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The aim of this paper is to assess whether the EU accession had an impact on the quality of institutions in Poland. Such a membership should improve institutional quality through both direct (the necessity to adjust regulations to EU standars) and indirect (for example, through an increased international trade or capital flows) channels. The author applied the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) to compare the actual levels of institutional quality (measure by the Rule of Law index provided by the World Bank) with the counterfactual values based on the assumption the Poland had not entered the EU. The obtained results indicate tet the EU membership led to levels of institutional development that were above those calculated in the counterfactual scenario. In other words, Poland has had higher quality of institutions that it would be if the country remained outside of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether participation in IMF programmes is a positive catalyst for FDI investors in Central and Southeastern Europe, differentiating between 3 types of IMF arrangements. We use time-series cross-section data for 17 countries in the region between 1990 and 2013. The research employs treatment effect model to address endogeneity bias, as participation in IMF arrangements is not a random event. We find evidence that only under those circumstances (i.e. under those types of arrangements) where countries can more credibly commit to required reforms and where IMF can influence them more strongly to do it, catalytic effect is positive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perioperative bleeding (PB) is associated with increased patient morbidity and mortality, and results in substantial health care resource utilization. To assess bleeding risk, a routine practice in most centers is to use indicators such as elevated values of the International Normalized Ratio (INR). For patients with elevated INR, the routine therapy option is plasma transfusion. However, the predictive accuracy of INR and the value of plasma transfusion still remains unclear. Accurate methods are therefore needed to identify early the patients with increased risk of bleeding. The goal of this work is to apply advanced machine learning methods to study the relationship between preoperative plasma transfusion (PPT) and PB in patients with elevated INR undergoing noncardiac surgery. The problem is cast under the framework of causal inference where robust meaningful measures to quantify the effect of PPT on PB are estimated. Results show that both machine learning and standard statistical methods generally agree that PPT negatively impacts PB and other important patient outcomes. However, machine learning methods show significant results, and machine learning boosting methods are found to make less errors in predicting PB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The statistics about construction, process, investment, treatment effect of 72 sewage treatment plants show that the plant scale of county sewage treatment plants are less than 50,000m?/d in Guangxi. The mainly treatment processes are SBR and its variants process, A2/O, Oxidation ditch. The sewage treatment plant's investment of unit total construction and operating costs are reduced with the treatment scale increases. While the treatment scales are below 10,000 m3/d, the investment of unit total construction is among 17,300-4,700 yuan/m3, but to scales in 10,000~20,000m?/d is 4,700-3,500 yuan/m3, and to scales 20,000 ~ 50,000 m3/d is about 3,500 yuan/m3. The average operating costs of scales below 20,000 m3/d and 20,000 ~ 50,000 m3/d is 0.48 and 0.36 yuan/m3, respectively. The pipe network actual investment is significantly lower than the municipal treatment plant construction investment. In 2010, the average load rate of the municipal treatment plant is only 60.8%, which is lower than national online average level. 96% of average wastewater treatment plant's efficiency reaches the standard, COD, BOD of the effluent are all reach the standards, but a few sewage treatment plants appear to ammonia nitrogen exceed standards for the less of technology, and shortage of carbon source. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]