Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Testing market efficiency: Evidence from the NFL sports betting market

This article examines the efficiency of the National Football League betting market. The standard ordinary least squares regression methodology is replaced by a probit model. This circumvents potential econometric problems, and allows the authors to implement more sophisticated betting strategies where bets are placed only when there is a relatively high probability of success. In-sample tests indicate that probit-based betting strategies generate statistically significant profits. Whereas the profitability of a number of these betting strategies is confirmed by out-of-sample testing, there is some inconsistency among the remaining out-of-sample predictions. The authors' results also suggest that widely documented inefficiencies in this market tend to dissipate over time. Copyright 1997 by American Finance Association.
Institutional Marketing Approaches, Student Decision Points, and Motivational Factors Affecting Student Decisions to Participate in Summer Session and Attend a Particular Institution

Why do students enroll in Summer Session? What are the most effective ways to market summer programs? When do students decide to enroll? What leads students to particular institutions for their studies? Summer Session directors ask these questions every year. Possible answers are proposed in the offices and halls of our institutions, while assumptions are often made based upon anecdotal information and—far less frequently—upon institution-specific survey findings. Despite the fact that answers to these questions should inform much of what we plan and do, little empirical research has been conducted to seek answers to these and other critical questions to support solid planning efforts. Many program directors and deans lament the lack of resources to adequately explore these issues, yet do not question how their current allocation of resources might be realigned to continually assess student motivations, trends affecting enrollment and patterns in decision-making behavior.
Tangled up in a spaghetti bowl - trade effects of overlapping preferential trade agreements in Africa

Overlapping trade agreements in Africa are often brought up as an obstacle to the trade effect of preferential integration and referred to as the spaghetti bowl. The problem has not been investigated empirically before although it is often discussed by observers of the African economy. The purpose of this study is to describe the spaghetti bowl in Africa and to assess its impact on the effect of preferential integration with the help of a gravity model. The data cover intra-Africa bilateral trade flows for Africa’s 53 countries. The study could not provide evidence of a negative effect of overlapping agreements on preferential integration and hence trade.
Incentives to Cultivate Favored Minorities Under Alternative Electoral Systems

A simple model is used to compare, under different electoral systems, the incentives for candidates to create inequalities among otherwise homogeneous voters, by making campaign promises that favor small groups, rather than appealing equally to all voters. In this game model, each candidate generates offers for voters independently out of a distribution that is chosen by the candidate, subject only to the constraints that offers must be nonnegative and have mean 1. Symmetric equilibria with sincere voting are analyzed for two-candidate elections and for multicandidate elections under rank-scoring rules, approval voting, and single transferable vote. Voting rules that can guarantee representation for minorities in multiseat elections generate, in this model, the most severely unequal campaign promises.
Twisted zastava and q ‐Whittaker functions

We implement the program outlined in Section 7 of our earlier paper [J. Amer. Math. Soc. 27 (2014) 1147–1168] extending to the case of nonsimply laced simple Lie algebras the construction of solutions of q ‐difference Toda equations from geometry of quasimaps' spaces. To this end we introduce and study the twisted zastava spaces.
MicroRNAs are differentially expressed in ulcerative colitis and alter expression of macrophage inflammatory peptide-2 alpha.

BACKGROUND & AIMS Chronic inflammatory bowel diseases such as ulcerative colitis (UC) are associated with differential expression of genes involved in inflammation and tissue remodeling. MicroRNAs (miRNAs), which direct mRNA degradation and translational inhibition, influence a number of disease processes. We examined whether miRNAs are differentially expressed in UC tissues and are associated with expression of genes that regulate inflammation. METHODS miRNA expression was assessed in patients with active UC, inactive UC, Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, infectious colitis, and microscopic colitis, as well as in healthy subjects by microarray, quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction and in situ hybridization analyses. Colonic epithelial cell (HT29) expression of miRNAs was assessed. Regulation of gene expression by miRNAs was assessed by luciferase reporter construct assays and transfection of specific miRNA mimics. RESULTS Active UC was associated with the differential expression of 11 miRNAs; 3 were significantly decreased and 8 were significantly increased in UC tissues. In situ hybridization analysis indicated that miR-192, an miRNA with decreased expression in active UC, was predominantly localized to colonic epithelial cells. Macrophage inflammatory peptide (MIP)-2 alpha, a chemokine expressed by epithelial cells, was identified as a target of miR-192. In colon epithelial cells, induction of MIP-2 alpha expression by tumor necrosis factor-alpha was accompanied by a concomitant reduction in miR-192 expression and miR-192 was observed to regulate the expression of MIP-2 alpha. CONCLUSIONS These findings expand the known roles of miRNAs, indicating that tissues from patients with UC, and possibly other chronic inflammatory diseases, have altered miRNA expression patterns. These findings also demonstrate that miRNAs regulate colonic epithelial cell-derived chemokine expression.
Individual Effects in a Nonlinear Model: Explicit Treatment of Heterogeneity in the Empirical Job-Search Model

This paper extends the empirical version of a job-search model to permit heterogeneity in the location of wage offer distributions. Population variance in wage offers is decomposed into variance due to heterogeneity and variance facing each individual. Heterogeneity is found to be an important source of offer variance in the population. The amount of "pure wage offer dispersion" facing individuals is found to contribute little to population variance.
Exploring intellectual capital in a call centre through a 'system dynamics' resource based view

This paper examines alternative Intellectual Capital (IC) investment policies in a dynamically complex system in order to explain differences in firm performance. The analysis is supported through the use of a System Dynamics (SD) simulation model. This paper is based on the hypothesis that in order to explain superior performance, it is not sufficient to look at the endowment of strategic resources; it also requires an analysis of the dynamics of resource accumulation and depletion processes, which stem from management policies. To assess the impact of IC on company performance, a conceptual framework and an SD simulation model are developed. Finally, the results from alternative scenarios are presented.
Concurrent engineering: An enabler for fast, high-quality product realization

Concurrent engineering (CE) is a proven approach for product realization that results in reduced time to bring a product to market, improved product and service quality, and reduced life-cycle costs. Time-to-market improvements of 30% to 60% are typical of a disciplined approach to concurrent engineering. Concurrent engineering integrates and synchronizes activities and the information required to define, design, produce, deliver the product or service, and to maintain the product or service over its life cycle. This paper reaches beyond a simple explanation of CE and provides examples of how powerful CE implementations can be. The paper: — Describes the elements of an infrastructure and supporting technologies for a CE-based product realization process (PRP), — Provides guidance for deploying CE by explaining a broad-based CE implementation process, and — Shares tips and ideas on how an individual or small team can catalyze CE in an organization.
Efficacy of Monetary Policy in Curtailing Consumption: Empirical Evidence from Fiji

Should Reserve Bank of Fiji (RBF) use rate of interest to control private consumption expenditure in Fiji? This paper investigates whether rate of interest is an appropriate monetary policy instrument to reduce consumption in Fiji. Results indicate that interest rate has no effect on private consumption. The appropriate monetary policy stance is targeting the availability of consumer credit, if RBF intends to maintain the internal and external balance, because demand for money is stable.
The cyclical relations between traded property stock prices and aggregate time-series

This paper examines the cyclical regularities of macroeconomic, financial and property market aggregates in relation to the property stock price cycle in the UK. The Hodrick Prescott filter is employed to fit a long‐term trend to the raw data, and to derive the short‐term cycles of each series. It is found that the cycles of consumer expenditure, total consumption per capita, the dividend yield and the long‐term bond yield are moderately correlated, and mainly coincident, with the property price cycle. There is also evidence that the nominal and real Treasury Bill rates and the interest rate spread lead this cycle by one or two quarters, and therefore that these series can be considered leading indicators of property stock prices. This study recommends that macroeconomic and financial variables can provide useful information to explain and potentially to forecast movements of property‐backed stock returns in the UK.
But is it Myopia? Risk Aversion and the Efficiency of Stock-Based Managerial Incentives

This paper points out that stock incentives do not lead to myopia unless they result in more emphasis on the short-term than would occur under an optimal contract. It shows that myopia findings relative to the standard used throughout the literature (first-best efficiency) are often reversed when evaluated relative to the relevant standard of optimal contracting. Results reported by the previous literature to be myopia often in fact have excessive emphasis on the long-term. The paper solves in closed-form for the region in parameter space which gives rise to these reversals and shows that it can be arbitrarily large.
Dividend Taxation and the Cost of New Share Issues

This paper examines how the effects of dividend taxation on the cost of new equity funds depend on whether or not shareholders can recover their original equity injections without being subject to the dividend tax. We point out the alternative assumptions in the literature on this, and we compare two different tax regimes, one where it is impossible for the firm to pay cash to its shareholders that is not taxed as dividends, the other where the shareholders are allowed a tax-free return of the original capital contributed through new issues. We conclude that any model, which explicitly or implicitly assumes that the shareholders cannot recover their original equity injections without being subject to the dividend tax, exaggerates the distortive effects of the tax.
ExprGAN: Facial Expression Editing with Controllable Expression Intensity

Facial expression editing is a challenging task as it needs a high-level semantic understanding of the input face image. In conventional methods, either paired training data is required or the synthetic face’s resolution is low. Moreover,only the categories of facial expression can be changed. To address these limitations, we propose an Expression Generative Adversarial Network (ExprGAN) for photo-realistic facial expression editing with controllable expression intensity. An expression controller module is specially designed to learn an expressive and compact expression code in addition to the encoder-decoder network. This novel architecture enables the expression intensity to be continuously adjusted from low to high. We further show that our ExprGAN can be applied for other tasks, such as expression transfer, image retrieval, and data augmentation for training improved face expression recognition models. To tackle the small size of the training database, an effective incremental learning scheme is proposed. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on the widely used Oulu-CASIA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of ExprGAN.
The Privatization of Public Legal Rights: How Manufacturers Construct the Meaning of Consumer Law

This article demonstrates how the content and meaning of California’s consumer protection laws were shaped by automobile manufacturers, the very group these laws were designed to regulate. My analysis draws on and links two literatures that examine the relationship between law and organizations but often overlook one another: political science studies of how businesses influence public legal institutions, and neo-institutional sociology studies of how organizations shape law within their organizational field. By integrating these literatures, I develop an “institutional-political” theory that demonstrates how organizations’ construction of law and compliance within an organizational field shapes the meaning of law among legislators and judges. This study examines case law and more than 35 years of California legislative history concerning its consumer warranty laws. Using institutional and political analysis, I show how auto manufacturers, who were initially subject to powerful consumer protection laws, weakened the impact of these laws by creating dispute resolution venues. The legislature and courts subsequently incorporated private dispute resolution venues into statutes and court decisions and made consumer rights and remedies largely contingent on consumers first using manufacturer-sponsored venues. Organizational venue creation resulted in public legal rights being redefined and controlled by private organizations.
Different Domains Control the Localization and Mobility of LIKE HETEROCHROMATIN PROTEIN1 in Arabidopsis Nuclei[W]

Plants possess a single gene for the structurally related HETEROCHROMATIN PROTEIN1 (HP1), termed LIKE-HP1 (LHP1). We investigated the subnuclear localization, binding properties, and dynamics of LHP1 proteins in Arabidopsis thaliana cells. Transient expression assays showed that tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) LHP1 fused to green fluorescent protein (GFP; Sl LHP1-GFP) and Arabidopsis LHP1 (At LHP1-GFP) localized to heterochromatic chromocenters and showed punctuated distribution within the nucleus; tomato but not Arabidopsis LHP1 was also localized within the nucleolus. Mutations of aromatic cage residues that recognize methyl K9 of histone H3 abolished their punctuated distribution and localization to chromocenters. Sl LHP1-GFP plants displayed cell type–dependent subnuclear localization. The diverse localization pattern of tomato LHP1 did not require the chromo shadow domain (CSD), whereas the chromodomain alone was insufficient for localization to chromocenters; a nucleolar localization signal was identified within the hinge region. Fluorescence recovery after photobleaching showed that Sl LHP1 is a highly mobile protein whose localization and retention are controlled by distinct domains; retention at the nucleolus and chromocenters is conferred by the CSD. Our results imply that LHP1 recruitment to chromatin is mediated, at least in part, through interaction with methyl K9 and that LHP1 controls different nuclear processes via transient binding to its nuclear sites.
Determinants of disclosure of genital herpes to partners

Objective: To identify factors which determine whether and when patients will disclose infection with genital herpes to sexual partners. Methods: The sample was 26 women and 24 men attending a herpes clinic in a sexually transmitted disease clinic. Semistructured interviews yielded quantitative data and also qualitative data which were subjected to content analysis. Results: Characteristics of partners were very important in determining whether disclosure occurred. Respondents were less likely to tell partners regarded as casual. Perception of the likely reaction of partners was important in deciding whether to tell. Many respondents assumed that they were not infectious if they were not currently having an attack or if they were taking antiviral medication. The decision whether to tell tended to be based on considerations of likely discovery and of honesty towards the partner rather than control of transmission. Of patient characteristics only self rated depressed mood was related to disclosure to the most recent partner. Conclusions: Perception of the partner and anticipated partner response is crucially important in determining whether and when disclosure of genital herpes infection occurs.
Money as Stock: Price Level Determination with No Money Demand

I show that a determinate, finite price level can be achieved in an economy with no monetary frictions, and no commodity standard or other explicit redemption commitment. I make one small modification to a standard cash in advance model: I reopen the security market at the end of the day. With this modification, overnight money demand is precisely zero. I show that the price level is still determined, however, by the government debt valuation equation. Nominal government debt is, despite appearances, a residual claim to government surpluses. Thus, the price level is determined just like the price of stock, and just as if we used (say) Microsoft stock as numeraire, unit of account, and medium of exchange. I resolve Buiter's (1999) criticism that fiscal price level determination mis-treats the government budget constraint. The government is not forced by a budget constraint to raise surpluses in response to an off-equilibrium deflation, just as Microsoft is not forced to raise earnings if there is a bubble in its stock price. I also address McCallum's (1998) criticism that fiscal models do not properly treat indeterminacies, and a number of other confusions and misconceptions surrounding fiscal price level determination. I provide a taxonomy of fiscal and monetary regimes.
The Marketing Strategy Continuum: Towards a Marketing Concept for the 1990s

In this article the marketing strategy continuum concept is presented and a number of marketing and management consequences are discussed. It demonstrates the need for a marketing concept which allows a variety of approaches to marketing. The nature of a relationship approach to marketing strategy is analysed in comparison with the nature of a transaction marketing strategy. Relationship marketing and transaction marketing are seen as strategy options at opposite ends of the continuum. Eight marketing and management implications of the two extreme strategies are examined.
Fluid therapy for severe acute pancreatitis in acute response stage

Background Fluid therapy for severe acute pancreatitis (SAP) should not only resolve deficiency of blood volume, but also prevent fluid sequestration in acute response stage. Up to date, there has not a strategy for fluid therapy dedicated to SAP. So, this study was aimed to investigate the effects of fluid therapy treatment on prognosis of SAP. Methods Seventy‐six patients were admitted prospectively according to the criteria within 72 hours of SAP onset. They were randomly assigned to a rapid fluid expansion group (Group I, n=36) and a controlled fluid expansion group (Group II, n=40). Hemodynamic disorders were either quickly (fluid infusion rate was 10‐15 ml·kg‐1·h‐1, Group I) or gradually improved (fluid infusion rate was 5‐10 ml·kg‐1·h‐1, Group II) through controlling the rate of fluid infusion. Parameters of fluid expansion, blood lactate concentration were obtained when meeting the criteria for fluid expansion. And APACHE II scores were obtained serially for 72 hours. Rate of mechanical ventilation, incidence of abdominal compartment syndrome (ACS), sepsis, and survival rate were obtained. Results The two groups had statistically different (P <0.05) time intervals to meet fluid expansion criteria (Group I, 13.5±6.6 hours; Group II, (24.0±5.4) hours). Blood lactate concentrations were both remarkably lower as compared to the level upon admission (P <0.05) and reached the normal level in both groups upon treatment. It was only at day 1 that hematocrit was significantly lower in Group I (35.6%±6.8%) than in Group II (38.5%±5.4%) (P<0.01). Amount of crystalloid and colloid in group I ((4028±1980)ml and (1336±816)ml) on admission day was more than those of group II ((2472±1871)ml and (970±633)ml). No significant difference was found in the total amount of fluids within four days of admission between the two groups (P>0.05). Total amount of fluid sequestration within 4 days was higher in Group I ((5378±2751)ml) than in Group II ((4215±1998)ml, P <0.05). APACHE II scores were higher in Group I on days 1, 2, and 3 (P <0.05). Rate of mechanical ventilation was higher in group I (94.4%) than in group II (65%, P <0.05). The incidences of abdominal compartment syndrome (ACS) and sepsis were significantly lower in Group II (P <0.05). Survival rate was remarkably lower in Group I (69.4%) than in Group II (90%, P <0.05). Conclusions Controlled fluid resuscitation offers better prognosis in patients with severe volume deficit within 72 hours of SAP onset.
Proctocolectomy with ileal reservoir and anal anastomosis

A technique of proctocolectomy avoiding an ileostomy has been developed for patients with ulcerative colitis or polyposis coli. After excision of all diseased tissue a reservoir of terminal ileum is constructed which is brought through the rectal stump denuded of mucosa; an ileo‐anal anastomosis is then carried out.
Variability in Population Density of House Dust Mites of Bitlis and Muş, Turkey

Abstract This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between the number of house dust mites/g dust and different physical and environmental variables. A total of 1,040 house dust samples were collected from houses in Bitlis and Muş Provinces, Turkey, between May 2010 and February 2012. Overall, 751 (72.2%) of dust samples were mite positive. The number of mites/g dust varied between 20 and 1,840 in mite-positive houses. A significant correlation was detected between mean number of mites and altitude of houses, frequency of monthly vacuum cleaning, number of individuals in the household, and relative humidity. No association was found between the number of mites and temperature, type of heating, existence of allergic diseases, age and structure of houses. A maximum number of mites were detected in summer and a minimum number was detected in autumn.
Learning through Alliances: General Motors and Nummi

Although alliances often create valuable learning opportunities, the exploitation of the opportunities is a difficult, frustrating, and often misunderstood process. More often than not, firms learn little from their alliance partners. This article examines General Motors (GM) and its exploitation of the learning opportunity created by NUMMI, its California-based alliance with Toyota. Over the past few decades, GM has steadily and significantly improved its quality and productivity relative to its main rivals. A key factor in this improvement has been knowledge transferred from Toyota to NUMMI and NUMMI to GM. This article describes how GM transferred the "sticky" knowledge of NUMMI to the initially skeptical GM manufacturing community. The learning mechanisms employed included managerial assignments to NUMMI, visits and tours to NUMMI, a technical liaison office for managing learning activities, leadership commitment and involvement in the learning process, and a learning network to articulate and spread the knowledge.