Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How does competition affect the relationship between innovation and productivity? Estimation of a CDM model for Norway

The paper investigates the effects of industry-level competition on firm-level innovation and productivity. We propose a refined version of the CDM (Crepon, Duguet, and Mairesse) model that analyses the impacts of competition on four interrelated stages of the innovation process: the choice of a firm to engage in innovation, its R&D intensity, its innovation output and labour productivity. We test the model on a firm-level panel data set based on the last three waves of the innovation survey for Norway (CIS3, CIS4 and CIS5). The econometric results provide empirical support for the refined version of the CDM model. They show that enterprises in oligopolistic sectors have, on average, a greater propensity to engage in innovative activities and tend to invest a greater amount of resources in R&D. On the other hand, firms in competitive industries are characterized by a stronger impact of innovation input on their technological and economic performance.
Adaptive reduced-order K-filters based DSC of uncertain systems with input unmodeled dynamics and dead-zone

Using dynamic surface control method, an adaptive output feedback prescribed performance tracking control scheme is proposed for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with input unmodeled dynamics and dead-zone in this paper. Reduced-order K-filters are designed to observe unmeasured states. Input dead-zone characteristic is considered on the basis of the control input having unmodeled dynamics. A normalization signal is employed to deal with the negative impact of nonlinear input unmodeled dynamics, and a transformation of tracking error is designed to implement constrained performance tracking control. The state unmodeled dynamics is described by Lyapunov function based on global exponential stability. By the theoretical analysis, the transient tracking performance is guaranteed, and the signals in the closed-loop system are proved to be semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded. A numerical simulation example shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Regulation of melanoma‐cell motility by the lipoxygenase metabolite 12‐(S)‐hete

Cellular motility, a prerequisite for metastasis of tumor cells, is affected by a 55‐kDa tumor‐cell‐secreted cytokine which influences the migration of the producing cells and is called autocrine motility factor (AMF). Previous studies indicated that AMF stimulates motility by binding to its receptor, a cell‐surface glycoprotein of 78 kDa (gp78), inducing its phosphorylation, activating a pertussis toxin (PT)‐sensitive G‐protein, and stimulating inositol metabolism. However, the intracellular signaling mechanisms which transduce and regulate the AMF motility response remain largely unknown. 12‐(S)‐HETE, a lipoxygenase metabolite of arachidonic acid which affects the cytoskeletal architecture of murine melanoma cells, also stimulates cell motility independently of PT‐sensitive G‐proteins and up‐regulates gp78 surface expression. 12‐(S)‐HETE induces the phosphorylation of gp78 in a manner analogous to AMF and the motility response of these murine melanoma cells to both AMF and 12‐(S)‐HETE is inhibited by protein kinase C inhibitors. Furthermore, perturbation of the AMF receptor stimulated endogenous biosynthesis of 12(S)HETE. These results suggest the existence of an “autocrine motility cycle” which influences melanoma cell motility by gp78 activation, and production of second messengers which affect the cytoskeletal architecture and expression of the AMF receptor itself.
Consumer's acceptance of high-tech products: the case of RFID credit cards in Taiwan

Risk and uncertainty are inherent in the nature of high-tech innovation (Branscomb and Auerswald, 2003). This research sets out to explore the role of perceived risk in the adoption of RFID credit cards and the interaction of perceived risks with other important factors in technology adoption using a model integrating perceived risk, the technology acceptance model, and technology readiness. We have found that perceived risks are directly and negatively related to both perceived usefulness and use intentions; however, most of the influences on use intentions are mediated through perceived usefulness. We also explored the relationship between perceived risk, technology readiness and perceived usefulness. Results show that technology readiness may mitigate risk perception and leads to higher intentions to adopt. Technology readiness can also directly and indirectly influence behaviour intentions. We discuss theoretical and managerial implications for the marketing of high-tech products that embody certain levels of risk.
Intergroup Anxiety

This article reviews studies of intergroup anxiety and places them in the context of a theoretical model that specifies categories of antecedents and consequences of intergroup anxiety. It is proposed that intergroup anxiety is comprised of three interrelated components: an affective component, a cognitive component, and a physiological component. The potential causes of intergroup anxiety include personality traits (e.g., social dominance orientation, attributional complexity), attitudes and related cognitions (e.g., negative expectations, stereotypes), personal experience (e.g., negative contact), and situational factors (e.g., the presence of linguistic barriers, structured vs. unstructured interactions). The potential consequences include attitudes and other cognitions (e.g., stereotypes, negative expectations), affect (e.g., fear, anger), and behavior (e.g., avoidance, negative behaviors). Theory and research on the reduction of intergroup anxiety (e.g., intergroup contact, direct or indirect cross-group friendships) are also presented. The discussion explores the implications of these studies for theory, research, and practice.
Devolution of HRM and organizational performance: evidence from India

Purpose – Devolution of human resource management to the line managers is an area that has received ample research attention, yet it remains a relatively unexplored area in the Indian context. Some researchers have examined the nature of devolution in India, but there is still a dearth of studies that establish the devolution‐organizational performance link. Thus, this paper study is carried out to explore the above link in the Indian context.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on primary data obtained through a structured research instrument from senior human resource executives of top ranking companies in India. Scale unidimensionality, reliability, and validity were assessed.Findings – The structural equation modeling capabilities of LISREL 8.50 are employed to assess the relationship between devolution and organizational performance. It is found that the structural model fits the data well. The model shows that devolution has a significant direct and positive impact on organizational perf.
Housing finance reform in Mexico: the impact of housing vacancy on property crime

Since 2000, the numbers of vacant housing units have increased dramatically in many parts of Mexico. Much of this has been tied to the liberalisation of the housing market where private homebuilders play an important role in the production of housing and the role of public sector is limited to the support of housing finance. Public debates concerning the regulation of private sector homebuilders as well as the practices and policies of government lending agencies have hinged on housing overproduction and vacancy rates in recent years, with the latter associated with social problems in many cities. This paper explicitly examines the relationship between vacancy rate and levels of property crime (burglaries) in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Along with data from the Population and Housing Census, the State Public Security Office data for the 2008–2009 period on property crimes (burglary), were geocoded, mapped and aggregated to the census-tract level. The ordinary least square regression results show that there are significant local variations in the relationships between the risk of property crimes and the percentage of vacant housing units, commercial and service land use and residents who are male aged 15–24. The findings strongly link housing overproduction with vacancy rates and crime, and suggest that private sector homebuilders and the mortgage allocation system should be more strongly regulated in Mexico.
IFI16 as a Negative Regulator in the Regulation of p53 and p21Waf1*

IFI16 is a member of the HIN-200 family (hematopoietic interferon-inducible nuclear antigens with 200 amino acid repeats) that contains a DNA binding domain, a transcriptional regulatory domain, and DAPIN/PAAD, a protein domain associated with interferon response. It can function as a transcription repressor and directly binds p53. Although the structural and biochemical properties of IFI16 are known, the physiological relevance of these properties in the cellular context is still elusive. Here we report that the inhibition of endogenous IFI16 expression by small interfering RNA (siRNA) induces p21Waf1 mRNA and protein expression through p53 but does not induce pro-apoptotic p53 target genes. This rapid induction of p21 was wild-type p53-dependent and resulted in cell cycle arrest along with a marked reduction of phosphorylated Rb in normally growing cells. We also showed that the repression of IFI16 affects p53 transcriptional activity at the p21 promoter as well as the protein stability of p53 and p21. Our findings identified a new role for IFI16 in modulating p53 function and its target gene regulation in the control of cell cycle regulation.
Managing without institutions : the role of communication networks in governing resource access and control

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that the way groups or individuals tackle resource access and control problems does not always reflect identifiable institutional processes. This was tested through a case study of livelihoods and resource access problems of a Kenyan coastal community dependent on small scale fisheries. The structure of the study was based on the need to understand the context in which people live in order to interpret their behaviour. Each chapter sought to examine aspects of people's social and biophysical setting, paying particular attention to changes and causes of change. This involved a reconstruction of the community's historical relations with other groups in their area; socio-economic analysis of the livelihoods of different groups within the community; and social network analysis of people's actions in response to resource access and control problems. All groups within the community depended on a range of activities to provide food and income, but the role of fishing was dominant. Changes in local natural environments were shown to have led to a decrease in household productivity over the last five decades. This was attributed to colonialism, international development and cultural changes. This also led to increased effort in the sea, leading to overfishing. The overall socio-economic situation of the community was revealed as poor. Social network analysis showed that administrative and political actors were found to be more important than actors with a legal mandate to solve resource related problems. It was shown that formal institutions relating to natural resources stifled the process of problem resolution. Local people were found to use alternative processes, based on communication networks, to solve problems, thus supporting the hypothesis. The findings stress the importance of understanding local people's socio-economic and socio-political situation before developing resource management strategies. Resource managers could make use of social network analysis to identify and understand the roles of key people, groups and organisations.
Water resources vulnerability and adaptive management in the Huang, Huai and Hai river basins of China

The water-short adjacent basins of the Huang (Yellow), Huai and Hai Rivers in North China contain most of China's farmland. This study evaluates water vulnerability there as a function of sensitivity to climate change, people per unit flow, water use-to-availability ratio, and per capita water use. Three scenarios for 2030 are considered: (1) climate change without socio-economic changes; (2) socio-economic changes without climate change; and (3) both climate and socio-economic changes. Results show increases in the already precarious vulnerability, especially in the Hai river basin.
Human gait recognition based on ground reaction forces in case of sport shoes and high heels

Currently, one of the most interesting and quickly growing issues is biometrics. Among many techniques of behavioural biometrics, the human gait recognition deserves special attention. The aim of this work is to check how the quality of a biometrics system based on ground reaction forces will change in the case of women walking in two types of footwear: sports shoes and high heels. The research was carried out based on measurements from 81 people (more than 2 700 gait cycles). The correct classification rate depended on the selected scenario of research and was in the range from 69% to 99%. The work presents the limitations and possibilities of use of human gait recognition. It also shows, that the results depend on the experience of the person walking in high heels.
Reassessing the Gender Wage Gap in Madagascar: Does Labor Force Attachment Really Matter?

In the labor economics literature, it has been argued that differences in labor force attachment across gender are important to explain the extent of the gender wage gap. However, measures of women’s work experience are particularly prone to errors given discontinuity in labor market participation. Using proxy measures such as potential experience may lead to biased estimates of the returns to human capital. Such biases cannot be ignored since these returns are used in the standard decomposition techniques to measure the extent of gender‐based wage discrimination. By matching two original surveys conducted in Madagascar in 1998—a labor force survey and a biographical survey—we built a unique data set that enabled us to combine the original information gathered from each of them, particularly the earnings from current employment and the entire professional trajectories. Our results lead to a reassessment of the returns to human capital as potential experience always exceeds actual experience for both males and females. By using actual experience, we obtain a significant increase in the portion of the gender earnings gap explained by observable characteristics, while the differences in average actual experience across sexes lead to markedly different estimates of the fraction of the gender gap explained by experience.
Optimal Fiscal Policies, Congestion and Over-Entry

By shedding light on market imperfections and the congestion of public goods, we show that free entry in a market equilibrium will lead to excessive entry relative to the social optimum. Moreover, by specifying a generalized congestion function, it is also shown that different fiscal policies, including labor income tax, capital income tax and government expenditure, play a distinct role in terms of remedying market distortions. Specifically, optimal income taxes decrease with the degree of market imperfections in order to remove the monopoly inefficiency, while they increase with the degree of congestion in order to remedy the adverse externality caused by congestion distortion. Since a higher degree of increasing returns to an expansion in the variety of intermediate goods is found to intensify the congestion effect of government infrastructure expenditure, the optimal rule of government expenditure proposed by Barro (1990) should be modified.
How Do Five- and Six-Day Work Schedules Influence the Perceptions of Hospitality Employees in Hong Kong?

In 2006 the Hong Kong government sought to reduce work pressure and increase employee morale by implementing a five-day work scheme for all public service employees. Although average working hours have since decreased 5% compared with those recorded in 2004, the average working week is still too long and Hong Kong has reported the highest turnover rates in Asia, particularly in the hospitality industry. This article investigates the influence of five- and six-day work schedules, both with and without overtime, on employee perceptions of organizational commitment and turnover intentions (TIs) in Hong Kong's hospitality industry. Significant differences were found among the four different work schedules with respect to organizational commitment and TIs. Respondents working the five-day schedule only exhibited higher organizational commitment when compared with their counterparts working a six-day schedule with overtime. Regardless of the influence of overtime, significant differences in TIs were found.
Spatial gradient in value representation along the medial prefrontal cortex reflects individual differences in prosociality

Significance How do selfish and prosocial brains function differently with regard to valuing the welfare of others? The present study addresses this question by combining neuroimaging, computational modeling, and an instrumental conditioning paradigm. Contrary to the conventional notion of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) implicated in mentalization, we found that it was selfish individuals who showed greater spatial segregation between ventral and dorsal MPFC, which encoded self- and other-regarding values, respectively. Prosocial individuals, on the other hand, were characterized by overlapping self–other representation in the ventral MPFC and by stronger functional coupling between MPFC and striatum while representing and updating the value of other-regarding choices. These findings provide rigorous scientific evidence of neural markers reflecting individual differences in human prosociality. Despite the importance of valuing another person’s welfare for prosocial behavior, currently we have only a limited understanding of how these values are represented in the brain and, more importantly, how they give rise to individual variability in prosociality. In the present study, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing a prosocial learning task in which they could choose to benefit themselves and/or another person. Choice behavior indicated that participants valued the welfare of another person, although less so than they valued their own welfare. Neural data revealed a spatial gradient in activity within the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), such that ventral parts predominantly represented self-regarding values and dorsal parts predominantly represented other-regarding values. Importantly, compared with selfish individuals, prosocial individuals showed a more gradual transition from self-regarding to other-regarding value signals in the MPFC and stronger MPFC–striatum coupling when they made choices for another person rather than for themselves. The present study provides evidence of neural markers reflecting individual differences in human prosociality.
Political Party Purpose, Individual Votes, and Political Action Committee Contributions

The authors use two different data sources to confront the questton of whether a party's primary economic purpose is to sell spectal favors or alternatively to provide information and serve as an ideological label. Although not denying the proposition that politicians sell special favors, it does present results consistent with the subordination of favor specialization to ideological specialization. Besides referring to earlier published results, this article analyzes individual voting data in presiden tial and congressional elections in the United States and contributions by groups of individuals and types of special interest classes to incumbent members of the U.S. Senate and House. These results also imply that there is no need to assume differential abilities to provide favors to special interest groups to explain differential success rates in more or less aggregated political jurisdictions.
Scanning Electron Microscopic Study of the Lingual Papillae in the Arctic Fox (Alopex lagopus L., 1758)

This study aims to show the distribution and the three‐dimensional structure of the lingual papillae in the arctic fox. The macro‐ and microscopic structure of the tongue and its lingual papillae was studied in 11 adult arctic foxes. Two types of mechanical papillae were distinguished on the dorsal surface of the tongue – filiform papillae and conical papillae. The gustatory papillae in the arctic fox are represented by fungiform, vallate and foliate papillae. The keratinized filiform papillae on the anterior part of tongue are composed of one big posterior process accompanied by 10–12 secondary anterior processes. The number of anterior processes of filiform papillae undergo a complete reduction within the area between the posterior part of the body of the tongue and area of the vallate papillae. The conical papillae cover the whole dorsal surface of the root of the tongue, including the lateral parts surrounding the area of the vallate papillae and the posterior part of the root. The size of the conical papillae increases towards the root of the tongue but their density decreases. In the arctic fox, there are three pairs of vallate papillae distributed on the plan of a triangle. The diameter of vallate papillae in each successive pair is bigger. The wall surrounding the body of the vallate papilla and its gustatory trench is composed of six to eight conical papillae joined at various degree. The foliate papillae on both margins of the tongue consist of seven to nine laminae.
Factors Influencing Migrant Workers' Employment and Earnings—The Role of Education and Training

在城市劳动力市场上，农村劳动力根据个人的人力资本积累状况和当地的劳动力 市场条件，在成为自我经营者和工资收入者之间进行就业选择。 简单的Mincer工资方 程回归结果显示，工资收入者比自我经营者的教育回报率高出2个百分点左右。 在矫 正了样本选择偏差之后，拓展的Mincer工资方程对工资收入者的教育回报率估计结果 在5.3%-6.8%之间。 从培训角度看，简单培训、短期培训和正规培训对农民工再流动 都有显著作用，但简单培训对农民工的工资收入作用不显著，而短期培训和正规培训 则对其工资收入有着重要的决定作用。 此外，工资拖欠等权益保护问题也对农村劳动 力再流动有重要影响。 在处理农民工的个人异质性和教育内生性问题时，本文还发现 父母受教育年限不是一个理想工具变量。 关键词: 农民工 就业选择 再流动 教育与培训的回报率 处理效应模型 In the urban labor market, the rural labor force can choose whether to become self‐employed or work for wages depending on their stock of human capital and local labor market conditions. A simple Mincer earnings regression shows that the rate of return to schooling for wage earners is two percentage points higher than that for the self‐employed. After correcting for bias in sample selection, the expanded Mincer earnings equation estimated the rate of return to schooling for wage earners at between 5.3 and 6.8 percent. From the standpoint of training, we found that the simplest form of training, short‐term training and formal training played an important role in promoting migrant workers' repeat mobility. However, the simplest form of training did not have a significant effect on earnings, whereas short‐term and formal training played an important determining role in this respect. Moreover, rights protection issues such as wage arrears also had an important effect on migrant workers' repeat mobility. In handling heterogeneity and endogenous educational variables among migrant workers, the authors found that the years of schooling of the parents of migrant workers were not an ideal instrumental variable.