Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Innovation not imitation: Human resource strategy and the impact on world-class status

Benchmarking has become increasingly important as organizations strive for better performance. For many, this means observing, adapting and reapplying best practice from others within the same sector, which can lead to a convergence of competitive positioning as they strive to do the same things better. To increase competitiveness, improvement activities should be innovative and release the full potential of all employees. This paper results from a review of the literature relating to operational effectiveness, benchmarking and the role of strategic human resource management (SHRM). It examines the relationship between HR strategy and the practices and performance of service sector organizations. The analysis draws on empirical data from research, which benchmarked the practices and performance of over 800 manufacturing and service sector organizations. Underpinning the analysis is the argument that for some, HRM has completed the transformation from reactive 'doer' to proactive strategic facilitator (Tamkin et al., 1998), and in successful organizations HR strategies are about making business strategies work (Cook & Armstrong, 1990). This paper examines the association between HR strategy and world-class status, and investigates the proposition that leading organizations improve their operational effectiveness through innovation not imitation.
Unsupervised Part-Based Weighting Aggregation of Deep Convolutional Features for Image Retrieval

In this paper, we propose a simple but effective semantic part-based weighting aggregation (PWA) for image retrieval. The proposed PWA utilizes the discriminative filters of deep convolutional layers as part detectors. Moreover, we propose the effective unsupervised strategy to select some part detectors to generate the "probabilistic proposals," which highlight certain discriminative parts of objects and suppress the noise of background. The final global PWA representation could then be acquired by aggregating the regional representations weighted by the selected "probabilistic proposals" corresponding to various semantic content. We conduct comprehensive experiments on four standard datasets and show that our unsupervised PWA outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised and supervised aggregation methods.
The New Economy and the Challenges for Macroeconomic Policy

The accelerated introduction of information and communications technology into the economy has created numerous challenges for policymakers. This paper describes this New Economy and then proceeds to examine difficulties created for policymakers. The increased flexibility of the new economy argues against trying to use fiscal policy for stabilization and creates both immediate and long-term difficulties for monetary policy. Immediate difficulties concern the problems associated with estimating potential output when the productivity trend is shifting. During periods of transition, it is extremely difficult to distinguish permanent from transitory shifts in output growth, and adjust policy correctly. In the long-term, central banks must face the prospect of a significant decline in the demand for their liabilities, and a resulting loss of their primary interest rate policy instrument. The disappearance of the demand for central bank money for interbank settlement seems very unlikely, and so this concern seems unwarranted.
Cultural Political economy, the knowledge-based economy, and the state (II) 文化政治經濟學:以知識為基礎的經濟和國家 (下)

This chapter explores the interconnected roles of discourse and governance in constituting the knowledge-based economy in response to the alleged crisis of Atlantic Fordism. It interprets the globalizing knowledge-based economy (KBE) as an increasingly hegemonic meta-object of governance (and, indeed, meta-governance) that involves a complex, heterogeneous, and variable assemblage of social relations, which are articulated to a distinctive set of subjectivities and mediated through material objects and social institutions. It also traces the rise of the KBE as a provisional, partial, and unstable product of distinctive discourses and material practices. It should be emphasized at once that these claims do not imply that capitalism is always characterized by such hegemonic meta-objects of (meta-)governance nor that the latter have some predetermined lifespan (let alone a predetermined life-course) that coincides with some preordained logic of capital. Instead the approach developed here is precisely concerned with what I have elsewhere termed the â��contingent necessityâ�� of durable institutional orders and with what actor-network theorists have elsewhere described as the problem of how Leviathan (and, by extension, other institutional ensembles) get â��screwed downâ�� and actors are enrolled behind them (Jessop 1982; Callon and Latour 1981; Callon and Law 1982).
Housing Tenure, Job Mobility and Unemployment in the UK

This article examines the effects of housing tenure on individuals' job and unemployment durations in the UK. We examine job to job transitions and transitions from unemployment. We take account of whether or not the arrival of a job was synonymous with a non-local residential move, tenure endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity. We find that home-ownership is a constraint for the employed and public renting is more of a constraint for the unemployed. Employed home-owners have a lower transition into employment with a distant move and unemployed public renters have a lower probability of gaining employment in more distant labour markets. Copyright © 2008 The Author(s).
Security Returns and the Value Relevance of Accounting Data

INTRODUCTION Empirical market-based accounting research seeks evidence of the value relevance of accounting data via analysis of the relation between these data and various market variables. The decade of the 1990s witnessed an increasing use of price per share and market rate of return as the market variables of interest. The focus of this commentary is on regressions of price per share on the levels of various financial statement data (referred to herein as “price-levels regressions”) and regressions of returns on changes in these financial statement variables (referred to herein as “returns regressions”). The main points in the commentary are:
An autoregressive conditional duration model of credit‐risk contagion

Purpose – This paper seeks to discuss a modeling tool for explaining credit-risk contagion in credit portfolios. Design/methodology/approach – Presents a “collective risk” model that models the credit risk of a portfolio, an approach typical of insurance mathematics. Findings – ACD models are self-exciting point processes that offer a good representation of cascading phenomena due to bankruptcies. In other words, they model how a credit event might trigger other credit events. The model herein discussed is proposed as a robust global model of the aggregate loss of a credit portfolio; only a small number of parameters are required to estimate aggregate loss. Originality/value – Discusses a modeling tool for explaining credit-risk contagion in credit portfolios
New allotropes of phosphorene with remarkable stability and intrinsic piezoelectricity

Based on first-principles calculations, we have predicted an ultrathin metastable phosphorus nanotube as the smallest phosphorus nanotube and obtained a new class of two-dimensional phosphorus allotropes via assembling the smallest phosphorus nanotubes into planar structures in different stacking orientations. These two-dimensional phosphorene allotropes possess remarkable stabilities due to the strong inter-tube van der Waals interactions, which cause an energy release of about 30-70 meV/atom depending on their stacking manners. Our results show that most of these two-dimensional van der Waals phosphorene allotropes are energetically more favorable than the experimentally viable black alpha-P and blue beta-P. Three of them showing relatively higher probability to be synthesized in future are further confirmed to be dynamically stable semiconductors with strain-tunable band gaps and remarkable piezoelectricity, which may have potential applications in nano-sized sensors, piezotronics, and energy harvesting in portable electronic nano-devices
Approximation for convenience yield in commodity futures pricing

The pricing of commodity futures contracts is important both for professionals and academics. It is often argued that futures prices include a convenience yield, and this article uses a simple trading strategy to approximate the impact of convenience yields. The approximation requires only three variables—underlying asset price volatility, futures contract price volatility, and the futures contract time to maturity. The approximation is tested using spot and futures prices from the London Metals Exchange contracts for copper, lead, and zinc with quarterly observations drawn from a 25‐year period from 1975 to 2000. Matching Euro‐Market interest rates are used to estimate the risk‐free rate. The convenience yield approximation is both statistically and economically important in explaining variation between the futures price and the spot price after adjustment for interest rates. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 22:1005–1017, 2002
On Ignorance, Intuition, and Investing: A Bear Market Test of the Recognition Heuristic

This study replicates recent tests of the recognition heuristic as a device for selecting stock portfolios. The heuristic represents a lower limit to the search for information, since simple name recognition is the least one can know about anything. Gigerenzer and others conducted original experiments in this field at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research's Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (the "ABC Research Group"). The ABC Group's tests support the use of the heuristic in a bull market environment. This study, conducted in a down market, reaches a different conclusion: Not only can a high degree of company name recognition lead to disappointing investment results in a bear market, it can also be beat by pure ignorance. Virtually the only finding of the ABC Group's study that we match here is that Americans are not very good at picking American stocks to outperform the market.
International Capital Mobility and the Coordination of Monetary Rules

The paper develops a two-country model with flexible exchange rates and perfect capital mobility, for evaluating the alternative macroeconomic policy rules. Macroeconomic performance is measured in terms of fluctuations in inflation and output. Expectations are rational, and prices are sticky; wagesetting is staggered over time. The countries are linked by aggregate spending effects, relative price effects, and mark-up pricing arrangements. The modelis solved and analyzed through deterministic and stochastic simulation techniques. The results suggest that international capital mobility is not necessarily an impediment to efficient domestic macroeconomic performance. Changes in the expected appreciation or a depreciation of the exchange rate along with differentials between real interest rates in the two countries can permit macroeconomic performance in one country to be relatively independent of the policy rule chosen by the other country. The results depend on the particular parameter values used in the model and suggest the need for further econometric work to determine the size of these parameters.
From Public Housing to the Social Market: Rental Policy Strategies in Comparative Perspective

Jim Kemeny develops a conceptual framework to present a critical study of comparative rental markets. The framework centres around the concept of the process of maturation of cost rental housing and two policies for handling this which have been adopted by industrial societies. These are, firstly, the Anglo-Saxon "dualist" system, seen in Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and secondly, the Germanic "unitary market" system, seen in Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. Using a comparative approach based around international case studies, Jim Kemeny shows how each system stems from different power structures, is governed by different policy strategies, and is informed by different ideological views of how markets operate. Offering a radical critique of the orthodox view, it is argued that the time is now right for English-speaking nations to abandon state control over cost renting but allow to it to compete directly with profit renting, as in the "unitary market" model. International in scope, this volume should be of interest to researchers in housing, sociology and related fields.
Who Gets into Government? Coalition Formation in European Democracies

This article investigates different dynamics in government formation in 16 Western and 10 Central-Eastern European democracies during the post-war period. The study provides the first systematic comparison of determinants of participation in government in the East and the West. Applying mixed effects logit regression models while taking into account missing values in the dataset, the results demonstrate substantial differences between the two regions and show that most of the existing findings about participation in government are driven by Western democracies. Policy-based factors are relevant in Western countries, but no indications were found for these factors in Central-East European democracies where membership of government is mainly the result of electoral gains and losses.
Effects of work requirements on welfare migration

This study tests for a migration response to the implementation of stricter rules for welfare benefit receipt, in the form of mandatory participation in activation programs for welfare recipients, in Stockholm town districts. The hypothesis is that welfare benefit prone individuals will choose to live in a town district that has no program if they dislike the loss of leisure due to program participation more than they value the contents of the program, and vice versa. The results give some indications of a negative effect of the program on the outmigration of welfare prone individuals. This is however not robust to changes in comparison group nor in the sample of town districts. The conclusion that can be drawn is that there are no indications that activation programs lead to outmigration of welfare prone individuals.
Neural Query Performance Prediction with Weak Supervision

Predicting the performance of a retrieval engine for a given query is a fundamental and challenging task that has attracted much attention. Accurate performance predictors could potentially be used in various ways, such as triggering an action, choosing the most effective ranking function per query, or selecting the best variant from multiple query formulations. In this paper, we propose a general end-to-end query performance prediction framework based on neural networks, called NeuralQPP. Our framework consists of multiple components, each learning a representation suitable for performance prediction. These representations are then aggregated and fed into a prediction sub-network. We train our models with multiple weak supervision signals, which is an unsupervised learning approach that uses the existing unsupervised performance predictors as weak labelers. We also propose a simple yet effective component dropout technique to regularize our model. Our experiments on four newswire and web collections demonstrate that NeuralQPP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, in nearly all cases. Furthermore, we thoroughly analyze the effectiveness of each component, each weak supervision signal, and their combinations in our experiments.
A Saccharomyces cerevisiae homologue of mammalian translation initiation factor 4B contributes to RNA helicase activity.

The TIF3 gene of Saccharomyces cerevisiae was cloned and sequenced. The deduced amino acid sequence shows 26% identity with the sequence of mammalian translation initiation factor eIF‐4B. The TIF3 gene is not essential for growth; however, its disruption results in a slow growth and cold‐sensitive phenotype. In vitro translation of total yeast RNA in an extract from a TIF3 gene‐disrupted strain is reduced compared with a wild‐type extract. The translational defect is more pronounced at lower temperatures and can be corrected by the addition of wild‐type extract or mammalian eIF‐4B, but not by addition of mutant extract. In vivo translation of beta‐galactosidase reporter mRNA with varying degree of RNA secondary structure in the 5′ leader region in a TIF3 gene‐disrupted strain shows preferential inhibition of translation of mRNA with more stable secondary structure. This indicates that Tif3 protein is an RNA helicase or contributes to RNA helicase activity in vivo.
Comparative Large Scale Characterization of Plant versus Mammal Proteins Reveals Similar and Idiosyncratic N-α-Acetylation Features*

N-terminal modifications play a major role in the fate of proteins in terms of activity, stability, or subcellular compartmentalization. Such modifications remain poorly described and badly characterized in proteomic studies, and only a few comparison studies among organisms have been made available so far. Recent advances in the field now allow the enrichment and selection of N-terminal peptides in the course of proteome-wide mass spectrometry analyses. These targeted approaches unravel as a result the extent and nature of the protein N-terminal modifications. Here, we aimed at studying such modifications in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana to compare these results with those obtained from a human sample analyzed in parallel. We applied large scale analysis to compile robust conclusions on both data sets. Our data show strong convergence of the characterized modifications especially for protein N-terminal methionine excision, co-translational N-α-acetylation, or N-myristoylation between animal and plant kingdoms. Because of the convergence of both the substrates and the N-α-acetylation machinery, it was possible to identify the N-acetyltransferases involved in such modifications for a small number of model plants. Finally, a high proportion of nuclear-encoded chloroplast proteins feature post-translational N-α-acetylation of the mature protein after removal of the transit peptide. Unlike animals, plants feature in a dedicated pathway for post-translational acetylation of organelle-targeted proteins. The corresponding machinery is yet to be discovered.
Does News Play an Important Role in the Correction Process of the Accrual Anomaly?

type="main" xml:id="acfi12060-abs-0001"> We examine whether the financial press plays an important role in the correction of the accruals anomaly. Using 83,016 Wall Street Journal news articles published during 1993–2006, we find that a significant fraction of abnormal returns associated with the accruals trading strategy is concentrated on news days. The clustering of returns on news announcements is consistent with the financial press revealing information valuable for the correction of accruals mispricing. Further, we find that earnings-related news is more influential in the correction process than non-earnings-related news. Collectively, the results suggest that the financial press provides useful information to capital market participants.
Macroeconomic Factors and the Thoroughbred Industry

Abstract A capitalization approach is used to estimate econometrically the effects of exchange rate, interest rate and tax law changes on thoroughbred yearling prices. The analysis found that exchange rate and tax law changes have significantly influenced yearling prices since the early 1980s. Another serious price-reducing event was the 1986 tax law change. Both of these factors have counteracted the positive impact of increased purse rates on yearling prices.
Entry dynamics of self-employment in South Korea

The purpose of this paper is to clarify whether the entry into self-employment was an inevitable move due to economic recession (push hypothesis) or a voluntary move due to entrepreneurship (pull hypothesis) in Korea. It also examines how this decision is affected by changes in socio-economic conditions. The empirical analysis in this study exploited the matched sample for the adjacent months in the Economically Active Population Survey (EAPS) conducted by Korea National Statistical Office in 2000–2004. The empirical results showed that the push aspect of self-employment was strong in Korea over the whole sampled periods. The entry into self-employment in South Korea is largely attributable to economic sluggishness and an increase in unemployment rather than a voluntary transition resulting from entrepreneurship. Policy environment (such as providing information and financial support for new start-ups after the Asian financial crisis), which is a country-specific factor magnified the pushed effects. For the pushed (unprepared) self-employed people, not only is there a need to expand the coverage of vocational training programmes, but also it is vital that social safety nets are strengthened and supplemented.
What Drives Job Search? Evidence from Google Search Data

The large-scale unemployment caused by the Great Recession has necessitated unprecedented increases in the duration of unemployment insurance (UI). While it is clear that the weekly payments are beneficial to recipients, workers receiving benefits have less incentive to engage in job search and accept job offers. We construct a job search activity index based on Google data which provides the first high-frequency, state-specific measure of job search activity. We demonstrate the validity of our measure by benchmarking it against the American Time Use Survey and the comScore Web-User Panel, and also by showing that it varies with hypothesized drivers of search activity. We test for search activity responses to policy shifts and changes in the distribution of unemployment benefit duration. We find that search activity is greater when a claimant's UI benefits near exhaustion. Furthermore, search activity responses to the passage of bills that increase unemployment benefits duration are negative but short-lived in most specifications. Using daily data, we estimate that an increase by 1% of the population of unemployed receiving additional benefits results in a decrease in aggregate search activity of 1.7% lasting only one week.
Monopoly with Incomplete Information

Recent theoretical research on principal-agent relationships has emphasized incentive problems that arise when the parties involved are constrained by either asymmetric information or their inability to monitor each other's actions. Here we concentrate on the former constraint and consider the case of a single principal (the monopolist). The main contribution is to show that, under a separability assumption, strong conclusions can be drawn about the nature of optimal incentive schemes. Although the primary focus is on optimal quantity discounts in a monopolized market, the results also shed light on related topics, such as optimal income taxation and commodity bundling.