Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Different Prognostic Value of Functional Right Ventricular Parameters in Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy/Dysplasia

Background—The value of standard 2-dimensional transthoracic echocardiographic parameters for risk stratification in patients with arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy/dysplasia (ARVC/D) is controversial. Methods and Results—We investigated the impact of RV fractional area change (FAC) and tricuspid annulus plane systolic excursion (TAPSE) for the prediction of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) defined as the occurrence of cardiac death, heart transplantation, survived sudden cardiac death, ventricular fibrillation, sustained ventricular tachycardia, or arrhythmogenic syncope. Among 70 patients who fulfilled the 2010 ARVC/D Revised Task Force Criteria and underwent baseline transthoracic echocardiography, 37 (53%) patients experienced MACE during a median follow-up period of 5.3 (interquartile range, 1.8–9.8) years. Average values for FAC, TAPSE, and TAPSE indexed to body surface area (BSA) decreased over time (P=0.03 for FAC, P=0.03 for TAPSE, and P=0.01 for TAPSE/BSA, each versus baseline). In contrast, median RV end-diastolic area increased (P=0.001 versus baseline). Based on the results of Kaplan–Meier estimates, the time between baseline transthoracic echocardiography and experiencing MACE was significantly shorter for patients with FAC <23% (P<0.001), TAPSE <17 mm (P=0.02), or right atrial short axis/BSA ≥25 mm/m2 (P=0.04) at baseline. A reduced FAC constituted the strongest predictor of MACE (hazard ratio, 1.08 per 1% decrease; 95% confidence interval, 1.04–1.12; P<0.001) on bivariable analysis. Conclusions—This long-term observational study indicates that TAPSE and dilation of right-sided cardiac chambers are associated with an increased risk for MACE in patients with ARVC/D with advanced disease and a high risk for adverse events. However, FAC is the strongest echocardiographic predictor of adverse outcome in these patients. Our data advocate a role for transthoracic echocardiography in risk stratification in patients with ARVC/D, although our results may not be generalizable to lower-risk ARVC/D cohorts.
Boom-Bust Phases in Asset Prices and Fiscal Policy Behavior

Boom and bust phases in asset prices have become a pervasive feature of macroeconomic developments in many advanced economies. This paper studies fiscal policy during boom-bust phases in asset prices and draws several conclusions. First, expansions and contractions in economic activity during such boom-bust phases tend to be highly persistent, cyclical turning points are harder to forecast, and the margins of error for output gap estimates can be large. Second, conventional estimates of revenue elasticities seem not to allow an accurate assessment of fiscal stance or the strength of underlying fiscal positions during boom-bust phases. Third, boom-bust phases tend to exacerbate already existing procyclical policy biases, as well as political-economy biases, toward higher spending and public-debt ratios.
Predictability and the Earnings-Returns Relation

This paper studies the effects of predictability on the earnings-returns relation for individual firms and for the aggregate. We demonstrate that prices better anticipate earnings growth at the aggregate level than at the firm level, which implies that random-walk models are inappropriate for gauging aggregate earnings expectations. Moreover, we show that the contemporaneous correlation of earnings growth and stock returns decreases with the ability to predict future earnings. Our results may therefore help explain the apparently conflicting recent evidence that the earnings-returns relation is negative at the aggregate level but positive at the firm level.
The Real Risk-Free Rate and the Price of Equity: What Role does Macroeconomic Uncertainty Play?

Between 37% and 75% of quarterly variations in the U.S. aggregate logarithmic price-dividend ratio are related to economic information that is embedded in the real risk-free rate. Only one hidden factor is required to explain more than 80\% of these common variations. Surprisingly, standard measures of macroeconomic risks seem not to contain information about this unobserved common factor. As surprising, a standard measure of macroeconomic uncertainty explains more than 50\% of its variations. The revealed empirical pattern between macroeconomic uncertainty, the real risk-free rate and the price of equity is at odds with existing theoretical models. We analyze theoretically and empirically the reasons for this puzzle and derive suggestions to overcome these.
The effect of ownership concentration on CEO compensation‐firm performance relationship in New Zealand

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of ownership concentration on CEO compensation and firm performance relationship in New Zealand.Design/methodology/approach – The paper applies regression analysis to data from New Zealand listed companies from 2001 to 2005.Findings – The study finds a non‐linear effect of ownership concentration on CEO compensation‐firm performance relationship, that is CEO compensation is negatively (positively) related to firm performance in firms with high (low) concentrated ownership structure respectively.Research limitations/implications – Results provide evidence for the proposition that ownership concentration at a high level in New Zealand does not constrain excessive management power, but exacerbates agency problems associated with executive pay. A highly concentrated ownership structure provides potential explanation for the misalignment between CEO compensation and firm performance in New Zealand. The positive effect of a low ownership concentra.
Long-Run Money Demand in Canada: In Search of Stability

The authors search for a long-run cointegrating relationship among real money balances, real income, and interest rates, extending the work of Steve Ambler and Algin Paquet (1990), who explore this issue in the Canadian context employing the methods of Robert F. Engle and Clive W. Granger (1987). First, they uncover parameter estimates of the cointegrated relationships using three different methods of estimation. Second, the authors employ the Hansen (1992) procedure to search for structural instability in cointegrating relationships with unknown break points. They find empirical support for a stable cointegrating relationship among real M1, real income, and short-term interest rates in Canada for the period 1953:1-1990:4. Copyright 1996 by MIT Press.
West African Currency Unions: Rationale and Sustainability

Drawing on the recent literature and experience of monetary integration in Europe, the paper examines the rationale for establishing regional currency unions in western Africa. Despite dramatic economic, political and historical differences between the two regions, the analysis indicates that monetary unification might well be beneficial for a number of the member states of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The main reason is that the costs stemming from the loss of monetary autonomy are often more than offset by the gains originating in the (partial) separation of monetary and fiscal powers. However, large countries with relatively ambitious public expenditure objectives would not be attractive partners because they would be expected to pressure the common central bank, creating excessive inflation in the entire union. Hence, the desirability and sustainability of a currency union critically depends on fiscal discipline among its members. We also explore the vulnerability of regional monetary institutions to country-specific disturbances. Overall, the desirability of an ECOWAS monetary union requires a strong fiscal surveillance procedure both in the transition phase and after the establishment of the union. (JEL E58, E61, F42)
Levodopa-Induced Dyskinesias in Parkinson’s Disease: Etiology, Impact on Quality of Life, and Treatments

Levodopa is the most effective agent to alleviate motor dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease but its long-term use is associated with the development of dyskinesias. Although the pathogenic processes behind the development of levodopa-induced dyskinesias are still being elucidated, it appears that chronic administration of this short-lived agent results in nonphysiologic pulsatile stimulation of striatal neurons and abnormal firing patterns in the basal ganglia. Dyskinesias have been associated with decreased quality of life, and a number of methodologies to evaluate severity of dyskinesias are now available. Strategies to avoid, reduce, or eliminate dyskinesias include providing more continuous dopaminergic stimulation, administering an antidyskinetic agent, and surgery. Several new compounds that may provide an antidyskinetic effect are also under investigation.
Does consistency in management control systems design choices influence firm performance? An empirical analysis

This study examines the impact on firm performance of theoretically consistent relationships between three management control systems (MCS) design choices – delegation, performance measurement, and incentive compensation. Based upon the ‘three-legged stool’ model and agency theory, the hypothesis is that theoretically consistent MCS design choices are associated with enhanced firm performance. Using survey data from large Australian firms, the findings support the hypothesis, suggesting that an appropriate MCS design is a determinant of firm performance. The study contributes to the literature by moving beyond a focus on the antecedents of the three key MCS design choices to the consequence of alignment of those choices.
The Dynamic Impacts of State Revenue Capacity on Highway Investment

This study investigates the short-term effects of state-highway EARs (EARs) and federal-grant expenditure on present-year state revenue sources and highway investment, when another state-highway source, general revenue, is controlled for. In the dynamic framework, this article argues that general revenue interacts with highway EAR and federal-grant reimbursements since these revenue sources are substitutable. The results from the panel vector auto regression (PVAR) indicate that (a) EAR and federal grants are inversely related to general revenues used in highway programs, (b) when controlled for simultaneity, autocorrelation, and omitted-variable bias, EAR and federal grants are not significant for state-investment decisions, and (c) general revenue inversely relates to state investment because there is competition for public resources between highway and general-revenue programs.
Management Without Borders? A Survey of Landowner Practices and Attitudes toward Cross-Boundary Cooperation

Ecosystem management requires cross-jurisdictional problem-solving and, when private lands are involved, cross-boundary cooperation from many individual landowners. Fragmented ownership patterns and variation in ownership values, as well as distrust and transaction costs, can limit cooperation. Results from a landowner survey in California were analyzed using an audience segmentation approach. Landowners were grouped into four clusters according to ownership motivations: rural lifestyle, working landscape, natural amenity, and financial investment. All clusters showed willingness to cooperate for all three topics addressed in the survey (pest and disease control, fire hazard reduction, and wildlife conservation), but their degree of willingness differed by cluster, who they were expected to cooperate with, and the natural resource problem addressed. All were more willing to cooperate with neighbors and local groups than with state and federal agencies. Landowners were most willing to cooperate to reduce fire hazard, which is the most direct threat to property and well-being.
Karyotypic Characteristics of the Ornithophilic Simulium aureum Species Group (Diptera: Simuliidae) Along the Northern Black Sea Coast and the Origin of Chromosomal Reduction

Abstract The Simulium aureum group (Diptera: Simuliidae), also known as subgenus Eusimulium Roubaud, is a monophyletic, Holarctic taxon of bird-feeding black flies with a reduced chromosome number of two and remarkably similar external structure in all life stages. We analyzed the banding patterns of the polytene chromosomes to understand the composition of this species group along the northern coast of the Black Sea where two little-known nominal species have their type localities. Our analyses link the names Simulium krymense (Rubtsov) and Simulium maritimum (Rubtsov) with unique chromosomal characters, indicate that both are male chiasmate, and reveal the presence of Simulium angustipes Edwards along the northern coast of the Black Sea for the first time. We show that S. krymense has a banding sequence most similar to the hypothesized ancestral form of the S. aureum group, and that the entire group is derived from within the Simulium vernum group, rendering the latter group and its encompassing subgenus, Nevermannia Enderlein, paraphyletic.
Asymmetric Information and Risky Debt Maturity Choice

When capital market investors and firm insiders possess the same information about a company's prospects, its liabilities will be priced in a way that makes the firm indifferent to the composition of its financial liabilities (at least under certain, well-known circumstances). However, if firm insiders are systematically better informed than outside investors, they will choose to issue those types of securities that the market appears to overvalue most. Knowing this, rational investors will try to infer the insiders' information from the firm's financial structure. This paper evaluates the extent to which a firm's choice of risky debt maturity can signal insiders' information about firm quality. If financial market transactions are costless, a firm's financial structure cannot provide a valid signal. With positive transaction costs, however, high-quality firms can sometimes effectively signal their true quality to the market. The existence of a signalling equilibrium is shown to depend on the (exogenous) distribution of firms' quality and the magnitude of underwriting costs for corporate debt. THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH financing decisions are irrelevant to a firm's market value and real investment incentives are now well-established. Most of the literature in this area has assumed, inter alia, that firm insiders and the market fully share all available information about the distribution of returns accruing to real investment opportunities. In this situation, insiders and outsiders agree about the value of possible financing changes, and equilibrium security prices make the firm indifferent among alternative financing plans. However, if the market's information is less accurate than insiders' information, firms with different "intrinsic" (or insider's) values will be indistinguishable to outsiders. Insiders may then prefer one type of financing plan over another even in equilibrium. Stiglitz [16] first showed how differences between owners' and potential lenders' bankruptcy assessments will lead to an optimal debt-equity ratio. Subsequently, Leland and Pyle [7] and Ross [14] evaluated the signalling implications of asymmetric information for capital market equilibrium, demonstrating that insiders could-and would-adjust the firm's financial structure to signal their assessment of true firm quality. (Downes and Heinkel [4] have provided empirical evidence supporting Leland and Pyle's main hypothesis about market valuation, although Ritter [13] questions the robustness of their results.) Campbell and Kracaw [3] described how relatively high-quality firms would willingly pay
Reliability Improvement for a High-Power IGBT in Wind Energy Applications

The power command in wind energy conversion systems is subject to wind power fluctuations, which may cause significant thermal cyclings of high-power insulated-gate bipolar transistors and may, consequently, lead to a reduction in lifetime. To address this reliability issue, a model integration is established in MATLAB/Simulink, which includes a doubly fed induction generator (DFIG), an aerodynamic model, a drive train model, and a pitch control system. A detailed model of a three-phase converter is adopted for thermal modeling and lifetime estimation. A low-pass filter is utilized to improve the lifetime consumption of the rotor-side converter control in the active power loop in the DFIG. The simulation results indicate that the resulting reliability performance of the system has been significantly improved. Moreover, the capacity factor has been estimated.
Credit market imperfections: Macroeconomic consequences and monetary policy implications.

In this thesis, dynamic general equilibrium models are developed for the analysis of credit market imperfections. The first chapter provides an overview of the thesis and sets out the motivation for the research. In the second chapter, the focus is on house prices. Empirical work is carried out to investigate the co-movement of house prices, housing investment, consumption and monetary policy in the UK. A general equilibrium model is then developed to fit some key patterns in the data. An important feature of the model is that house prices have a direct impact on consumption, because housing serves as collateral against which consumers can borrow. The model is used to analyse how the co-movement of key variables is likely to have changed following financial liberalisation in the 1980s. The third chapter develops a framework in which entrepreneurs want to borrow from and lend to each other because investment opportunities are always changing. Credit markets do not work perfectly, so borrowing can only take place against collateral. Moreover, monetary policy has real short-run effects due to nominal rigidities. The credit frictions cause productivity shocks to have a large and persistent effect on aggregate output and asset prices, as falls in output are accompanied by a transfer of capital from highly productive borrowers to less productive lenders. But nominal rigidities interact strongly with this mechanism: the more aggressively the monetary authorities stabilise inflation, the larger the output and asset price movements. The final chapter investigates how monetary policy should be set optimally, in the sense of maximising the welfare of the private sector agents. It is found that optimal monetary policy allows for a temporary rise in inflation following an adverse productivity shock, which will lead to more stable output and asset prices. The interaction of credit frictions and nominal rigidities therefore creates a short-term trade-off between the stabilisation of output relative to its efficient level and the stabilisation of inflation.
Has Liberalization Affected Profit Margins in Indian Industry?

In this article, we analyse the determinants of firm-level profit margins in Indian manufacturing. The model we estimate is rich in its dynamic characterization allowing as it does for lagged terms, trend movements, business cycle effects and a structural break in 1991. We hypothesize that the reforms undertaken by the government in 1991 constitute a structural break that influences a firm's independence to react to other firms as well as the extent of competition faced by these firms. Inserting this into the standard industrial organization model of profits, we obtain a dynamic market model. Estimating this model for 1980-1998, we find that the 1991 reforms did have a significant impact on profit margins in Indian industry. The reforms have worked through their impact on a firm's behavioural variables - advertising, Research and Development (R&D), capital-output ratios and managerial remuneration - though the precise variables that were significant varied from sector to sector. We find that relatively inefficient firms make significantly lower profits than others both before and after the liberalization as expected.
Regulatory Emission Limits for Cars and the Porter Hypothesis: A Survey of the Literature

Abstract This paper reviews the available evidence on the relevance of the Porter hypothesis for automotive emission standards. The literature confirms that emission standards for cars have had important effects on innovation (the ‘weak’ form of the Porter hypothesis). However, there is no evidence that regulations lead to an overall increase in productivity (the ‘strong’ version of the Porter hypothesis). In line with the Porter hypothesis, strict emission standards may bring some ‘first mover advantages’ to leading countries. For instance, countries are more likely to have more stringent domestic vehicular emission standards if they export more automobiles and automobile components to countries which themselves have more stringent vehicular standards. There is also (mixed) evidence that countries which receive more inward foreign direct investment in the automotive sector are more likely to have more stringent domestic emission standards.
Information Externalities in the Labour Market and the Duration of Unemployment

A matching model is analysed in which firms imperfectly test workers prior to hiring them. If (some) firms hire only workers who pass the test, there is an informational externality; unemployment duration is a signal of productivity. In equilibrium, if it is profitable for a firm to test, it is also profitable for it to condition its hiring decision on duration, hiring those whose duration is less than a critical value. This testing equilibrium is inefficient, with too much testing and too low a critical duration value. Sensitivity analysis of the latter suggests explanations for the dependence of re-employment probabilities on duration and the instability of the U-V curve.
Depicting Image of China as a Tourism Destination: A Travel Blog Approach

The purpose of this study was to examine international tourists’ destination image of China as represented in travel blog discourse. Data were obtained from blog entries relating to trips to China posted on major travel blog sites. Content analysis facilitated by Atlas.ti 6.0 was performed on a total of eighty-nine China-related travel blogs. The study identified the most frequently discussed aspects of tourists’ experiences in China. The results also indicated that the blog authors had mixed images of China, which was consistent with the conclusion of paradoxical images of China drawn by Xiao and Mair (2006). Marketing implications for China’s tourism development based on the results were discussed.