A. Prior to beginning work on this discussion, read Ellen Martin’s article, The Ethics of Big Data (Links to an external site.).Based on the article’s content, respond to the following:Describe the microeconomic principles being used. What is the impact for demand?Evaluate the different market structures that big data benefits the least and the most from.While data collection may benefit the business community, discuss the concerns for consumers as big data proliferates.Your initial post should be a minimum of 300 words.B. Patents are granted for 20 years, but pharmaceutical companies cannot use their patent-guaranteed monopoly powers for anywhere near this long because it takes several years to acquire Food and Drug Adminstration (FDA) approval of drugs.What purposes do barriers to entry created by the government serve?What are other barriers to entry in the pharmaceutical industry?Should drug patents be extended to 20 years after FDA approval?Explain what would be the costs and benefits from this extension.Your initial post should be a minimum of 300 words

For this discussion, you will examine how companies finance their expansion into the global marketplace. You will look at a current example of global expansion and consider the financing of the expansion. You will also need to research current financial news on the internet or in print (for example, Bloomberg, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, or the Financial Times, the data is on a three-day to one-week delay)Find a current (in the last two to three years) financial article describing a company that has expanded globally. You can also use foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) that are expanding to the U.S. market. Post a link to your selected article in the discussion board, summarizing your reading of the article, and, additionally, address the following in your initial post:In which country is the MNC headquartered and to which country is it expanding?How did the MNC finance its global expansion (for example, did it raise debt or issue extra shares)? If the article did not specify, you can take a look at the MNC’s financial statements.Do you think that it was a successful and beneficial expansion? Why or why not?Please do focus on every point in this questions.

In this box you will work with the HP-filter. This is a procedure to decompose economic variables into a trend and a cycle. The HP-filter allows for a flexible time-varying trend, in contrast to imposing a constant trend over long periods of time ---say, decades. Since long-term trends change (eventually), this provides a better measure of the cycles i.e. deviations from trend.The purpose of the box is to calculate the co-movement and volatility of consumption and investment relative to GDP, all measured in real terms. For this exercise you will use table 1.1.6 from BEA.gov once again; starting in 1960:Q1 to the latest available year at a quarterly frequency. The smoothing parameter λ (lambda) for quarterly data is 1,600.The box has to describe the nature of the filter and report the correlation and volatility of the cyclical components of GDP, consumption, and investment over time. The focus will be on the Great Moderation which is known as the period under which the U.S. economy experienced a break in the volatility of most of its macroeconomic variables. The literature has identified it as beginning in the mid-1980s, and ending in 2008 with the Great Recession. Part of the exercise is to identify the Great Moderation in the data and see whether the 2008 broke that trend; that is, has the U.S. economy become as volatile as before 1984, or has the moderation persisted?To create the box follow these steps:Go to NIPA Table 1.1.6 in the Bureau of Economic Analysis website (bea.gov), and download the quarterly data for GDP, consumption, and investment for the period 1960:Q1 to latest available.Use the HP-filter to calculate the trend of the three variables for the whole period, and then for the periods 1960-83; 1984-2007; and 2008 to latest available. Use a value of 1,600 for lambda.Detrend the original series and plot the three variables in the same graph for the entire sample period [25 points]; then calculate the standard deviation of the cyclical component of GDP, consumption, and investment for each of the periods and present in a table [25 points].Compare the four sample periods, summarize your findings [25 points] and explain in the context of the Great Moderation [25 points].The end.Detailed instructions for point 2 above (follow each step verbatim)Download the excel add-in for the HP-filter.http://ideas.repec.org/c/dge/qmrbcd/165.html (Links to an external site.)Make sure that the HPFilter.xla file is in the same directory as where you are going to save your excel file. Double click on HPFilter.xla to launch it in Excel and make sure to enable macros. This should enable the HP-Filter function. You will always have to first start the macro every time you use the workfile (in that order).Transpose the variables into columns and then take the natural log of each of the variables [the Excel function is =ln( )].HP-filter the natural log of each variable, the function in Excel is: HP(timeseries to be filtered, value for lambda). This is an array formula (columns).Example. Suppose you want to filter 5 data points in the first five cells of column A, sayA1:A5, at lambda = 1600.Enter the following formula into cell B1: =HP(A1:A5,1600)Then hit return or enter.Then, starting with cell B1, select cells B1 through B5Hit F2.Then hit the Ctrl, Shift, and Enter buttons simultaneously. This will HP-Filter the entire set of cells from A1-A5 and place the filtered series into B1-B5.5. For the case of GDP, the variable on column A should be the ln(GDP) and column B represents the trend, ln(GDP*). The next step is to compute the cycle ln(GDP) – ln(GDP*) in column C. Now you can plot it and calculate its standard deviation. Do the same for consumption and investment.