Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Influence of Dynamic Perspectives on Poverty Analysis and Anti-Poverty Policy in the UK

This article provides an overview of the academic debates and recent research on the dynamic perspective on poverty and anti-poverty policy. Renewed theoretical interest in dynamic analysis is discussed in the context of the more general debate about the roles of structure and agency in social relations. This is followed by a brief outline of some of the new empirical datasets now available for longitudinal research, in particular in the UK. The implications of dynamic analysis for our understanding of poverty are summarised, followed by a discussion of the impact of this on anti-poverty policy, again drawing largely on the UK, and some specifically English, developments. The article concludes that dynamic analysis and the role of agency has had a significant impact on both academic debate and policy intervention on poverty, but that this should not be interpreted as leading to an abandonment of policies for structural reform aimed at redistributing resources to the poor.
Commitment-based HR practices, different types of innovation activities and firm innovation performance

Research on human resource (HR) practices and innovation has increased in the strategic HR management literature over the last decades. Scholars suggest that commitment-based HR practices contribute to innovation performance of the firm. However, prior research puts little emphasis on the causal linkages among commitment-based HR practices, different types of innovation activities and firm innovation performance. This article opens the black box of the relationship between HR management and firm performance by examining the causal relationships among a bundle of commitment-based HR practices (i.e. a commitment-based HR system), different types of innovation activities and firm innovation performance. On the basis of a survey of 103 Turkish firms, empirical results show that a commitment-based HR system has a positive effect on process, organizational and marketing innovation activities. Furthermore, a commitment-based HR system mainly affects organizational innovation activities and shows that these innovation activities are the core drivers of process and marketing innovation activities, leading to higher rate of product innovation activities. Subsequently, product innovation activities enhance firm innovation performance, emphasizing their determinant role.
R&D partnership portfolios and the inflow of technological knowledge

This article links research on parallel search and joint R&D to contribute a portfolio perspective to the study of knowledge flows within interfirm R&D partnerships. In a longitudinal analysis of firms engaged in R&D partnerships relating to information technology between 1975 and 1999, we show that the size of a firm's R&D partnership portfolio and its share of novel partners both have an inverted U-shaped effect on the inflow of technological knowledge from the firm's R&D partners. We also show how these direct effects vary as a function of the level of technological uncertainty within the portfolio.
Converse Barrier Certificate Theorems

This technical note shows that a barrier certificate exists for any safe dynamical system. Specifically, we prove converse barrier certificate theorems for a class of structurally stable dynamical systems. Other authors have developed a related result by assuming that the dynamical system has neither singular points nor closed orbits. In this technical note, we redefine the standard notion of safety to comply with dynamical systems with multiple singular elements. Hereafter, we prove the converse barrier certificate theorems and highlight the differences between our results and previous work by a number of illustrative examples.
Information Technology Employees in State Government

This article explores the affective organizational commitment, job involvement, and job satisfaction of an increasingly important segment of the public sector workforce: information technology (IT) employees in state government. We propose a model that explores job characteristics and work experiences variables that together influence affective organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and job involvement. Using canonical correlation analysis, we find that role ambiguity, perceived organizational support, leader—member exchange, and task variety are the independent variables that together explain most of the variance in the affective organizational commitment and job satisfaction of IT employees working for one-state government. In contrast to findings based on private sector IT employees, our analysis does not identify major gender differences. Taken together, these findings advance our understanding of affective commitment and job satisfaction within the public sector and provide agency managers actionable ideas on how to retain valuable IT employees.
Structural adjustment, governance, economic growth and social progress

Abstract This paper analyses the interconnection between social achievement, structural adjustment, governance and economic performance. It does this by developing indices to measure social progress, measured by achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, and structural adjustment, measured by achieving the goals specified in the Washington consensus. These indices are constructed using the technique pioneered by Nagar & Basu, which uses the information contained in the correlation among the different indicators. Governance is measured by an index developed by the World Bank, and economic performance by growth of per capital income. Economic growth is not correlated with social progress, structural adjustment or governance. However, structural adjustment is not inimical to social progress. Furthermore, while the governance index is not correlated with growth of per capita income it is very highly correlated with social progress.
Hyperinsulinemia in nonobese women reporting a moderate weight gain at the beginning of menopause: a useful early measure of susceptibility to insulin resistance

Objective: At menopause, the frequent weight gain excess could be related to insulin resistance. This study evaluated the prevalence of hyperinsulinemia in nonobese women reporting a moderate increase in weight at the beginning of menopause. Methods: Women who were postmenopausal for 1 to 5 years and reporting a weight gain of 5 to 15 kg were evaluated for weight, eating habits, physical activity, body circumferences, fasting blood glucose level, insulin level, and lipid profile. An oral glucose tolerance test was performed in subgroups of 21 hyperinsulinemic women and 21 normoinsulinemic women matched for age, weight, height, body mass index, and hysterectomy. Results: Among 279 postmenopausal women reporting a weight gain of 8.7 ± 4.4 kg, insulin level was increased in 49 (17.6%) women as compared with normoinsulinemic women (108.53 ± 31.35 vs 58.96 ± 14.52 pmol/L, respectively; P < 0.001). Differences were also found for glucose (5.24 ± 0.37 vs 5.05 ± 0.42 mmol/L, respectively; P = 0.003), insulin resistance as estimated by homeostasis model assessment HOMA-2-IR (2.01 ± 0.53 vs 1.10 ± 0.27, respectively; P < 0.001), weight (72.6 ± 8.0 vs 69.9 ± 7.1 kg, respectively; P = 0.023), body mass index (28.3 ± 2.3 vs 27.2 ± 2.3 kg/m2, respectively; P = 0.003), and waist circumference (89.8 ± 5.8 vs 86.0 ± 6.5 cm, respectively; P < 0.001). Triglyceride levels were higher (1.47 ± 0.66 vs 1.17 ± 0.61 mmol/L, respectively; P = 0.002) and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol level was lower (1.54 ± 0.35 vs 1.72 ± 0.42 mmol/L, respectively; P = 0.007) in the hyperinsulinemic and normoinsulinemic groups. Although insulin levels were higher in 21 hyperinsulinemic women at all times that oral glucose tolerance tests were performed, levels of glucose were also above those of 21 matched normoinsulinemic women at 1 and 2 hours and remained greater than 6.0 mmol/L at 2 hours. Conclusions: Because insulin resistance is frequently associated with weight gain in nonobese women at menopause, the measurement of fasting insulin, along with glucose, lipids, and waist circumference, may help to identify those who are at higher risk of developing glucose intolerance, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases and to implement early preventive measures.
Exploiting seismic signal and noise in an intracratonic environment to constrain crustal structure and source parameters of infrequent earthquakes

In many regions of the world characterized by a relatively low rate of seismicity, the determination of local and regional seismic source parameters is often restricted to an analysis of the first onsets of P waves (or first motion analysis) due to incomplete information about Earth structure and the small size of the events. When rare large earthquakes occur in these regions, their waveforms can be used to model Earth structure. This, however, makes the nature of the earthquake source determination problem circular, as source information is mapped as structure. Presented here is one possible remedy to this situation,where through a two-step approach we first constrain Earth structure using data independent of the earthquake of interest. In this study, we focus on a region in Western Australia with low seismicity and minimal instrument coverage and use the CAPRA/LP temporary deployment to demonstrate that reliable structural models of the upper lithosphere can be obtained from an independent collection of teleseismic and ambient noise datasets. Apart from teleseismic receiver functions (RFs), we obtain group velocities from the cross-correlation of ambient noise and phase velocities from the traditional two-station method using carefully selected teleseismic earthquakes and station pairs. Crustal models are then developed through the joint inversion of dispersion data and RFs, and structural Green’s functions are computed from a layered composite model. In the second step of this comprehensive approach, we apply full waveform inversion (three-component body and surface waves) to the 2007 ML = 5.3 Shark Bay,Western Australia, earthquake to estimate its source parameters (seismic moment, focal mechanism, and depth). We conclude that the full waveform inversion analysis provides constraints on the orientation of fault planes superior to a first motion interpretation.
The Million Homes Programme: a review of the great Swedish planning project

The first decades of the post‐war era saw a large and quickly growing need for new housing. In Sweden, rapid urbanization, growing prosperity and demands for higher housing standards led to years‐long housing queues. The housing shortage became a political liability for the ruling Social Democratic party. To end the housing shortage once and for all, the Swedish parliament decided that a million new dwellings should be built in the period 1965 to 1974 and this was achieved. When the Million Homes Programme, as it came to be called, had reached barely half‐way, the housing shortage was replaced by a housing surplus, partly caused by the rapid expansion of the housing stock and by the fact that economic growth gave way to stagnation. At the same time, criticism began to be heard about what some people perceived as uniform and poor architecture and, since then, the Million Homes Programme has never ceased to engage people and provoke debate. Most of the buildings and areas of this era have survived quite well with routine maintenance, but in several multifamily housing areas more thoroughgoing measures have been needed. The development patterns can be divided into six categories: everything from maintenance and conventional daily care to large‐scale turn‐around and demolition. The housing construction of the ‘record years’ is typical of its period in modern Swedish history. In the 1960s the ambition was to create an exemplary welfare state – many people no doubt imagined the best in the world – and for this ambition the spacious and ultramodern buildings of the Million Homes Programme were a fitting expression. Sweden had been transformed from a country with a housing shortage to a country with a housing surplus. Today, again facing considerable housing shortage in many growing cities, developing this large housing stock with care for its qualities and its residents, and learning from the mistakes where new developments are needed, are important tasks.
Complicated Urinary Tract Infection Is Associated with Uroepithelial Expression of Proinflammatory Protein S100A8

ABSTRACT F344 rats chronically infected with Ureaplasma parvum develop two distinct profiles: asymptomatic urinary tract infection (UTI) and UTI complicated by struvite urolithiasis. To identify factors that affect disease outcome, we characterized the temporal host immune response during infection by histopathologic analysis and in situ localization of U. parvum. We also used differential quantitative proteomics to identify distinguishing host cellular responses associated with complicated UTI. In animals in which microbial colonization was limited to the mucosal surface, inflammation was indistinguishable from that which occurred in sham-inoculated controls, and the inflammation resolved by 72 h postinoculation (p.i.) in both groups. However, inflammation persisted in animals with microbial colonization that extended into the deeper layers of the submucosa. Proteome profiling showed that bladder tissues from animals with complicated UTIs had significant increases (P < 0.01) in proteins involved in apoptosis, oxidative stress, and inflammation. Animals with complicated UTIs (2 weeks p.i.) had the highest concentrations of the proinflammatory protein S100A8 (P ≤ 0.005) in bladder tissues, and the levels of S100A8 positively correlated with those of proinflammatory cytokines GRO/KC (P ≤ 0.003) and interleukin-1α (P ≤ 0.03) in urine. The bladder uroepithelium was a prominent cell source of S100A8-S100A9 in animals with complicated UTIs (2 weeks p.i.), which was not detected in animals with asymptomatic UTIs (2 weeks p.i.) or in any bladder tissues harvested at earlier p.i. time points. Based on these results, we surmise that invasive colonization of the bladder triggers chronic inflammation and immune dysregulation, which may be critical to struvite formation.
Financial Benefits of Rapid Student Loan Repayment: An Analytic Framework Employing Two Decades of Data

This study analyzes the benefits of rapid student loan repayment, defined here as borrowers who repaid their cumulative undergraduate loan debt in half the time of the expected repayment cycle (10 years). Drawing from data on borrowers in two nationally representative samples, I first explain the analytic framework employed to identify rapid loan repayers, then examine whether rapid loan repayment is associated with financial benefits in terms of salary, homeownership, and non–poverty level, identifying how rapid loan repayers differ from their non–rapid loan repayer and nonborrower counterparts. Results show salary benefits associated with rapid loan repayment and indicate that among rapid loan repayers, cumulative loan debt generally did not surpass $15,000. These findings suggest that policy-makers may consider the adoption of shorter repayment plans with clear eligibility cutoff amounts as an alternative to the more common 10-year fixed plan.
Legal constraints, transaction costs and the evaluation of mutual funds

The paper considers the legal restrictions on investment and the transaction costs related to optimal turnover that affect mutual funds. A method is developed for mutual fund performance evaluation when both these factors are included in the reference portfolios, and it is applied to a sample of available Spanish mutual funds. The poor performance results reflected in previous studies are not significantly modified. However, when net returns on the reference portfolios are used in the evaluation the performance is clearly improved.
Geographic Location of the Firm and Credit Rating Accuracy

We document in this study that lack of soft information as a result of longer distance between the firm and rating agency headquarters leads to higher errors in bond ratings, reflected by Type I and Type II errors for missed defaults and false warnings, respectively. Our results show that for each 100 km in terms of the distance between a firm’s and the rating agency headquarters, the likelihood of missed defaults (Type I error) increases by 4.9% and false warnings (Type II error) increases by 2.1%. In addition, our analyses show that the downgrades are less timely for firms that are further away from the rating agency headquarters. The results also show that missed defaults are especially higher, and timeliness of downgrades is lower for firms with higher complexity, lower analyst following, and lower accessibility to the rating agency headquarters. Although analysts adjust their ratings lower when soft information is lacking as a result of longer distance, their adjustments do not fully compensate for the lack of soft information.
Have food and financial markets integrated?

This article analyses comovements and discusses possibly greater market integration between aggregate food commodity and stock prices in the period 1990 to 2012. Return correlations, price return distributions, cointegration and Granger-causalities are tested in subsamples on monthly FAO Food Price Index and MSCI World Stock Market Index. Empirical results suggest that while there is only weak indication of greater comovements concurrent with structural changes such as changed agricultural policies, new demand due to growth in emerging markets and energy mandates and the financialization of food markets since the early 2000s, they did start to increase substantially in particular during the financial stress of the Lehman crisis and the Great Recession. While structural changes may have amplified price linkages across markets, results do not suggest that they are the key factors for greater price comovements. Instead, the effects of the late-2000s recession as a time of great economic weakness and uncertainty may have changed concurrently the behaviour of both food and financial market participants, such that different market prices exhibit large comovements.
Financial Liberalization: Does It Pay to Join the Party?

Financial liberalization is a highly controversial policy. Despite the fact that almost all the regions of the world have undergone liberalization of their financial markets, its effect on the performance of different economic sectors remains a question. In our research, we find that financial liberalization reduces the cost of capital, boosting the relative growth rates of economic sectors that for technological reasons rely heavily on external (to the firm) finance. This result, however, depends on the quality of institutions supporting credit markets. The effects of financial liberalization are more notable in countries that have and enforce regulations to protect property rights. In this sense, the answer to the question in the title of the paper is not clear-cut. The impact of financial liberalization on growth depends on underlying institutional factors.
O Efeito da Adoção dos IFRS sobre a Relevância Informacional do Lucro Contábil no Brasil

Este artigo teve por objetivo avaliar o efeito da adocao dos International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) no Brasil sobre a relevância informacional do lucro contabil das firmas de capital aberto. Estudos internacionais tem demonstrado que a adocao dos IFRS aprimora a qualidade da informacao contabil, comparativamente aos padroes contabeis domesticos. No Brasil, ha evidencias esparsas nesse sentido. A relevância informacional e aqui entendida como um atributo multidimensional e intimamente relacionado a qualidade e a utilidade da informacao que e expressa pelo lucro contabil. Dentre as suas dimensoes, foram investigadas a capacidade associativa e a tempestividade informacional do lucro contabil em relacao ao preco das acoes. Adicionalmente, por representar um aspecto relacionado a sua tempestividade, tambem foi analisado o nivel de conservadorismo condicional presente no lucro contabil, para tanto, assumindo a perspectiva proposta por Basu (1997). A metodologia consistiu no emprego de regressoes combinadas e modelos de dados em painel, por meio dos quais foram analisados os lucros contabeis trimestrais de 246 firmas, entre o primeiro trimestre de 1999 e o primeiro trimestre de 2013, o que resultou em 9.558 observacoes trimestre-firma. Os resultados obtidos indicaram que a adocao dos IFRS no Brasil: (1) aumentou a capacidade associativa do lucro contabil; (2) reduziu a niveis nao significantes a tempestividade informacional; e (3) nao surtiu efeitos sobre o conservadorismo condicional. Da analise conjunta das evidencias empiricas obtidas na presente pesquisa, conclui-se que nao e possivel afirmar que a adocao dos IFRS no Brasil contribuiu com o aumento da relevância informacional do lucro contabil das firmas de capital aberto.
Regional Growth and Policies in the European Union: Does the Common Agricultural Policy Have a Counter‐Treatment Effect?

This article investigates the impact of both the Common Agricultural Policy and structural policies on European regions by estimating a conditional growth convergence model. The Common Agricultural Policy influences the convergence process by affecting regional aggregate productivity, eventually conflicting with the structural policies designed to promote growth in lagging regions. The conditional convergence model is specified in a dynamic panel data form and applied to 206 regions observed from 1989 to 2000. A GMM estimation is applied in order to obtain consistent estimates of both the convergence parameter β and the impact of the conditioning variables, policy measures in particular. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.
Patient engagement strategies used for hypertension and their influence on self-management attributes.

BACKGROUND Several effective methods to facilitate patient self-management of hypertension are available in primary care. These include direct support from community pharmacists and general practice, and the use of home blood pressure (BP) monitoring. The aim of this study is to establish the prevalence of use of key strategies and to determine their independent relationship with patient self-management attributes. METHODS A survey of patients with treated hypertension was undertaken in 27 community pharmacies. This established recent use of BP monitoring and advice from health professionals. Patient awareness of BP and targets, appropriateness of BP targets and adherence to anti-hypertensive medications were assessed as indicative self-management outcomes. Predictors of outcomes were determined using binary logistic regression. RESULTS Overall, 215 surveys were returned. Two-thirds of patients were aged >65 years, and 45% had conditions warranting tighter BP control (<130/80 mmHg). Almost all patients reported monitoring of their BP in the previous year and 63% could report their most recent BP reading. Just 36% reported knowing a target BP, and 78% of reported targets were within guidelines recommendations. One-fifth (22%) monitored their own BP, and 15% reported non-adherence to medication. Doctors provided the large majority of professional advice. Self-monitoring or documentation of BP readings was independently associated with increased likelihood of BP and target BP being known. CONCLUSIONS Regular monitoring of BP does not automatically translate to professional advice. Increased uptake of patient self-monitoring should be promoted as a means of enabling self-management.