimentally.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

A narrow-band speckle-free light source via random Raman lasing

Currently, no light source exists which is both narrow-band and speckle-free with sufficient brightness for full-field imaging applications. Light emitting diodes (LEDs) are excellent spatially incoherent sources, but are tens of nanometers broad. Lasers on the other hand can produce very narrow-band light, but suffer from high spatial coherence which leads to speckle patterns which distort the image. Here we propose the use of random Raman laser emission as a new kind of light source capable of providing short-pulsed narrow-band speckle-free illumination for imaging applications

MIUS integration and subsystems test program

The MIUS Integration and Subsystems Test (MIST) facility at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center was completed and ready in May 1974 for conducting specific tests in direct support of the Modular Integrated Utility System (MIUS). A series of subsystems and integrated tests was conducted since that time, culminating in a series of 24-hour dynamic tests to further demonstrate the capabilities of the MIUS Program concepts to meet typical utility load profiles for a residential area. Results of the MIST Program are presented which achieved demonstrated plant thermal efficiencies ranging from 57 to 65 percent

Spatial, seasonal and climatic predicitve models of Rift Valley Fever disease across Africa

Understanding the emergence and subsequent spread of human infectious diseases is a critical global challenge, especially for high-impact zoonotic and vector-borne diseases. Global climate and land-use change are likely to alter host and vector distributions, but understanding the impact of these changes on the burden of infectious diseases is difficult. Here, we use a Bayesian spatial model to investigate environmental drivers of one of the most important diseases in Africa, Rift Valley fever (RVF). The model uses a hierarchical approach to determine how environmental drivers vary both spatially and seasonally, and incorporates the effects of key climatic oscillations, to produce a continental risk map of RVF in livestock (as a proxy for human RVF risk). We find RVF risk has a distinct seasonal spatial pattern influenced by climatic variation, with the majority of cases occurring in South Africa and Kenya in the first half of an El Niño year. Irrigation, rainfall and human population density were the main drivers of RVF cases, independent of seasonal, climatic or spatial variation. By accounting more subtly for the patterns in RVF data, we better determine the importance of underlying environmental drivers, and also make space- and time-sensitive predictions to better direct future surveillance resources. This article is part of the themed issue ‘One Health for a changing world: zoonoses, ecosystems and human well-being’

Star formation history in the SMC: the case of NGC602

Deep HST/ACS photometry of the young cluster NGC 602, located in the remote low density "wing" of the Small Magellanic Cloud, reveals numerous pre-main sequence stars as well as young stars on the main sequence. The resolved stellar content thus provides a basis for studying the star formation history into recent times and constraining several stellar population properties, such as the present day mass function, the initial mass function and the binary fraction. To better characterize the pre-main sequence population, we present a new set of model stellar evolutionary tracks for this evolutionary phase with metallicity appropriate for the Small Magellanic Cloud (Z = 0.004). We use a stellar population synthesis code, which takes into account a full range of stellar evolution phases to derive our best estimate for the star formation history in the region by comparing observed and synthetic color-magnitude diagrams. The derived present day mass function for NGC 602 is consistent with that resulting from the synthetic diagrams. The star formation rate in the region has increased with time on a scale of tens of Myr, reaching $0.3-0.7 \times 10^{-3} M_\odot yr^{-1}$ in the last 2.5 Myr, comparable to what is found in Galactic OB associations. Star formation is most complete in the main cluster but continues at moderate levels in the gas-rich periphery of the nebula.Comment: 24 pages. Accepted for publication in A