In a world where financial boundaries are constantly blurring, understanding the nuances of global capital allocation has never been more critical. The recent NBER research report by Sergio Florez-Orrego, Matteo Maggiori, Jesse Schreger, Ziwen Sun, and Serdil Tinda sheds light on this intricate landscape, offering a road map for future research and policy implications. Let’s delve into the key takeaways from this comprehensive study. The Surge in Cross-Border Investments

A team of Israeli scientists in December 2019 announced it had discovered a new treatment that reduces pancreatic cancer cells in mice by up to 90%. The survival rate for pancreatic cancer is fewer than 5 years, and current options for treatment require chemotherapy, which stops cell division in the whole body. This affects the whole body as there is no discriminatory targeting – causing, for example, hair loss,

The Washington, D.C.-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in September 2019 published a working paper, The Impact of Brexit on UK Firms, authored by Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Scarlet Chen, Paul Mizen, Pawel Smietanka, and Gregory Thwaites. The authors identify three key results from a survey of UK firms, the Decision Maker Panel. According to the abstract of the 59-page article: “First, the UK’s decision to leave the

Randstad in March 2019 released the first quarter 2019 edition of its Workmonitor report. Workmonitor’s Mobility Index, which tracks employee confidence and captures the likelihood of an employee changing jobs within the next six months, provides a comprehensive understanding of sentiments and trends in the job market. Besides mobility, the survey addresses employee satisfaction and personal motivation as well as a rotating set of themed questions. The report for

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in February 2019 released a new paper, titled “Trends in life expectancy in EU and other OECD countries” that reports on trends in life expectancy in the 28 EU countries and some other high-income OECD countries, and examines potential explanations for the slowdown in improvements in recent years. The slowing of improvements, which has been measured since 2011, has been greatest

Pension assets continued to rise in 2017, to the tune of USD 43.4 trillion in the OECD area for the first time, with almost all countries showing positive investment results according to the new Pension Markets in Focus 2018 report published in October 2018 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This annual report, which now covers 87 countries, gives an overview of private pension systems worldwide

The Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative (B3i) in March 2018 incorporated B3i Services AG in Zürich, Switzerland. B3i has been a collaborative initiative of 15 global insurers and reinsurers who came together in late 2016 to explore and test the potential of using Distributed Ledger Technologies within the re/insurance industry. B3i Services will provide insurance solutions on a blockchain platform, striving for improved speed, transparency, quality, security, and cost. It

Engineers at Cornell University have developed a simple method for gathering a patient’s vital signs using radio waves. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags use low-power radio frequencies and are similar to the anti-theft tags we find in department stores. These ‘passive’ RFID tags require no batteries, and can transmit information such as heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rates from multiple patients simultaneously. By measuring internal body motion, such

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that up to half a million people per year develop multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, presenting an increasing threat to global health, while cases of particularly resistant bacteria strains have increased 600-fold in the U.K. between 2003 and 2015. The rise of multidrug-resistant bacteria has been attributed to the overuse of antibiotics in medicine and farming, but a new study, published in May 2017 in the

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in May 2017 announced having discovered a way to structurally modify an antibiotic called vancomycin to make it even more potent — an advance that could mitigate the threat of antibiotic-resistant infections. The World Health Organization and other public-health experts have been warning that antibiotic resistance is a serious global threat. Previous studies had shown that it is possible to add two modifications

One thousand college-educated U.S. employees recently responded to questions about their bosses’ ability to handle stress, their contributions to the workplace, and their own work experiences, in a March 2017 study conducted by workforce consulting firm Life Meets Work. According to the survey site, “Managers provide direction, assessment, and motivation for the teams they support. If managers don’t have the skills to handle stress, then everyone working for that

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the U.S. has reported the death of a Reno, Nevada, woman in her 70s from septic shock, after contracting an infection that was resistant to all antibiotics. This comes on the heel of warnings about carbapenem-resistant Enterbacteriaceae (CRE) bacteria that is resistant to all currently available antibiotics. The strain of bacteria that caused the Reno woman’s death is known as Klebsiella pneumoniae.

In response to the urgent call for new vaccines to treat emerging infectious diseases, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, established a global coalition in January 2017 that is committed to developing safe and effective vaccines against known infectious disease threats. Buoyed by an initial investment of US$460m from the governments of Germany, Japan, and Norway, plus investments from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome

Engineers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) , a member of the A*STAR’s group of biomedical sciences institutes in Singapore have developed a new material that claims to kill E. coli bacteria quickly and without the adverse health effects of triclosan, a common antibacterial agent that has been restricted in the European Union. IBN Group Leader Yugen Zhang, PhD, and his team, synthesized a chemical compound made

A non-invasive treatment for diabetes monitoring and drug delivery has been developed by South Korean researchers at The Institute for Basic Science (IBS) Center for Nanoparticle Research located in Seoul, South Korea. The device, a graphene-based patch, uses a hybrid of gold-doped graphene and a serpentine gold mesh to measure pH (blood acidity level) and temperature by measuring the amount of glucose in sweat. If abnormally high levels of

The emergence of new, more expensive, cancer drug therapies that help the immune system attack tumors is expected to increase cancer drug spending to over $150 billion by 2020 according to a global oncology report released by IMS Health Holdings. This represents an annual global growth rate for oncology drug spending of 7.5% to 10.5% through 2020, up from last year’s IMS forecast of 6% to 8% growth. The

Despite the obvious benefits of exercise, cancer patients are avoiding exercise. According to MacMillan Cancer Support (MCS), which launched a study conducted by YouGov Research, many patients avoid exercise for varying reasons, the top three of which are: worrying about being able to find a toilet (36%), feeling uncomfortable getting active in public (31%) and feeling uncomfortable in active wear or bathing suit (24%). Group exercise therapy delivers benefits

The spread of cancer, or metastasis, has historically been one of the most significant hurdles in the treatment of the deadly disease. In metastasis, when cancer cells break away from a tumor, they spread throughout the body, infecting other organs and vital systems. The question of how these cells survive is closer to being answered, however, thanks to research being performed by Barts Cancer Institute at Queen Mary University

Insilico Medicine will unveil a newly-developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) drug discovery engine at the Re-Work Machine Intelligence Summit in Berlin, Germany, to be held June 29-30, 2016. The AI engine is capable of predicting therapeutic use, toxicity, and adverse effects of thousands of molecules. Insilico says that this drug-discovery engine has the potential to transform the pharmaceutical industry and double the number of drugs on the market by “developing multi-modal deep-learned and parametric biomarkers as well as multiple drug-scoring pipelines

Released in April 2016, a study entitled Association Between Carbohydrate Nutrition and Successful Aging Over 10 Years of more than 1,600 adults aged 50 years and older revealed that a diet rich in fiber from breads/cereals and fruits could be part of a successful strategy for aging successfully. A group of researchers from Australia’s Westmead Institute for Medical Research led by Associate Professor Bamini Gopinath, PhD, examined the relationship

Medical error may be the third cause of death in the United States, just behind cancer and heart disease, but we can’t be sure thanks to a flaw in the reporting system that tracks such things. Martin Makary and Michael Daniel of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine hope to change all that, as they explain in their analysis of the system used by the U.S. Centers for Disease

Researchers warn against a particular strain of E-coli bacteria found in Chinese farms and patients that is proving to be resistant to a particular group of veterinary antibiotics called polymyxins. This group of antibiotics is considered to be the last line of defense against food-borne bacteria such as E-coli and salmonella, and its overuse has created a polymyxin-resistant bacteria strain according to a report released in November 2015 in

Source: Statistics Canada – Median household net worth over the life cycle

Did we lose our focus on global employee benefits? Hopefully not! In fact, global employee benefits do include insurance and assistance services pertaining to international travel, so we thought you might be interested in hearing this fascinating news from one of our adjacent industries, travel, as reported in February 2016 by B2B website travelmarketreport.com . Available as a mobile phone app, OneGo offers unlimited U.S. domestic flights on plans

Does it still make sense for a multinational company’s employee benefits plan to deal with 28 different social and tax legislations in the EU? Does it make sense for a  multinational company to set up as many employee benefits plans as the number of the EU countries in which it operates? Plausibly, the answer is no. Yet that is exactly what happens in the European Union — and for

Eating a group of specific foods may slow cognitive decline among aging adults, even when the person is not at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to researchers at Rush University Medical Center, in a study recently published online in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association. The MIND diet, which is short for “Mediterranean-DASH Diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay,” is a hybrid of the Mediterranean

Human beings are living longer than ever, which can be a wonderful thing. As the T-shirts say, life is good. But human longevity has big consequences for society, which is one reason President Obama is hosting today’s White House Conference on Aging. It’s great that we can get new hips when our old ones wear out, but someone has to pay for them. It’s great that Baby Boomers will