Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimating the Long Run Effects of Exchange Rate Devaluation on the Trade Balance of Nigeria

This paper attempts an empirical investigation of the impact of currency devaluation on Nigeria trade balance using the Johansen co-integration and variance decomposition analyses from 1970-2010; whether exchange rate devaluation improves or worsens trade balance has been at the centre of literature debate over time with varying empirical evidences for developed and developing nation. The empirical results indicate that there exist a long-run stationary relationship between trade balance and its determinant- domestic income, domestic and foreign money supply, domestic interest rate and nominal exchange rate; as employed in the study. Also, there exists an inelastic and significant relation between trade balance and its determinants. Our major findings include; exchange rate induce an inelastic and significant relation on trade balance in the long run, there exist no short run causality from exchange rate to trade balance and money supply volatility contributes more to variance in trade balance than exchange rate volatility. The paper concludes with important implications for policy makers because it provides evidence supporting that fact that level of money supply has a major impact on trade balance adjustment and that devaluation of the exchange rate worsens the trade balance of Nigeria in the long run.
A Joint-Product Analysis of the Adoption of Modern Cereal Varieties in Developing Countries

Semi-dwarf wheat varieties have been slow to diffuse in some regions despite their superior grain yield. We analyze varietal differences in yields of the joint products of grain and straw, the decision to adopt new varieties, and nitrogen demand. The low straw yield of semi-dwarf varieties under low input conditions is shown to be a plausible explanation for their slow adoption in some regions. First generation modern varieties induced a large increase in the derived demand for nitrogen, but subsequent varietal development appears to have had little impact on nitrogen demand.
Real Exchange Rate Assessment for Nigeria: An Evaluation of Determinants, Strategies for Identification and Correction of Misalignments

By using monthly data for the 2004–2010 period and a vector error correction model approach, this paper evaluates the determinants of real exchange rates for the Nigerian Naira. Estimations suggest that oil prices, broad money supply, level of foreign reserves held by the Central Bank and interest rate differentials with trading partners can be used as good predictors of the long run Naira equilibrium real exchange rate. It is shown that the recent increases in the world price of oil have a significant appreciating effect in the real Naira rate, while increases in the money supply have the opposite impact. The study also uses the behavioural equilibrium exchange rate approach to identify the misalignments in the real Naira rate. Findings point out to the undervaluation of the Naira at the end of 2010.
Do Retail Investors Follow Insider Trades?

Abstract On the basis of transaction records of retail investors provided by a large financial institution, this article analyzes whether, in the aggregate, retail investors do copy insider trades. The results suggest that insider trades are indeed an important piece of information for the transactions of retail investors, whose buy-sell imbalances (BSIs) increase in stocks which insiders buy, and whose BSIs decrease following insider sales. These results are robust when considering stock characteristics and general attention effects. With regard to trading insider stocks, retail investors’ preferences for growth and attention are less pronounced when compared with trades of noninsider stocks.
Who Controls Us?

Berle and Means asserted that US corporations typically have dispersed shareholders; their evidence did not support this conclusion. Today, 59.74% of US corporations have ‘controlling shareholders’ who hold at least 10% of the shares; 24.57% are controlled and managed by a family; 16.33% are controlled by a widely‐held financial institution; 13.55% are controlled through family trusts. In all size ranges, the USA has more corporations controlled by families than by financial institutions. In almost all size ranges, it has a higher percentage of family‐controlled corporations than any of next four largest economies.
The extent of nontariff barriers to industrial countries' imports

This article examines the extent of nontariff barriers (NTBs) to the visible imports of sixteen industrial countries. It uses three alternative measures to show that governmental commodity-specific border measures affect more than 27 percent of all imports and more than 34 percent of imports from developing countries. It also shows that during the period from 1981 to 1983, NTBs became significantly more extensive. Detailed statistics reveal considerable variations in NTB coverage by commodity, type of barrier, importer, and exporter. The data on which these conclusions are based were compiled from official information at the highest level of disaggregation and are described in the article.
Audit Partner Public-Client Specialisation and Client Abnormal Accruals

Abstract We examine the association of Big 4 audit partners’ public-client specialisation with client companies’ audit quality. Using a sample of NASDAQ OMX companies in Finland, we identify the audit partner assigned to each public-client engagement. We expect that partners with greater public-client specialisation provide higher quality auditing, since they have likely developed deep domain-specific knowledge and a keen sense of the litigation and reputational risks posed by public clients. In addition, the willingness to resist client pressure likely increases with the number of public clients in the partner's portfolio because dependence on any one client diminishes, which should help to ensure audit quality. The results show that public-client specialisation is negatively associated with abnormal accruals, and this result is attributable to audit partners with three to six public clients. The results of supplemental tests imply that public-client specialisation is more important when general auditing experience is lower. Further, the results reveal that in our setting of high-tax and high alignment between financial reporting and tax reporting, greater public-client specialisation is particularly associated with smaller income-decreasing abnormal accruals, suggesting that auditors with greater public-client specialisation likely recognise the downside reputational implications and achieve audit quality by discouraging tax avoidance.
FOXM1 is a critical driver of lung fibroblast activation and fibrogenesis

While the transcription factor forkhead box M1 (FOXM1) is well known as a proto-oncogene, its potential role in lung fibroblast activation has never been explored. Here, we show that FOXM1 is more highly expressed in fibrotic than in normal lung fibroblasts in humans and mice. FOXM1 was required not only for cell proliferation in response to mitogens, but also for myofibroblast differentiation and apoptosis resistance elicited by TGF-&bgr;. The lipid mediator PGE2, acting via cAMP signaling, was identified as an endogenous negative regulator of FOXM1. Finally, genetic deletion of FOXM1 in fibroblasts or administration of the FOXM1 inhibitor Siomycin A in a therapeutic protocol attenuated bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis. Our results identify FOXM1 as a driver of lung fibroblast activation and underscore the therapeutic potential of targeting FOXM1 for pulmonary fibrosis.
A review on changing trend of recruitment practice to enhance the quality of hiring in global organizations

Human capital is arguably the most treasured and valued asset of any organization, and is primarily responsible for adding value to all other assets of an organization. The very word recruitment is a logistics nightmare for the HR of many organizations. It has been seen, in this rapid changing world, that various sourcing recruitment channels, such as social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) have been developed and used, in addition to the traditional ones (advertisements, employee referrals, recruitment agencies, etc). In this paper, an attempt has been made to identify the changing trends related to effective hiring sources and to study their impact on the leading global organizations. It is concluded that a shift is being made towards the modern and innovative sourcing channels due to various factors like quality, cost, availability, time, etc.
Tourism in Dubai: overcoming barriers to destination development

The Middle East as a whole attracts comparatively few visitors, and political events in the current century have generated new uncertainties and tensions which seem likely to further discourage tourists and investors. Additional barriers relate to poor accessibility, a perceived lack of conventional attractions and limited promotion. Despite these apparently unfavourable circumstances, international tourism has been adopted by the Dubai authorities as a core element in a programme of economic diversification. They have invested heavily in expensive facilities, as well as undertaken extensive marketing, and the outcome has been strong growth in tourism. There are great expectations of the future, reflected in the setting of very high arrival targets. However, there are also several constraints that might inhibit progress, with a need to review strategies. The experience of Dubai thus serves to illustrate factors that are critical to destination development, major impediments and approaches to overcoming these. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley &Sons, Ltd.
The End of Class Warfare: An Examination of Income Disparity

During the 1990s, the richest quintile of a country had an average income per capita approximately ten times that of the poorest quintile. We find that the poor of a country are better off relatively, and absolutely, when the country ranks higher in average income, union participation, taxation, government spending, education, and property rights. Under these same conditions, the wealthy of a country also have more absolute per capita income, just not a higher percentage relative to the poor. Countries with substantial black market activity, high levels of international trade (as a percentage of GDP), and former Spanish colonies have greater income disparity; these features also coincide with lower incomes for both rich and poor. Key features of democracy such as political and voting rights, civil liberties and freedom of the press, while important for economic growth, are not independently associated with income inequality. We find little empirical support for a tradeoff between a high level of prosperity and greater equality. Above a very low level of development, appropriate policies are associated with both higher average and more equal income.
Pengaruh Risiko Sistematik, Struktur Aktiva, Profitabilitas, dan Jenis Perusahaan Terhadap Struktur Modal Emiten Sektor Pertambangan: Pengujian Hipotesis Static-Trade Off

The aim of this research is to test some variables, such as systematic risk, asset tangibility, profitability, and firm’s type which have the impact on capital structure based on static trade-off hypothesis and find the evidence that shows firm’s type measured by dummy variable acting as the moderating variable. The sample that we use is taken from the companies of mining industry in Indonesian Stock Exchange. Purposive sampling technique is used as the sampling method. The analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) model with polled data is conducted as the method of data analysis. To test the firm’s type which acts as moderating variable, we use the significance of R-square change before and after the interaction effects are involved in the regression model. The result reveals that systematic risk, profitability, and firm’s type support static-trade off hypothesis for explaining the capital structure. In addition, increase in R-square significantly gives the evidence that firm’s type acts as the moderating variable. Keywords: systematic risk, profitability, firm’s type, capital structure, moderating variable.
Cognition-Cognizant Sentiment Analysis With Multitask Subjectivity Summarization Based on Annotators' Gaze Behavior

For document level sentiment analysis (SA), Subjectivity Extraction, ie. , extracting the relevant subjective portions of the text that cover the overall sentiment expressed in the document, is an important step. Subjectivity Extraction, however, is a hard problem for systems, as it demands a great deal of world knowledge and reasoning. Humans, on the other hand, are good at extracting relevant subjective summaries from an opinionated document (say, a movie review), while inferring the sentiment expressed in it. This capability is manifested in their eye-movement behavior while reading: words pertaining to the subjective summary of the text attract a lot more attention in the form of gaze-fixations and/or saccadic patterns. We propose a multi-task deep neural framework for document level sentiment analysis that learns to predict the overall sentiment expressed in the given input document, by simultaneously learning to predict human gaze behavior and auxiliary linguistic tasks like part-of-speech and syntactic properties of words in the document. For this, a multi-task learning algorithm based on multi-layer shared LSTM augmented with task specific classifiers is proposed. With this composite multi-task network, we obtain performance competitive with or better than state-of-the-art approaches in SA. Moreover, the availability of gaze predictions as an auxiliary output helps interpret the system better; for instance, gaze predictions reveal that the system indeed performs subjectivity extraction better, which accounts for improvement in document level sentiment analysis performance.
Recycling to the Plasma Membrane is Delayed in EHD1 Knockout Mice

EHD1 is a member of the EHD family that contains four mammalian homologs. Among the invertebrate orthologs are a single Drosophila and Caenorhabditis elegans proteins and two plant members. They all contain three modules, a N‐terminal domain that contains nucleotide‐binding motifs, a central coiled–coil domain involved in oligomerization and a C‐terminal region that harbors the EH domain. Studies in C. elegans and EHD1 depletion by RNA interference in human cells have demonstrated that it regulates recycling of membrane proteins. We addressed the physiological role of EHD1 through its inactivation in the mouse. Ehd1 knockout mice were indistinguishable from normal mice, had a normal life span and showed no histological abnormalities. Analysis of transferrin uptake in Ehd1–/– embryonic fibroblasts demonstrated delayed recycling to the plasma membrane with accumulation of transferrin in the endocytic recycling compartment. Our results corroborate the established role of EHD1 in the exit of membrane proteins from recycling endosomes in vivo in a mouse model.
Is growth exogenous? Evidence from the 1970s and 1980s

This article assesses the role of external and policy factors for growth variability. The mean group estimator is used to estimate a vector autoregressive system on a panel data set of eighteen developing economies from 1965 to 1992. The main findings are that (i) temporary external shocks are an important determinant of medium to long-run growth variability (ii) high inflation countries are more vulnerable to external shocks than others. This evidence is supportive of the conventional view that macro-economic stability is conducive to growth, and casts doubts on the idea that the growth process might be largely exogenous.
Neuronal inhibition and synaptic plasticity of basal ganglia neurons in Parkinson's disease

The mechanisms underlying the therapeutic benefits of deep-brain stimulation (DBS) are complex and varied. Milosevic et al. examine frequency-dependent effects of DBS on cell firing and synaptic plasticity in the basal ganglia of patients with Parkinson’s disease. Enhanced inhibitory synaptic plasticity, and frequency-dependent potentiation and depression may underlie the observed therapeutic effects.
Career and learning: the ins and the outs of it

Purpose – Seeks to explore how individuals talk about learning when asked about career.Design/methodology/approach – Brings together three qualitative research studies, based in the UK and New Zealand on how individuals make sense of career; one focused on people in organizational employment and two on “portfolio” workers operating as freelance workers on a variety of contracts with organizations. The debate on the changing nature of careers and the imperative to life‐long learning resonates in the studies and the extent of change that has occurred is questioned.Findings – The findings of the studies suggest that there is less learning activity (in terms of education, training or self‐development activities) being undertaken by these participants than may be expected. While participants generally believe that they should take charge of their own learning and career development, they are less sure what actions to take. Signals from the organization are still an important prompt for learning for those in em.
The Glycyl Radical Enzyme TdcE Can Replace Pyruvate Formate-Lyase in Glucose Fermentation

ABSTRACT Mutants of Escherichia coli unable to synthesize a functional pyruvate formate-lyase (PFL) are severely impaired in their capacity to grow by glucose fermentation. In a functional complementation assay designed to isolate the pfl gene fromClostridium butyricum, we fortuitously identified a gene that did not encode a PFL but nonetheless was able to complement the phenotypic defects caused by an E. coli pfl mutation. The clostridial gene encoded a basic 14.5-kDa protein (TcbC) which, based on amino acid similarity and analysis of immediately adjacent DNA sequences, was part of a transposase exhibiting extensive similarity to the product of the site-specific transposon Tn554 fromStaphylococcus aureus. Our studies revealed that the clostridial TcbC protein activated the transcription of the E. coli tdcABCDEFG operon, which encodes an anaerobicl-threonine-degradative pathway. Normally, anaerobic synthesis of the pathway is optimal when E. coli grows in the absence of catabolite-repressing sugars and in the presence ofl-threonine. Although anaerobic control of pathway synthesis was maintained, TcbC alleviated glucose repression. One of the products encoded by the tdc operon, TdcE, has recently been shown to be a 2-keto acid formate-lyase (C. Heßlinger, S. A. Fairhurst, and G. Sawers, Mol. Microbiol. 27:477–492, 1998) that can accept pyruvate as an enzyme substrate. Here we show that TdcE is directly responsible for the restoration of fermentative growth topfl mutants.
Degrees of Freedom of the Bursty MIMO X Channel with Instantaneous Topological Information

We study the effects of instantaneous feedback of channel topology on the degrees of freedom (DoF) of the bursty MIMO X channel, where the four transmitter-receiver links are intermittently on-and-off, governed by four independent Bernoulli (p) random sequences, and each transmitter and receiver are equipped with $M$ and $N$ antennas, respectively. We partially characterize this channel: The sum DoF is characterized when $p \leq\frac{1}{2}$ or when $\frac{\min(M,N)}{\mathrm{m}m(M,N)}\leq\frac{2}{3}$. In the remaining regime, the lower bound is within 5.2% of the upper bound. Strictly higher DoF is achieved by coding across channel topologies. In particular, codes over as many as 5 topologies are proposed to achieve the sum DoF of the channel when $p \leq\frac{1}{2}$. A transfer function view of the network is employed to simplify the code design and to elucidate the fact that these are space-time codes, obtained by interference alignment over space and time. A full version of this paper is accessible at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.02527
Financial hardship after traumatic brain injury: a brief scale for family caregivers

ABSTRACT Objective: Financial hardship is frequently posited as a significant factor influencing family health and adjustment after brain injury, though traditional methods of measurement have shown limited usefulness. The purpose of this study was to adapt and test the utility of a brief scale of financial hardship (BSFH-BI) for use with family caregivers after TBI. Methods: The researchers constructed the BSFH-BI using financial well-being items adapted from three survey instruments. The BSFH-BI questionnaire was completed by 136 family caregivers of individuals with TBIs. Scale utility was evaluated through reliability analysis, factor analysis, and correlations with a measure of life satisfaction. Results: The factor analysis revealed that the BSFH-BI had a meaningful two factor structure consisting of items related to (a) meeting essential living expenses and (b) financial changes after the injury. The scale showed high internal consistency (α = 0.92) and moderate negative correlations with life satisfaction (rs = −0.58). Conclusions: The preliminary findings indicate that the BSFH-BI can be a reliable and valid scale for use with family caregivers after TBI. The authors recommend further study of financial hardship within models of adaptation to TBI using psychometrically validated instruments such as the BSFH-BI.
Entry regulation, labor laws, and informality

Using state and industry level panel data on informal enterprises in India, the author present microeconomic evidence linking informality to industrial entry and labor regulation. A major policy reform in 1991 removed license requirements on the setup and expansion of factories in nearly half of all Indian industries. The author examines the impact of this entry deregulation on the informal manufacturing sector, comparing it across states that differ in the rigidity of their labor laws. The main finding is that the informal sector contracted after this lowering of entry barriers, and to a significantly greater extent in states with more pro-employer labor laws. Furthermore, value added per informal worker increased, and more so in pro-employer states. The estimates indicate that after deregulation, compared to states with less flexible labor laws, states with pro-employer labor laws saw a 25 percent larger decline in the number of informal establishments, and 36 percent larger increase in value added per worker in the informal sector. Thus, entry deregulation can lead to a productivity-enhancing labor reallocation from the informal sector, but the extent of this reallocation depends on the flexibility of labor laws.