Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Heterogeneous Effects of Risk-Taking on Bank Efficiency: A Stochastic Frontier Model with Random Coefficients

We estimate a stochastic frontier model with random inefficiency parameters, which allows us not only to identify the role of bank risk-taking on driving cost and profit inefficiency, but also to recognize heterogeneous effects of risk exposure on banks with different characteristics. We account for an integral group of risk exposure covariates including credit, liquidity, capital and market risk, as well as bank-specific characteristics of size and affiliation. The model is estimated for the Colombian banking sector during the period 2002-2012. Results suggest that risk-taking drives inefficiency and its omission leads to over (under) estimate cost (profit) efficiency. Risk-taking is also found to have different effects on efficiency of banks with different size and affiliation, and those involved in mergers and acquisitions. In particular, greater exposures to credit and market risk are found to be key profit efficiency drivers.Likewise, lower liquidity risk and capital risk lead to higher efficiency in both costs and profits. Large, foreign and merged banks benefit more when assuming credit risk, while small, domestic and non-merged banks institutions take advantage of assuming higher market risk
Analysis of the Fecal Microflora of Human Subjects Consuming a Probiotic Product Containing Lactobacillus rhamnosusDR20

ABSTRACT The composition of the fecal microflora of 10 healthy subjects was monitored before (6-month control period), during (6-month test period), and after (3-month posttest period) the administration of a milk product containing Lactobacillus rhamnosus DR20 (daily dose, 1.6 × 109 lactobacilli). Monthly fecal samples were examined by a variety of methods, including bacteriological culture analysis, fluorescent in situ hybridization with group-specific DNA probes, denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis of the V2-V3 region of 16S rRNA genes amplified by PCR, gas-liquid chromatography, and bacterial enzyme activity analysis. The composition of theLactobacillus population of each subject was analyzed by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis of bacterial DNA digests in order to differentiate between DR20 and other strains present in the samples. Representative isolates of lactobacilli were identified to the species level by sequencing the V2-V3 region of their 16S rRNA genes and comparing the sequences obtained (BLAST search) to sequences in the GenBank database. DR20 was detected in the feces of all of the subjects during the test period, but at different frequencies. The presence of DR20 among the numerically predominant strains was related to the presence or absence of a stable indigenous population of lactobacilli during the control period. Strain DR20 did not persist at levels of >102 cells per g in the feces of most of the subjects after consumption of the product ceased; the only exception was one subject in which this strain was detected for 2 months during the posttest period. We concluded that consumption of the DR20-containing milk product transiently altered the Lactobacillus and enterococcal contents of the feces of the majority of consumers without markedly affecting biochemical or other bacteriological factors.
Intergenerational flows of support between parents and adult children in Britain

ABSTRACT Understanding patterns of intergenerational support is critical within the context of demographic change, such as changing family structures and population ageing. Existing research has focused on intergenerational support at a given time in the individuals' lifecourse, e.g. from adult children towards older parents and vice versa; however, few studies have focused on the dynamic nature of such support. Analysing data from the 1958 National Child Development Study, this paper investigates the extent to which the receipt of parental help earlier in the lifecourse affects the chances of adult children reciprocating with support towards their parents later in life. The findings show that three-quarters of mid-life adults had received some support from their parents earlier in life, and at age 50 more than half were providing care to their parents. Patterns of support received and provided across the lifecourse differ markedly by gender, with sons being more likely to have received help with finances earlier in the lifecourse, and daughters with child care. The results highlight that care provision towards parents was associated with support receipt earlier in life. However, the degree of reciprocity varies according to the type of care provided by children. Such findings have implications for informal care provision by adult children towards future cohorts of older people, and by extension, the organisation of social care.
The Flypaper Effect Revisited

This paper argues that there is nothing anomalous about the flypaper effect. I develop a simple median voter model of government spending with costly tax collection that predicts the flypaper effect and provide a quantifiable measure of its magnitude. Using the model insights and previous estimates, I show that a tax rate between 8% to 16% would account for the flypaper effect observed in U.S. subnational governments.
A Utilitarian Assessment of Alternative Decision Rules in the Council of Ministers

We develop a utilitarian framework to assess different decision rules for the European Council of Ministers. The proposals to be decided on are conceptualized as utility vectors and a probability distribution is assumed over the utilities. We first show what decision rules yield the highest expected utilities for different means of the probability distribution. For proposals with high mean utility, simple benchmark rules (such as majority voting with proportional weights) tend to outperform rules that have been proposed in the political arena. For proposals with low mean utility, it is the other way round. We then compare the expected utilities for smaller and larger countries and look for Pareto-dominance relations. Finally, we provide an extension of the model, discuss its restrictions, and compare our approach with assessments of decision rules that are based on the Penrose measure of voting power.
The Translational Apparatus of Plastids and Its Role in Plant Development

SUMMARY Systematic reverse genetic approaches in the nuclear and chloroplast genomes have greatly increased our knowledge about the structure, function, and biogenesis of chloroplast ribosomes, and about the molecular mechanisms of plastid protein biosynthesis. They also provided new insights into the regulation of plant development by the activity of plastid gene expression. We review our current knowledge about the translational apparatus of plastids and the impact of plastid translation on plant anatomy and plant morphology.
Response of a spatially developing turbulent boundary layer to a spanwise oscillating electromagnetic force

Direct numerical simulations were performed to investigate the physics of a spatially developing turbulent boundary layer flow subjected to a spanwise oscillating electromagnetic force. The electromagnetic force was applied beneath a finite length of the flat plate. A fully implicit fractional step method was employed to simulate the flow. The mean and turbulent flow properties were obtained to analyze the spatial evolution of the near-wall vortical structure. It was found that the skin friction drag is significantly reduced for an oscillation period of T + = 100. Imposition of electromagnetic forcing leads to a decrease in turbulence production, which in turn causes a reduction in the turbulent kinetic energy. Instantaneous flow visualization techniques were used to observe the responses of the streamwise vortices and streak structures. The visualization results show that imposition of the spanwise oscillation suppresses and weakens the streak structures. Downstream of the region where the electromagnetic force is applied the flow eventually relaxes back to a two-dimensional equilibrium boundary layer.
Candesartan cilexetil in the treatment of chronic heart failure

The prevalence of heart failure is ever increasing around the world, particularly due to aging populations. Despite improvements in treatment over the last 20 years, the prognosis for heart failure remains poor. Among the treatments recommended for chronic heart failure, angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and beta-blockers are crucial, provided of course that they are not contraindicated. However, angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs) can also be a beneficial treatment option. Candesartan is a particular ARB, characterized by a strong binding affinity to the angiotensin II type 1 receptor and slow dissociation. The benefits of candesartan have been demonstrated by the CHARM programme, which showed that candesartan significantly reduces the incidence of cardiovascular death, hospital admissions for decompensated heart failure, and all-cause mortality in chronic heart failure patients with altered left ventricular systolic function, when added to standard therapies or as an alternative to ACE inhibitors when these are poorly tolerated. Furthermore, candesartan can protect against myocardial infarction, atrial fibrillation and diabetes. Tolerance to candesartan is good, but blood pressure and serum potassium and creatinine levels must be monitored.
The mental representation of compound nouns: evidendence from neuro and psycholinguistic studies

Compounds are morphologically complex words (e.g., swordfish) formed by the concatenation of two or more independent lexemes, called constituents (e.g., sword and fish). There is a general debate as to whether constituent representations are accessed during compound processing, and which compound properties would influence this parsing procedure. Indeed, cross-linguistic results of experiments employing priming paradigms indicate a separate representation of compound constituents (e.g., Libben et al., 2003; Zwitserlood, 1994; Jarema et al., 1999). However, several results in cognitive neuropsychology, as well as a number of theoretical considerations, suggest that also properties associated to a whole-word representation of the compound have to be represented (e.g., Mondini et al., 2002). Moreover, it is far from clear as to whether the head-modifier roles of constituents are represented in the mental lexicon: in fact, in most compounds it is possible to identify a head constituent, that shares its lexical and semantic properties with the whole compound (e.g., fish in swordfish), but since most studies are run on Germanic languages, in which the head is always the rightmost element (Williams, 1981), this issue has been mostly overlooked in psycholinguistic literature. Romance languages, which are characterized by both head-initial and head-final compounds, could be an ideal benchmark to test the headedness effect. This thesis investigates the mental representation of compound nouns in a series of six studies exploiting the properties of compounding in Italian, and adopting methodologies from both psycholinguistics and cognitive neuropsychology, with the aim of proposing a unified explanation for the whole-word and structure effects observed in compound processing. Most of the Chapters of this thesis have been published as individual studies on peer-reviewed international journals and presented at several international conferences.
Dialog speech acts and prosody: considerations for TTS

As natural language dialog systems involving both speech recognition and text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis become more sophisticated, the limitations of general-purpose TTS for human-computer dialogs have become more apparent. Much subtlety and complexity of meaning in natural language dialogs is conveyed by prosody; how something is said is often as important as what words are spoken. At the same time, advances such as unit selection synthesis have greatly improved the naturalness of synthetic speech because much less signal processing is required, resulting in less distortion. However, the improved naturalness provided by unit selection synthesis has been achieved at the cost of the more precise prosodic control provided by earlier, more robotic sounding synthesizers. With the goal of providing more prosodic and expressive control over unit selection TTS for dialog applications, while retaining naturalness, we have focused on speech acts, the communicative function of an utterance. The current working set of speech acts being used includes: • Imperative: directive, request, wait, repeat, warning • Interrogative: question-wh, question-yes/no, questionmultiple choice • Assertive: informative-general, informative-detail • Affective: apology, exclamation-positive, exclamationnegative, greeting, good-bye, thanks • Others: confirmation, disconfirmation, back-channel, cue phrase Our work is practically focused, but also involves some observations of more general interest. We use a relatively small set of speech acts both to classify utterances in a speech corpus according to their communicative function, and then to preferentially select speech act-appropriate units to match the desired speech act of the utterance to be synthesized. The corpus is composed of speech read (primarily from interactive dialogs of various kinds) by a female US English speaker (a voice talent used to build one of our TTS voices). We examine prosodic differences of a more “global” nature (mean f0, f0 range, speaking rate, energy level) for the entire set of speech acts. A portion of the database has also been ToBI labeled and analyzed for systematic differences. There are several significant prosodic differences among the various speech acts. In our current TTS implementation, speech acts are being used as another feature to select speech units for concatenation, but results from analyzing prosodic features of the various speech acts will also be used to better predict the prosodic features desired. Results thus far are promising and examples will be demonstrated.
Gambling disorder in financial markets: Clinical and treatment-related features

Background and Aims To date, few studies have examined the clinical manifestation of disordered gamblers in financial markets. This study examined the differences in the clinical and treatment-related features of gambling disorder between financial markets and horse races. Methods Subjects who met the DSM-IV criteria for pathological gambling (PG) and who sought treatment were assessed by retrospective chart review. One hundred forty-four subjects were included in this sample, which consisted of the following groups: financial markets (n = 45; 28.6%) and horse races (n = 99; 71.4%). Results Multiple similar manifestations were found between the groups, including severity of PG, age of PG onset, amounts of gambling debts, drinking days per week, depressive mood, duration of seeking treatment after the onset of PG, and treatment follow-up duration. However, disordered gamblers who invested in the financial market were significantly more likely to be educated (p = 0.003), live with their spouses (p = 0.007), have full-time jobs (p = 0.006), and they were more likely to participate in the first type of gambling than the horse races group (p<0.001). Furthermore, the financial markets group received the anti-craving medication less often than the horse races group (p = 0.04). Discussion and Conclusions: These findings suggest that disordered gamblers in financial markets show different socio-demographic, clinical and treatment-related features compared with the horse race gamblers, despite a similar severity of gambling disorder. Understanding these differential manifestations may provide insight into prevention and treatment development for specific types of gambling.
Profitability of simple trading strategies exploiting the forward premium bias in foreign exchange markets and the time premium in yield curves

This paper focuses on two actively studied inefficiencies in financial markets: the forward premium bias in foreign exchange markets (see, for example, Hansen and Hodrick 1980, Fama 1984, Bansal and Dahlquist 2000, etc.) and the empirical finding that the time expectations theory performs relatively poorly in describing the average shape of yield curves (for a list of papers see, for example, Backus et al. 1998, p 1). The goal of the article is to test whether these two inefficiencies can still offer the possibilities of earning positive and stable excess return for investors. For that purpose, first two very simple trading strategies are tested based on the abovementioned inefficiencies: buying the currencies of the countries with higher short-term interest rates against the currencies of the countries with lower short-term interest rates (i.e. simple FX carry-strategy) and holding long-only positions in longerterm interest rate futures. The results show that the two studied risk premiums are still present in the markets and enable investors to earn excess returns even with simple strategies. Additional tests show that the performance of these simple strategies can be further improved by the inclusion of a risk factor in the foreign exchange carry-strategy and by the addition of monetary policy direction and yield curve steepness filters in the long-only strategy in interest rate futures.
Forecasting Mortgage Securitization Risk Under Systematic Risk and Parameter Uncertainty

type="main" xml:lang="en"> The global financial crisis exposed financial institutions to severe unexpected losses in relation to mortgage securitizations and derivatives. This article finds that risk models such as ratings are exposed to a large degree of systematic risk and parameter uncertainty. An out-of-sample forecasting exercise of the financial crisis shows that a simple approach addressing both issues is able to produce ranges for risk measures consistent with realized losses. This explains how financial markets were taken by surprise in relation to realized losses.
Large‐scale morphological survey of mouse retinal ganglion cells

Five hundred twenty ganglion cells in an isolated whole‐mount preparation of the mouse retina were labeled using the “DiOlistic” method (Gan et al. [ 2000 ] Neuron 27:219–225) and were classified according to their morphological properties. Tungsten particles coated with a lipophilic dye (DiI) were propelled into the whole‐mount retina using a gene gun. When a dye‐coated particle contacted the cell membrane, the entire cell was labeled. The ganglion cells were classified into four groups based on their soma size, dendritic field size, and pattern and level of stratification. Broadly monostratified cells were classified into three groups: RGA cells (large soma, large dendritic field), RGB cells (small to medium‐sized soma, small to medium‐sized dendritic field), and RGC cells (small to medium‐sized size soma, medium‐sized to large dendritic field). Bistratified cells were classified as RGD. This study represents the most complete morphological classification of mouse retinal ganglion cells available to date and provides a foundation for further understanding of the correlation of physiology and morphology and ganglion cell function with genetically manipulated animals. J. Comp. Neurol. 451:115–126, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Endogenous Credible Commitment and Party Competition Over Redistribution Under Alternative Electoral Institutions

Political parties competing in elections for the power to set public policy face the problem of making credible their policy promises to voters. I argue that this commitment problem crucially shapes party competition over redistribution. The model I develop shows that under majoritarian electoral rules, parties' efforts to achieve endogenous commitment to policies preferred by the middle class lead to different behavior and outcomes than suggested by existing theories, which either assume commitment or rule out endogenous commitment. Thus, left parties can have incentives to respond to rising income inequality by moving to the right in majoritarian systems but not under proportional representation. The model also generates new insights about the anti-left electoral bias often attributed to majoritarian electoral rules, and the strategic use of parliamentary candidates as a commitment device. I find evidence for key implications of this logic using panel data on party positions in 16 parliamentary democracies.
A Behavioral Genetic Study of Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Dimensions of Narcissism

Narcissism, characterized by grandiose self-image and entitled feelings to others, has been increasingly prevalent in the past decades. This study examined genetic and environmental bases of two dimensions of narcissism: intrapersonal grandiosity and interpersonal entitlement. A total of 304 pairs of twins from Beijing, China completed the Narcissistic Grandiosity Scale and the Psychological Entitlement Scale. Both grandiosity (23%) and entitlement (35%) were found to be moderately heritable, while simultaneously showing considerable non-shared environmental influences. Moreover, the genetic and environmental influences on the two dimensions were mostly unique (92–93%), with few genetic and environmental effects in common (7–8%). The two dimensions of narcissism, intrapersonal grandiosity and interpersonal entitlement, are heritable and largely independent of each other in terms of their genetic and environmental sources. These findings extend our understanding of the heritability of narcissism on the one hand. On the other hand, the study demonstrates the rationale for distinguishing between intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions of narcissism, and possibly personality in general as well.
ISSN 1398-2699STOCK MARKET RISK-RETURN INFERENCE. AN UNCONDITIONAL NON-PARAMETRIC APPROACH.

We propose an unconditional non-parametric approach to the simultaneous estimation of volatility and expected return. By means of a detailed analysis of the returns of the Standard & Poors 500 (S&P 500) composite stock index over the last fifty years we show how theoretical results and methodological recommendations from the statistical theory of non-parametric curve inference allow one to consistently estimate expected return and volatility. In this approach we do not postulate an a priori relationship risk-return nor do we specify the evolution of the first two moments through covariates. Our analysis gives statistical evidence that the expected return of the S&P 500 index as well as the market price of risk (the ratio expected return minus risk free interest rate over volatility) vary through time both in size and sign. In particular, the periods of negative (positive) expected return and market price of risk coincide with the bear (bull) markets of the index as defined in the literature. A complex relationship between risk and expected return emerges which is far from the common assumption of a positive linear time-invariant relation.
Leadership development, identity, culture and context : a qualitative case study

3 Chapter 1: Introduction . 8 1.1 Setting the Scene . 8 1.2 Research Context . 10 1.3 Research Aim and Contribution . 12 1.4 Thesis Structure . 16 Chapter 2: Literature Review . 18 2.