Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cardiovascular health profile among Québec male and female police officers

Abstract To document the cardiovascular health profile of Québec police officers (PO). Participants answered an online questionnaire evaluating the presence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors and symptoms. Two thousand, ninety-nine (2,099) male (age: 40.8 ± 9.2 years) and 756 female (age: 37.9 ± 7.9 years) PO participated in this study. The prevalence of obesity (body mass index ≥30 kg/m2) and diagnosed hypertension was respectively 21.1, and 14.3% in male and 7.3 and 4.1% in female PO. According to 2013 American College of Sports Medicine guidelines, 27.0 and 48.0% of male and 12.1 and 56.7% of female PO were categorized as being at moderate and high CVD risk, respectively. These findings suggest that Québec police departments should help PO to adopt and maintain a healthy lifestyle to decrease CVD risk.
Monitoring of Acute Migraine Attacks: Placebo Response and Safety Data

In the course of evaluating the safety and efficacy of an investigational compound for acute migraine headaches, a large number of patients received placebo at a single site, offering the opportunity to characterize subjective and clinical physiologic responses of migraine patients to placebo in a controlled environment. In a single‐site, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled study, 67 patients reported to the clinic while suffering a moderate to severe acute migraine headache and received oral placebo. For 6 hours after treatment, a continuous electrocardiogram (ECG) was performed, and headache severity, adverse events, and vital signs were recorded. Patients returned and repeated the procedure when free from pain. A headache was considered to be improved if its severity dropped to “mild” or “none. ” Twenty‐five patients (37%; 95% Cl: 26% to 50%) experienced headache improvement within 2 hours of receiving placebo, and 32 patients (48%: 36% to 60%) improved within 4 hours. There were no clinically important ECG changes during the migraine visit, and there were no clinically relevant differences in vital signs between the migraine and pain‐free visits. Thus, a substantial placebo response occurs in migraine headache. Hemodynamic and ECG parameters are unchanged between migraine and pain‐free states.
Important factors influencing the return to work after stroke.

BACKGROUND As the field of rehabilitation shifts its focus towards improving functional capacity instead of managing disability, return to work (RTW) and return to the community emerge as key goals in a person's recovery from major disabling illness such as stroke. OBJECTIVE To compile important factors believed to influence RTW after a stroke. METHODS Based on a comprehensive literature review, we clustered similar factors and organized these factors based on the International Classification of Function, Disability and Health (ICF) framework: body functions or structure, activity participation, environmental factors and personal and psychosocial factors. RESULTS Overall, stroke severity, as assessed by the degree of residual disability such as weakness, neurological deficit or impairments (speech, cognition, apraxia, agnosia), has been shown to be the most consistent negative predictor of RTW. Many factors such as the number of working years remaining until retirement, depression, medical history, and occupation need to be taken into consideration for stroke survivors, as they can influence RTW decision making. Stroke survivors who are flexible and realistic in their vocational goal and emotionally accept their disability appear more likely to return to work. CONCLUSIONS There are many barriers to employment for stroke survivors ranging from physical and cognitive impairments to psychosocial and environmental factors.
Bankruptcy, Counterparty Risk, and Contagion

This paper provides a unifying framework for the modeling of various types of credit risks such as contagion effects. We argue that Markov chains can efficiently be used to tackle these problems. However, our approach is not limited to pricing problems with contagion. Other applications include the modeling of a more sophisticated default process of a firm. On the theoretical side, we derive pricing formulas for three building blocks that are generalizations of contingent claims studied in Lando (1998). These claims can be thought of as atoms forming the basis for all credit risky payments. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, in general, all contingent claims exposed to credit risk satisfy a system of partial differential equations. This is the key result to calculate prices of credit risky claims explicitly and efficiently.
Taxation of Financial Assets in Developing Countries

In developing countries, most financial assets in formal markets are deposits at financial institutions. This potentially important tax base could be taxed at a low administrative cost. When revenues of financial taxes are significant, implicit taxes dwarf explicit taxes. The author focuses on the implicit taxation of financial assets through seigniorage, reserve requirements, lending targets, and interest ceilings combined with inflation. The last instrument has often been overlooked, but it has generated more than a third of implicit revenues in some cases by lowering the cost of government borrowing. Tax revenues are difficult to measure because of regulations that prevent the use of market prices for computation and distort the meaning of some definitions. For some countries, the standard method of seigniorage grossly underestimates the revenue from financial taxation. The author discusses various sources of distortion but ignores potential impacts on the level of saving and the growth rate. Although taxes on financial assets have a low administrative cost, the excess burden that stems from the misallocation of resources is probably a much higher fraction of revenues than that of other taxes.
Condom-Insistence Conflict in Women’s Alcohol-Involved Sexual Encounters With a New Male Partner

First-time sexual intercourse with a new male partner, relative to other sexual encounters, is associated with heightened risk to women for contracting sexually transmitted infections. Little is known, however, about women’s condom-related decision-making processes during these first-time sexual encounters. In the present study, we surveyed a community sample of 179 women aged 18–30 about their alcohol consumption, desire to use a condom, perception of their partner’s desire to use a condom, condom-insistence conflict, and condom-decision abdication and use during their most recent alcohol-involved first-time sexual encounter with a new partner. With structural equation modeling, we tested a cognitive mediation model with various configurations of alcohol effects on abdication and condom use (direct, indirect, and moderator). A moderated mediation model fit the data best. Women experienced elevated condom-insistence conflict when they wanted to use a condom and perceived their partner did not; conflict, in turn, was associated with higher likelihood of abdication and lower likelihood of condom use. Higher alcohol intoxication attenuated the associations of desire to use a condom, and perceived partner’s desire to use a condom, with conflict. Results support an alcohol myopia-conflict inhibition-reduction model and emphasize the importance of sex education programs that not only teach young women about condom-related assertiveness and the effects of alcohol but also prepare them to respond to experiences of conflict that arise during sexual encounters.
Collective bargaining, decentralisation and crisis management in the German metalworking industries since 1990

Collective bargaining in the German metal and electrical engineering (M+E) industries has undergone a phase of considerable development since the 1990s. The profound changes which underwent collective bargaining in M+E over the last two decades have to be regarded against the background of a new global and national political and economic environment which emerged after the end of the Cold War. The M+E sector with at its core the automobile industry underwent successive waves of restructuring which shaped the bargaining agenda. This discussion paper examines these developments, putting a special focus on the changing bargaining agendas at both sectoral and company level and looks in particular at the decentralisation of collective bargaining. The management of the crisis of 2008 - 2010 in metal manufacturing is a further topic.A first version of this paper was presented at a meeting of the European GUSTO research project on 6 September 2011 in Barcelona.
Price discovery in the foreign exchange futures market

Examination is made of the relative contributions to price discovery of the floor and electronically traded euro FX and Japanese yen futures markets and the corresponding retail on‐line foreign exchange spot markets. GLOBEX electronic futures contracts provide the most price discovery in the euro; the on‐line trading spot market provides the most in the Japanese yen. The floor‐traded futures markets contribute the least to price discovery in both the euro and the Japanese yen markets. The overall results show that electronic trading platforms facilitate price discovery more efficiently than floor trading. Futures traders may also extract information from on‐line spot prices. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 26:1131–1143, 2006
Critical assessment of pile modulus determination methods

The elastic modulus of a concrete pile is an important parameter for the interpretation of load test results. This paper summarizes and assesses the methods available for its determination. Ten methods have been identified of which four are based on laboratory tests and the remainder on in situ pile instrumentation. Six of the methods have been used to interpret the modulus of a concrete pile subject to an axial load test. From the analyses, it was found that creep strains that developed during load-holding periods can have a significant effect on the modulus value if not allowed for when assessing the measured strain values. Based on a comparison of the derived pile loads the secant modulus method was found to be the most satisfactory. The tangent modulus method was also found to be a useful tool for investigating the effect of a partial steel casing — a feature of the method that has not been discussed before. Surprisingly, the theoretically correct transformed area equation had the worst performance, p.
Market Manipulation and Moral Hazard: Can the LIBOR be Fixed?

The aim of this work is to focus on the recent allegations of LIBOR rates manipulation. We show clear evidence that the individual contribution of each bank in the LIBOR submission process did not have a relevant impact on the rates level. Only through a synchronized "cartel-type" effort banks were allegedly able to fix the interest rate with a significant difference. For the case of USD LIBOR we developed a factorial modeling that captures the its relationship with US Treasury rates and Credit Default Swap spreads. Under this hypothesis we rebuilt a theoretical LIBOR that can peak 1% above the observed LIBOR during 2008.
Optimal inventory policy for deteriorating items with two-warehouse and time-dependent demands

An optimal inventory policy for a two-warehouse inventory model with free-form time-dependent demand function and deteriorating items is developed. While the two-warehouse model with time-dependent demand developed by researchers are limited in their applicability due to unrealistic assumption of regenerated cycles of identical cycle length being treated as a decision variable, we seek to reconsider this problem under the environment of the continuous release rule. Special case analysis provides further findings that the model for non-deteriorating items can be deduced and that this two-warehouse model can be treated as a one-warehouse model when both warehouses are identical in all surroundings. A numerical example is used to illustrate the derived results.
Liquidity effects and habit formation in a sticky price model

This paper sets up a sticky price model with external habit formations. It shows that the cross-correlation between output and interest rates as well as prices match the data well when there is habit formation. Consumption as well as output display a hump-shaped response to a positive monetary shock when there is habit formation. The paper also shows that the sticky price model with Abel's (1990, 1999) external habit formation succeeds in generating liquidity effects.
Rotavirus Infection Alters Peripheral T-Cell Homeostasis in Children with Acute Diarrhea

ABSTRACT The patterns of gene expression and the phenotypes of lymphocytes in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from children with diarrhea caused by rotavirus and healthy children were compared by using DNA microarray, quantitative PCR, and flow cytometry. We observed increased expression of a number of genes encoding proinflammatory cytokines and interferon or interferon-stimulated proteins and demonstrated activation of some genes involved in the differentiation, maturation, activation, and survival of B lymphocytes in PBMC of patients with rotavirus infection. In contrast, we observed a consistent pattern of lower mRNA levels for an array of genes involved in the various stages of T-cell development and demonstrated a reduction in total lymphocyte populations and in the proportions of CD4 and CD8 T lymphocytes from PBMC of patients. This decreased frequency of T lymphocytes was transient, since the proportions of T lymphocytes recovered to almost normal levels in convalescent-phase PBMC from most patients. Finally, rotavirus infection induced the activation and expression of the early activation markers CD83 and CD69 on a fraction of CD19 B cells and the remaining CD4 and CD8 T lymphocytes in acute-phase PBMC of patients; the expression of CD83 continued to be elevated and was predominantly exhibited on CD4 T lymphocytes in convalescent-phase PBMC. On the basis of these findings at the molecular, phenotypic, and physiologic levels in acute-phase PBMC, we conclude that rotavirus infection induces robust proinflammatory and antiviral responses and B-cell activation but alters peripheral T-cell homeostasis in children.
The State of the Art in Modeling Migration in the LDCS: A Comment

Below I discuss models that are state of the art from the view of the Harris and Todaro (HT) results. The question of migration in the LDCs must focus on whether and if so to what extent migration increases productivity so I concentrate only on how models modify HTs two main results. Section 2 discusses models that modify HT; Section 3 discusses models which use the HT framework but add significantly to it; and Section 4 discusses some models of migration in LDCs that are outside the HT framework. I use symbols as defined in Brueckner and Kim (BK) above. (excerpt)
Recent Methodological Developments to Measure Spatial Interaction: Synthetic Accessibility Indices Applied to High‐speed Train Investments

Abstract The paper aims to analyse and compare synthetic indices of accessibility in order to measure the impact of high‐speed trains on European cities. In particular, it considers the data and results concerning two previous articles by Gutiérrez et al. and Martín et al. that analyse the accessibility gains produced by the construction of Trans‐European Transport Networks (TEN‐Ts). In these two papers, accessibility is studied using, first, a partial approach with three different indicators: location, potential market, and daily accessibility; and, second, data envelopment analysis (DEA) to calculate a synthetic index of global accessibility. The present paper extends these studies by applying principal component analysis (PCA) to obtain a new synthetic accessibility index. DEA and PCA are two good candidates to synthesize the partial information provided by different methods that have been employed in the previous literature that studies accessibility. It is shown that DEA and PCA methodologies yield a consistent ranking for the global accessibility of the European cities for three different scenarios: 1996, 2005 and 2015.
Fixed assets revaluations and their association with stock returns

This study examines the association between annual stock returns of firms listed on the Athens Stock Exchange and the tax benefits of mandated fixed assets revaluations that occurred in the years 1982, 1988 and 1992. A significant association is found for the revaluations that occurred in 1992 but not for those that took place in 1988 or 1982 As the tax benefits are probably measured with error, we use the amount of the revaluation to explain stock returns with similar findings. When we extend the period over which we accumulate stock returns from one to two years, the association between stock returns and the amount of the revaluation is significant both in 1992 and in 1982. For the years 1992 and 1982, we also observe a significant association between stock prices and the revaluation amounts.
In Vitro Differentiation of Dendritic Cells in the Presence of Prostaglandin E2 Alters the IL-12/IL-23 Balance and Promotes Differentiation of Th17 Cells1

PGE2, an endogenous lipid mediator released in inflammatory conditions, affects both dendritic cell (DC) differentiation and maturation. Whereas the effect of PGE2 on fully differentiated DC was studied extensively, little is known about its effects on DC differentiation. In this study, we show that bone marrow-derived DC generated in the presence of PGE2 (DCp) acquire a proinflammatory profile; produce higher levels of proinflammatory cytokines/chemokines; express higher levels of MHC class II, costimulatory molecules, and TLRs; and exhibit increased activation of the NF-κB-signaling pathway. In addition, DCp exhibit a different IL-12/IL-23 profile than DC generated in the absence of PGE2. The low IL-12 and high IL-23 production in LPS-stimulated DCp is associated with the down-regulation of p35 and the up-regulation of p19 expression, respectively. In agreement with the DCp proinflammatory phenotype and especially with the altered IL-12/IL-23 balance which strongly favors IL-23, DCp also affect T cell differentiation. In contrast to DC which favor Th1 differentiation, DCp promote Th17 and inhibit Th1/Th2 differentiation, in vitro and in vivo. Previous in vivo studies indicated that PGE2 had a proinflammatory effect, especially in models of autoimmune diseases. Our results suggest that the proinflammatory effects of PGE2 could be mediated, at least partially, through effects on differentiating DC and subsequent alterations in CD4+ T cell differentiation, resulting in the preferential development of pathogenic autoimmune Th17 cells.
A Practical Method of Predicting Client Revisit Intention in a Hospital Setting

Abstract: Data mining (DM) models are an alternative to traditional statistical methods for examining whether higher customer satisfaction leads to higher revisit intention. This study used a total of 906 outpatients' satisfaction data collected from a nationwide survey interviews conducted by professional interviewers on a face-to-face basis in South Korea, 1998. Analyses showed that the relationship between overall satisfaction with hospital services and outpatients' revisit intention, along with word-of-mouth recommendation as intermediate variables, developed into a nonlinear relationship. The five strongest predictors of revisit intention were overall satisfaction, intention to recommend to others, awareness of hospital promotion, satisfaction with physician's kindness, and satisfaction with treatment level.
Lung Transplantation and Lung Cancer: Is There a Link

Lung transplantation offers a major survival benefit in selected patients with end-stage pulmonary disease. In recent years, there is accumulating evidence of an increase in solid organ tumors and especially in primary lung cancer. There is also some anecdotal evidence that lung transplantation may be beneficial as a treatment option in some patients with lung cancer, such as the ones with extensive bronchoalveolar cell carcinoma. In this review, we analyze the literature data reporting the incidence of lung cancer after lung transplantation with its inherent risk factors, and we summarize the available data on possible treatment of lung cancer by lung transplantation. Finally, bronchial epithelial chimerism as possible cause for lung cancer is discussed.
Tariff Reduction, Tax Replacement, and Implications for Income Distribution in China

This paper considers the distributional effects of trade liberalization and government tax replacement policies during foreign trade reform. The analysis uses a 22-sector, 12-representative-household computable general equilibrium (CGE) model for China. The simulation results show that trade liberalization can enhance both economic efficiency and income equality in China. However, the extent of the efficiency gains from trade liberalization depends on which tax instrument the government chooses to balance its budget. Imposing a progressive household income tax reduces the Gini coefficient while retaining most of the efficiency gains. Hence, this is likely to be one of the appropriate tax policies for China's government to choose to replace lost tariff revenue during trade liberalization.J. Comp. Econom. , June 1998,26(2), pp. 358–387. Purdue University and United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Services, Room 5141, 1800 M Street, NW, Washington DC 20036-5831; and Development Research Center, the State Council, Beijing 10017, People's Republic of China.
Learning and the Value of Relationships in International Trade

How valuable are long-term supplier relationships? To address this question, this paper explores relationships between U.S. importers and their suppliers abroad. We first establish several facts: almost half of U.S. imports are in relationships three years or older, relationship survival and traded quantity increase as a relationship ages, and long-term relationships were more resilient in the 2008/9 financial crisis. Based on these findings, we present a model of importer learning and calibrate it using our data. We estimate large differences in the value of relationships across countries. Counterfactuals show that relationships are central to trade flows following external shocks.
Comments on "The Impact of Dividend and Earnings Announcements: A Reconciliation."

R. Richardson Pettit concludes from his empirical study of the information content of dividends in the Journal of Finance that "market participants make considerable use of the information implicit in dividend payments. "' That conclusion is exactly the opposite of the conclusion in the Watts article in the Journal of Business on the information content of dividends.2 In another article in this issue of the Journal of Business Pettit attempts to reconcile the two findings.3 In that second article, Pettit makes the point that the two different conclusions depend on the specification of the earnings and dividend information variables in the original Pettit and Watts studies. Pettit argues that the Watts dividend information variable is misspecified, but apparently that his earnings variable is not. Consequently, his conclusion remains that dividends do have information content. The results presented in Pettit's second article do not indicate whether the dividend information content variable used by Watts is or is not misspecified. However, it is apparent from Pettit's original article and from his reconciliation article that the Pettit earnings variable is misspecified. In fact, Pettit's earnings misspecification is such that we cannot conclude from Pettit's results, using his methodology, that dividends do have information content. Pettit's results (in the second article) with a reformulation that used my methodology on regular dividends suggest that dividends could perhaps convey information to market participants. However, those results are not clear cut. Let us look at these points in more detail.