Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimating Financial Fraud Damages with Response Coefficients

Shareholder class action litigation most often deals with allegations that defendants made misrepresentations and/or omissions that caused the stock price to be higher than it otherwise would have been. We show how regression analysis of the response of share prices and investor expectations to news can be exploited in estimating a priori what would have been the effect of the truth had it been told at the time it was covered up. Mindful that there will be statistical error associated with the estimate of such coefficients, their application will nonetheless usually be an improvement over an unadjusted event study under any of the following, frequently encountered, circumstances: (1) it is necessary to isolate the impact of a revelation of the relevant truth on a stock price in the presence of confounding, material news; (2) inflation per share builds up in magnitude over time in response to multiple, sequential misrepresentations; and, (3), it would be useful to put bounds on the proportionate liability of an auditor co-defendant.
Targeted Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis via Embedding Commonsense Knowledge into an Attentive LSTM

Analyzing people’s opinions and sentiments towards certain aspects is an important task of natural language understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to targeted aspect-based sentiment analysis, which tackles the challenges of both aspect-based sentiment analysis and targeted sentiment analysis by exploiting commonsense knowledge. We augment the long short-term memory (LSTM) network with a hierarchical attention mechanism consisting of a target-level attention and a sentence-level attention. Commonsense knowledge of sentiment-related concepts is incorporated into the end-to-end training of a deep neural network for sentiment classification. In order to tightly integrate the commonsense knowledge into the recurrent encoder, we propose an extension of LSTM, termed Sentic LSTM. We conduct experiments on two publicly released datasets, which show that the combination of the proposed attention architecture and Sentic LSTM can outperform state-of-the-art methods in targeted aspect sentiment tasks.
Attitudes toward Credit and Finances among College Students in Brazil and the United States

Although research on credit card debt in developed countries has identified predictors of debt among college students, it is unknown whether these same predictors apply in emerging markets, such as Brazil. To examine this issue, a total of 1257 college students, 814 from Brazil and 443 from the United States, participated in a study exploring the utility of a theory of planned behavior as a predictor of credit card debtand student loans among college students, as well as perceived financial well-being. Compared to the Brazilian participants, the American sample was more financially self-confident, reported better financial well-being, and was more likely to believe that credit cards are negative. Similar predictors of financial well-being emerged in the samples. Specifically, parenting practices related to money and better self-reported delay of gratification are related to more positive financial attitudes and lower levels of debt. Although the debt to income ratio among card holders was similar, Brazilian students held more credit cards than American students. Greater delay of gratification was related to lower levels of student loans in the United States, but there were no significant predictors of student loans in Brazil.
The Length of Ministerial Tenure in the United Kingdom, 1945–97

We analyse the determinants of ministerial hazard rates in Britain from 1945 to 1997. We focus on three sets of attributes (i) personal characteristics of the minister; (ii) political characteristics of the minister; and (iii) characteristics pertaining to the government in which the minister serves. We find that educational background increases ministers' capacity to survive, that female ministers have lower hazard rates and older ministers have higher hazard rates. Experienced ministers have higher hazard rates than newly appointed ministers. Ministerial rank increases a minister's capacity to survive, with full cabinet members having the lowest hazard rates in our sample.We use different strategies to control for the characteristics of the government the minister serves in. Our results are robust to any of these controls.
A Note on Small Business Survival Rates in Rural Areas: The Case of Washington State

Using Washington State Department of Revenue and Employment Security Department data, this article uses non-parametric duration analysis to examine the nine-year time path of rural firm survival and hazard rates. The focus is on a cohort of rural firms that started operations in 1992; the cohort is followed up to the year 2000. Survival rates are estimated by using standard non-parametric (life-table) duration analysis. Using straightforward statistical tests, the study finds evidence that survival rates are statistically higher for firms that start as employers and for firms in the natural resource and service-based sectors. Copyright 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
The Dictator's New Clothes: The Relationship Between E-Participation and Quality of Government in Non-Democratic Regimes

It is often assumed that the development of e-participation and e-government initiatives aimed at stimulating citizen participation in the political process and fostering more efficient governmental services harbors a great potential for improved control of corruption and government performance. Thus, it is often argued that e-participation is an efficient instrument for increasing transparency and quality of government in non-democratic and developing countries. However, this article argues that these assumptions should be questioned on theoretical, empirical, and methodological grounds. The results of the empirical time-series cross-section analyses show that positive development in terms of e-participation in non-democratic countries does not lead to corresponding positive effects in terms of control of corruption and quality of government. Rather, in many cases the Internet offers political elites new opportunities in their quest for remaining in power.
Voting correctly in lab elections with monetary incentives

Whether people make the right choice when they vote for a given candidate or party and what factors affect the capacity to vote correctly have been recurrent questions in the political science literature. This paper contributes to this debate by looking at how the complexity of the electoral context affects voters’ capacity to vote correctly. Correct voting is defined as a vote that maximizes one’s payoffs in lab elections with monetary incentives. We examine two aspects of the electoral context: district magnitude and the distribution of preferences within the electorate. The main finding is that the frequency of correct voting is much higher in single-member than in multi-member district elections. As soon as there is more than one single seat to be allocated, voters have more difficulty figuring out whether they should vote sincerely for their preferred party or opt strategically for another party in order to maximize their payoffs. By contrast, the distribution of preferences within the electorate has no significant effect.
A Behavioral Economic Defense of the Precautionary Principle

The precautionary principle is, in some sense, an easy target for scholarly criticism: it lacks precision and for that reason invites charges of hypocrisy and manipulation on the part of those who invoke it on behalf of their policy positions. But the principle has proved to be a mainstay of the discourse of environmental protection, especially in those fora where environmental protection is taken most seriously. My article's principal claim is that this is neither a meaningless nor (as in Professors Sunstein's and Cross' accounts) an unfortunate phenomenon. Environmental policy choices often implicate cognitive biases in favor of the avoidance of sure, immediate losses over the avoidance of unsure, non-immediate ones, and the precautionary principle may play an important role in mitigating or even fully correcting these cognitive biases. Serious consideration of the role of the precautionary principle as a bias-correcting device also may shed light on other previously-ignored issues, including: the translation of cognitive biases into politics, the potential for full-scale risk-risk analysis to intensify cognitive biases in the arena of environmental law and policy, and the promise of contingent value methodology as a means to test relative valuations of non-market goods, as opposed to the absolute measure of such goods in money terms.
Competencies Versus Capabilities: A Reassessment

The paper begins by stating the author's views on the meaning of "capabilities", which build upon Sen's notion of consumer capabilities, here reinterpreted as producer capabilities, and extended to the cases of interactive and dynamic capabilities through incorporating learning based on external sources together with changes through time. In this respect, long-term increasing returns permit the inclusion of "capability lifecycles" in the analysis. Even more importantly they allow for interchanges between trends and cycles in capabilities and those in "competencies". Competencies are defined here according to some 16 criteria that differentiate them from capabilities. Consideration of the rise of technological capabilities over periods of expansion in catching-up countries suggests patterns of two-way leads and lags between competency acquisition and capability accumulation, in place of an "either/or" viewpoint. Implications include the limitations on human capital models of growth, which - inasmuch as these depict competency acquisition alone - undervalue the effort and commitment required via accompanying capability formation to bring about the desired growth outcomes. While both are required for sustained growth, the distinctions between the concepts highlight the interdependencies involved.
Complement C 5 Gene Confers Risk for Acute Anterior Uveitis

Citation: Xu D, Hou S, Jiang Y, et al. Complement C5 gene confers risk for acute anterior uveitis. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2015;56:4954–4960. DOI:10.1167/iovs.15-16645 PURPOSE. Polymorphisms in the genes encoding C3 and C5 are associated with several immune-mediated diseases. However, the association of C3 and C5 SNPs with acute anterior uveitis (AAU) has not yet been investigated and was the purpose of the study described.
Outsourcing of Insurance Claims: A U.K. Case Study

Contemporary business outsourcing has extended beyond manufacturing to include service sector industries, including insurance. There are developed theoretical arguments that both support and reject insurance claims handling as a service that should be determined by the market and outsourced where possible. Indeed, insurance has a tradition of using professional loss adjusters to negotiate the settlement of both commercial and personal lines claims. There appears, however, to be little empirical research to evidence either the success or failure of approaches to insurance outsourcing. This exploratory study adopts a case study methodology using a major U.K. insurer. Findings indicate a significant return to in-house claims handling but also point to advances in the professional exercise of bulk purchasing power in the provision of indemnity. Possible explanations for this behaviour are considered and an industry-wide survey is suggested.
Women's work, sibling competition and children's school performance

This research offers an interpretation of the relationship between fertility, child spacing, family resources, and market work by mothers, and the subsequent cognitive skills of grade schoolers as reported by their teachers. First, an approach to fertility as the outcome of a deliberate choice process is developed, and then empirical evidence from a small panel of U.S. households first interviewed in 1975-76 when they had preschool children is presented. In a 1981-82 reinterview, a supplementary project was that of obtaining teacher ratings of school performance of individual children. Large family size, as measured by the number of siblings of given age and sex in the household during preschool years (in 1975-76), has an important, negative impact on the child's subsequent grade-school performance. Boy siblings in nearby age ranges have the most negative impact on performance while teenage siblings of either sex have no systematic adverse effect. Parental resources, as measured by income, education, child-care time, and a mother's reduced market time are associated with greater cognitive skills, and can offset the apparent disadvantage of having siblings in nearby age intervals. There appears to be a significant tradeoff between a market career and a home career for women. Women who have more children spaced over wider age intervals and who devote more time to child care and less to market work presumably get more benefits from their home career in the form of enhanced child development. On the other hand, full-time market work (i.e., hours in the labor market for pay) is important for earnings growth of the mother (Mary Corcoran, Greg Duncan, and Michael Ponza, 1983), and family income has a favorable effect on school performance, so the apparent choices facing women are more equivocal.
Informal Financial Service Institutions for Survival: African Women and Stokvels in Urban South Africa, 1930–1998

Traditional kinship relations denied African women access to property and cash income. As they moved out of the traditional sector to urban centers, women created opportunities for independent earnings, and they displayed remarkable entrepreneurial spirit in undertaking informal economic activities. One of their tactics was the utilization of a type of rotating credit and savings organization (ROSCA), the stokvel, to mobilize savings outside the formal financial structure. This article brings together scattered research on stokvels, traces their past and present uses by African women, and concludes with an exploration of the reasons for the persistence of these forms despite the development of sophisticated financial structures in modern South Africa.
Management development practices: empirical evidence from Sri Lanka

Being a South Asian developing country, management development (MD) practices in Sri Lanka has received insufficient attention. The paper reports results of an empirical investigation of 219 managers and 78 human resource (HR) managers on MD practices in Sri Lanka. The study investigated different processes by which MD takes place in organizations, the nature of immediate senior managers' support for MD, the importance given to the HRM function in the organizational strategy and the HR managers' contribution to the organizational strategy on MD aspects. The research findings indicate more similar MD practices across the three forms of ownership – local, foreign and joint venture. The conclusions address the existing practice and implications.
Conducting Event Studies on a Small Stock Exchange

Abstract This paper analyses whether it is possible to perform an event study on a small stock exchange with thinly trade stocks. The main conclusion is that event studies can be performed provided that certain adjustments are made. First, a minimum of 25 events appears necessary to obtain acceptable size and power in statistical tests. Second, trade to trade returns should be used. Third, one should not expect to consistently detect abnormal performance of less than about 1% (or perhaps even 2%), unless the sample contains primarily thickly traded stocks. Fourth, nonparametric tests are generally preferable to parametric tests of abnormal performance. Fifth, researchers should present separate results for thickly and thinly traded stock groups. Finally, when nonnormality, event induced variance, unknown event day, and problems of very thin trading are all considered simultaneously, no one test statistic or type of test statistic dominates the others.
Do option traders on value and growth stocks react differently to new information?

This study compares the changes in implied volatilities of options on Nasdaq 100 and Russell 2000 value and growth portfolios, for the time period of 2004 and 2005. Following the methodologies in Stein (J Finance 44:1011–1024, 1989) and Heynen et al. (J Financ Quant Anal 29:31–56, 1994), we attempt to infer whether there are systematic differences in the degree of overreactions between value and growth options. The empirical evidence indicates that the reactions to information by investors in growth options, as proxied by options on Nasdaq 100 and Russell 2000 growth, are stronger than those of Russell 2000 value. Whether these reactions can be considered as overreacting, however, is not entirely conclusive. Nevertheless, the results imply that difference in investors’ behavior and styles is one potential explanation for the value stock effect.
Warmstarting of Model-based Algorithm Configuration

The performance of many hard combinatorial problem solvers depends strongly on their parameter settings, and since manual parameter tuning is both tedious and suboptimal the AI community has recently developed several algorithm configuration (AC) methods to automatically address this problem. While all existing AC methods start the configuration process of an algorithm A from scratch for each new type of benchmark instances, here we propose to exploit information about A's performance on previous benchmarks in order to warmstart its configuration on new types of benchmarks. We introduce two complementary ways in which we can exploit this information to warmstart AC methods based on a predictive model. Experiments for optimizing a flexible modern SAT solver on twelve different instance sets show that our methods often yield substantial speedups over existing AC methods (up to 165-fold) and can also find substantially better configurations given the same compute budget.
Explanations for the Predominant Use of Cash Financing in Hospitality Acquisitions

ABSTRACT Seventy-five percent of hospitality acquisitions from 1980 to 2000 were cash-financed. In other industries, this figure was 43 percent. Since the choice of cash versus stock financing can have a significant effect on a hospitality acquirer's capital structure, the purpose of this study was to examine possible explanations for the high level of cash financing used in hospitality acquisitions. The results indicate that in both the hotel and restaurant industries, the use of cash payments in acquisitions is positively related to the acquiring firm's debt ratio. Firm size is also positively related to the use of cash payments, but only in the restaurant industry. Free cash flow and internal growth opportunities do not appear to be significant determinants of the use of cash payments in acquisitions in the hospitality industry.
The success and failure of policy-implanted inter-firm network initiatives: motivations, processes and structure

This paper examines the processes and causes of inter-firm network success and failure, defined in terms of the ability of networks to become a sustained and valued form of business activity for their members. The paper examines four different case study network initiatives: (1) a failed informal ‘new entrepreneurs' network’ (2) a successful informal ‘local cluster group’ (3) a failed formal ‘defence contractors' network’ and (4) a successful formal ‘small-firm technology group’. It is shown that networks in business are often consciously developed and maintained by those managing directors who have recognized the importance of cooperative activities for achieving competitive advantage for their companies. The best network support consisted of brokers who are able to mix and overlap the ‘hard’ business and ‘softer’ social interests of participants. The case studies indicate that it is formal groups that are the most potent form of inter-firm network, but that it is through an initially informal structure that they are best facilitated. It is concluded that both economic and social rationalities are at play in the motivation of firms to join networks, and that their success is closely connected to pre-existing commonality between members.
Assessment of the Effects of Dentifrices on Plaque Acidogenesis via Intra-oral Measurement of Plaque Acids

Dionex® ion chromatography was used for identification and quantification of the plaque acids (formate, lactate, acetate, and propionate) formed in vivo following a sucrose rinse. Consistent with other literature reports, lactate and acetate were the predominant acid species generated by plaque. This micro-analytical technique was used for investigation of the effects of dentifrice formulations containing NaF, xylitol, or NaF/xylitol on plaque acid metabolism. Neither a single nor multiple exposures (three times daily for one week) to the experimental dentifrices significantly altered the profiles of the individual acids or total plaque acidity relative to the placebo dentifrice. The lack of an effect of fluoride and xylitol on plaque acid metabolism is attributed to the variability of dental plaque and the low concentrations of active ingredients reaching the plaque. However, we believe that, with further improvement in sampling technique and study design, this approach may prove useful for the study of the effects of active ingredients (i.e., anticaries agents) on plaque acidogenesis.
Analyst herding and investor protection: a cross-country study

Using a multi-national data set, we investigate the herding behaviour of financial analysts. Our results across a range of different countries suggest that analysts consistently deviate from their true forecasts and issue earnings forecasts that are biased by anti-herding. Furthermore, the level of bias (i.e. anti-herding) seems to be systematically higher for forecasts on companies from European countries compared to the US or Japan. We argue that such differences might stem from diverse levels of investor protection and corporate governance as analysts deviate less from true forecasts when the overall information environment is more transparent and company disclosures are of higher quality. Thereby, we proxy investor protection based on the company-level share of institutional ownership as well as on country-level investor protection measures. Our results show that increasing levels of investor protection and corporate governance mitigate the anti-herding behaviour. Especially, when companies that are located in high investor protection countries are held by an increasing number of institutional investors, analysts are most reluctant to issue biased forecasts.
Correlation between AF Substrate Ablation Difficulty and Left Atrial Fibrosis Quantified by Delayed‐Enhancement Cardiac Magnetic Resonance

Background: Studies have shown that the presence of left atrial (LA) fibrosis can be assessed by LA delayed‐enhancement cardiac magnetic resonance (LA DE‐CMR) and may be predictive of outcome after ablation for atrial fibrillation (AF). We sought to test the hypothesis that the amount of LA fibrosis evaluated by DE‐CMR correlates with the difficulty of complex fractionated atrial electrograms (CFAE) ablation.