Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Energy Consumption, Economic Growth and Financial Development: Exploring the Empirical Linkages for India

This study investigates the relationship between energy consumption, economic growth and financial development in India by using the annual data for the period 1971–2009. An application of Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration results suggest that energy consumption is positively and significantly impacted by proportion of urban population in total population, while the same is negatively and significantly impacted by financial development, economic growth and proportion of industrial output in total output. The cointegration results also further suggest that an increase in proportion of urban population adversely influences economic growth, whereas energy use positively influences economic growth. The findings have significant policy implications for the Indian economy as we find energy use positively impacts on economic growth, suggesting that India is harnessing on the effective use of energy. However, it is recommended that India needs to be cautious in the effective use of energy in proper channels.
The conditional relation between beta and returns in the Hong Kong stock market

Published results of empirical tests over the past two decades indicate that the risk-return relation in the Hong Kong stock market is negative. Such findings refute the positive risk-returnrelation stipulatedinthe traditional CAPM. However, traditional CAPM invokes expected or ex-ante returns while empirical tests have used ex-post returns as an imperfect proxy. Thus, in this paper, the risk-return relationship in the Hong Kong stock market is examined using the conditional method based on the work of Pettengill et al., which takes into consideration the dominating ex-post negative excess market returns found in the Hong Kong stock market. Under the conditional Pettengill et al. method, test results demonstrate a strong conditional positive and negative risk-return relationships in the Hong Kong stock market. The results show that the estimated risk premiums in both up and down markets are insignificantly different from the corresponding expected risk premiums. But the estimated risk premiums of the up and the down markets are asymmetric with the magnitude of the down market premium greater than that of the up market. Thus, under the conditional CAPM, the estimated security market line (SML) in the down market is negatively steeper than is the positively sloped estimated SML in the up market. The significant results are not driven by abnormal return behaviour in some of the months or by a particular beta group. Thus, in general, the test results suggest that the conditional CAPM is still practically a useful equilibrium pricing model in the Hong Kong stock market.
The Number of Factors in Security Returns

Both factor analysis of security returns and the analysis of eigenvalues seem to indicate that a market factor explains the major part of security returns. The author finds that such evidence is consistent with an economy where there are, in fact, k "equally important" priced factors; eigenvalue analysis in the context of such an economy will lead an investigator to the false inference that the one important "factor" is the retun on an equally weighted market index. Copyright 1989 by American Finance Association.
Some Mathematical Aspects of Market Impact Modeling

Market impact models describe the feedback of trading strategies on the underlying asset prices. The resulting feedback effects lead to interesting questions of stability and regularity, which are closely related to the existence and behavior of strategies for optimal order execution. In this paper, we give a survey on some recent results that were obtained in this context. In the first part, we explain in particular the stochastic control approach to the maximization of the expected utility of revenues in the Almgren-Chriss framework. In the second part, we describe stability issues that arise when market impact is allowed to be transient.
Western cosmetics in the gendered development of consumer culture in China

Abstract This paper examines the changes in China's gender regime during the reform period, especially during China's accession to the WTO. The analysis provides a framework to relate these changes to the consumption behavior of women, especially the increased consumption of cosmetics, to interpret the impact of accession on the gender regime in China. Institutionalist theories that model consumption decisions as a personal display of group identity are extended to the special case of gender identity. According to this framework, the desire to display identity, such as social status or lifestyles, shapes the decision to consume commodities that also display gender such as cosmetics. Thus, the new gender regime is an unintended consequence of a complex pursuit of identity. When consumption is understood as a performance of identity, we can see how the expansion of aggressive marketing tactics affects consumption by influencing the associations of goods with social status.
Value-Based Integrity Management and Bureaucratic Organizations: Changing the Mix

ABSTRACT This article examines integrity management initiatives designed to introduce more value-based elements in public bureaucracies. Incorporating value-based practices, which emphasize the personal ethical responsibilities of individual public servants, into a hierarchical, rule-based system may present difficult organizational problems. A central issue is to determine whether any change has actually occurred or whether the organization is simply functioning as it did previously. In addition, there are problems of implementation: new value-based initiatives may conflict with the pre-existing system; they may not be adequately reflected in training programs; and there may be differential impacts on departments and agencies. We analyze problems in this new organizational mix in a classical Weberian bureaucracy, the Hong Kong civil service. The findings are based on a 2011–2012 administrative ethics survey of 355 senior public servants, a separate survey of 70 Ethics Officers, and semi-structured interviews with 32 senior public servants.
Dividend collectors and negative cash dividends: evidence from Istanbul Stock Exchange

This paper examines the dividend-collecting firms and negative dividend payers listed on Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) from 1991 through 2006. Turkey used to be a unique country in terms of 50% mandatory cash dividend payment application, and this policy pushed some firms to create other ways to overcome liquidity problems. Among the dividend-paying firms, some dividend payers collected the distributed dividends back through rights issues. In some cases, the amount of rights issues exceeded the distributed dividends. Hence, this resulted in negative dividend payments. This paper provides a solid empirical basis to examine dividend-collecting firms and negative dividends. The findings of this paper show that dividend collectors, in particular negative-dividend-paying firms, started to decrease after the suspension of mandatory cash dividend payment policy in 1995. The results suggest that large firms with low earnings are likely to become negative dividend payers. Further, firms with high investment potential and higher short-term debt constraints tend to collect more dividends back.
Super-resolution via K-means sparse coding

Dictionary learning and sparse representation are efficient methods for single-image super-resolution. We propose a new approach to learn a set of dictionaries and then choose the suitable one for a given test image patch of low resolution. Firstly, the training image patches are clustered into K groups with the information of the test image patches. Secondly, a best basis is learned to model each cluster using sparse prior. Finally, we employ this dictionary to estimate the high resolution patch for the given low resolution patch. This method reduces the complexity of dictionary learning greatly and also makes the representation of patches more compact compared to state-of-the-art methods, which learn a universal dictionary. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.
Club Goods and Inefficient Institutions: Why Danzig and Lübeck Failed in the Early Modern Period

This article uses club theory to explain why two major medieval commercial centres declined in the early modern period. Lubeck and Danzig illuminate the difficulties experienced by old-style European towns where early modern guilds (and other privileged ‘corporations’) had a lot of political influence in making the transition to the new style of north-west European cities such as Amsterdam and Hamburg. The article refutes theories proposing that the special privileges awarded to a merchant elite enhanced economic growth; instead, it is argued that those privileges gave rise to ‘club goods’ that were beneficial only to a small number of merchants and were provided at the expense of society at large, resulting in economic decline.
Income Security Programs and Retirement in Sweden

We examine the effects of economic incentives inherent in pension schemes and income security programs on retirement behavior in the Swedish labor market. We use social security wealth and three alternative measures of accrual (one-year benefit accrual, peak value and option value). The social security system, occupational pensions as well as insurance on the labor market, i.e., unemployment, sickness and disability insurance are considered. We estimate a model using panel data on about 30 000 men and women born between 1927 and 1940, observed between 1983 and 1997. The model is then used to simulate the effects of two alternative systems: one where eligibility for benefits in the prevailing system is delayed by three years and another where replacement levels are reduced.
State regulations and the availability of child-care services

Most state regulations do not adversely affect the availability of regulated day-care services. However, regulations differ in their costliness, intrusiveness, and enforceability. Costly regulations may reduce the number of group day-care centers, and intrusive regulations may reduce the number of family day-care homes. Unenforceable regulations have no apparent effects. In some instances, regulators face trade-offs between quality and availability. However, requirements for provider training and limitations on group size do not involve such trade-offs. More broadly, improvements in the regulatory process may result in quality gains without reductions in availability.
Fabrication and characterization of field-plated buried-gate SiC MESFETs

Silicon carbide (SiC) MESFETs were fabricated using a standard SiC MESFET structure with the application of the "buried-channel" and field-plate (FP) techniques in the process. FPs combined with a buried-gate are shown to be favorable concerning output power density and power-added efficiency (PAE), due to higher breakdown voltage and decreased output conductance. A very high power density of 7.8 W/mm was measured on-wafer at 3 GHz for a two-finger 400-/spl mu/m gate periphery SiC MESFET. The PAE for this device was 70% at class AB bias. Two-tone measurements at 3 GHz /spl plusmn/ 100 kHz indicate an optimum FP length for high linearity operation.
Lifestyle Factors as Predictors of General Cardiovascular Disease

This study aims to examine the effectiveness of lifestyle factors in predicting general cardiovascular events and to investigate the feasibility of using the lifestyle model as a self-screening tool. The authors conducted a longitudinal study over a 10-year follow-up in Japan. Logistic regression analysis was used to create prediction models for general cardiovascular disease (CVD) death. The authors estimated the predictive power of the models by calculating the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve. The total of 6 traditional and 5 lifestyle risk factors were significantly associated with the incidence of CVD events. Hazard ratios (HRs) were 0.26 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.17, 0.41) for regular physical activity, 0.57 (95% CI = 0.50, 0.67) for moderate- or high-intensity work, and 1.72 (95% CI = 1.31-2.26) for short sleep duration; the HRs for traditional and Western dietary patterns were 1.53 (95% CI = 1.12, 2.09) and 2.62 (95% CI = 1.46, 4.68), respectively. The AUROC curve was significantly different between the classic and lifestyle prediction models. These results suggest that lifestyle factors are significant predictors of CVD events.
Family Firms and the Choice of Payment Method in Domestic and International Acquisitions

This paper investigates the impact of family control on domestic and international acquisition's payment. This effect is important to understand since it will underpin all the future financial flexibility of the merged firms in a context of accelerating international market integration. We find that the percentage of cash payment in acquisitions is positively associated with family voting rights, but we highlight that family wedge is negatively associated with cash payment, which indicates the important role of control-enhancing mechanisms. Dilution risk is crucial at an intermediate level of control, since this relationship is nonlinear. Moreover, we show that both unused debt capacity and the increase in debt capacity are used by family firms to finance the relevant deals, but that these firms become overleveraged after merging, losing some financial flexibility in exchange for equity control purposes.
The Impact of Agglomeration Economies on Estimated Demand Thresholds: An Extension of Wensley and Stabler

Central place theory predicts that geographic markets located in rural areas have lower demand thresholds, and, therefore, a higher frequency of business establishments relative to areas that are more proximate to urban centers, other things equal. Wensley and Stabler (1998) confirm this prediction using data on the location and frequency of business activities in rural Saskatchewan. We demonstrate that this relationship may not always hold true depending on the existence and magnitude of agglomeration economies. If average cost differences associated with being located in an urbanized area are sufficiently large, then the relationship between urban proximity and number of establishments may be reversed. We provide evidence of this reversal using 1996 cross‐sectional data on hospital services in Texas.
NEUROPHYSIOLOGY: High frequency stimulation of the STN influences the activity of dopamine neurons in the rat

The effect of high frequency stimulation (HFS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) on the spontaneous activity of substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) dopaminergic neurons was investigated in normal rats and in rats with globus pallidus (GP) lesions. In normal rats, the spontaneous activity of SNc neurons did not signi®cantly differ from that of rats with GP lesions (4.2 2.2 versus 4.4 2.6 spikes/s). STN-HFS induced an increase of ®ring rate in the majority of tested cells in normal (76%) and GP-lesioned rats (73%) with an after-effect of 34.4 3.4 and 33.2 3.1 s, respectively. These results demonstrate that STN-HFS in ̄uences the activity of the SNc dopaminergic neurons by increasing their ®ring rate and that this increase of activity is independent of the globus pallidus. NeuroReport 11:1593±1596 & 2000 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Empirical Analysis of Health and Educational Attainment in Turkey

The overall aim of this thesis is to examine and analyse three separate yet related issues in health and education that have been attracting increasing attention on the policy agenda in Turkey, especially over the recent decade. Public policy attention has particularly been devoted to issues such as financial protection against health care costs, decreasing the smoking prevalence rate and closing the gender gap in educational attainment. One of the main reasons behind the interest of policy makers in these areas may be attributed to need of the country to enhance human capital as well as to its aim to fulfill the requirements for EU membership. This provides the motivation for the empirical analyses presented in this thesis which investigate these issues in depth and, where relevant, provide policy implications. The first empirical study presented in Chapter 2 investigates the prevalence of ‘catastrophic’ out-of-pocket health care expenditure in Turkey and identifies the factors which are associated with its risk. The results indicate that poverty is an important barrier to seeking health care and that poverty is inversely associated with the risk of incurring catastrophic health expenditure. Chapter 3 examines the determinants of adult smoking propensity and intensity from a gender perspective. The findings of this chapter are twofold. First, the factors associated with smoking participation differ from the factors associated with the level of cigarette consumption. Second, the determinants of smoking behaviour are found to be different across males and females. The third empirical study is presented in Chapter 4 and aims to examine the educational attainment of girls and boys at the primary and secondary education levels. The findings indicate that the determinants of educational attainment and the potential factors that are associated with gender inequality differ by the level of education.
Role of Sperm DNA Integrity in Fertility

The traditional semen analysis is a cornerstone in diagnosis and treatment of male fertility (World Health Organisation (WHO), 1999, 2010). The sperm parameters concentration, motility and morphology are, however, claimed to be poor predictors of a male s fertility status, this in natural conception (Bonde et al., 1998; Guzick et al., 2001) as well as in assisted reproductive techniques (ART) (Wolf et al., 1996).
SlrR/SlrA controls the initiation of biofilm formation in Bacillus subtilis

Undomesticated strains of Bacillus subtilis can form pellicle biofilms in standing culture. Pellicle formation is initiated by repression of flagellar genes and activation of the eps and yqxM operons, which are involved in biofilm–matrix synthesis. SinI is thought to induce the eps and yqxM operons by antagonizing their repressor SinR. Here, we show that mutations in late‐flagellar genes prevent pellicle formation at an initiation step. These mutations reduce the activity of SlrR/SlrA. SlrR (formerly Slr) and SlrA are homologues of SinR and SinI respectively, and SlrR/SlrA represses σD‐dependent flagellar genes and activate the eps and yqxM operons. Contrary to previous reports, a sinI mutation does not prevent pellicle formation in B. subtilis strain ATCC 6051. ATCC 6051 has a frameshift mutation in the ywcC gene, which encodes a TetR‐type transcriptional repressor. The ywcC mutation depresses slrA transcription, thereby increasing SlrR/SlrA activity. In the ywcC mutant, SlrR/SlrA rather than SinI activates the eps and yqxM operons by antagonizing SinR. The roles of SlrR/SlrA and flagella in the initiation of pellicle formation are discussed.
Linking Theory and Practice in Probation. Structured Decision Support for Case Management Plans

In 2010, the Dutch Probation Service introduced a digital decision support system for case management plans, a so called fourth generation risk/needs assessment instrument. Does this system help probation officers in determining the appropriate interventions that should prevent recidivism for each individual client? And to what extent are the case management plans based on existing theories on desistance from crime? These are the central questions in the thesis of Jacqueline Bosker of the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht: ‘Linking Theory and Practice in Probation – Structured decision support for case management plans’. “Further development is still needed, but we can conclude that the use of digital decision support helps improve the quality of case management plans. ” Bosker concluded in her research that this form of decision support enhances the quality of the case management plans. “In the most practical sense, it helps a probation officer not to overlook certain measures that might be applicable for the client considering the risks and needs. The plans also correspond better to the offenders’ goals and focus more on strengthening social bonds. Over the years, desistance from crime has been studied and researched. This knowledge should be used in practice. A decision support system helps linking theory and practice. ”
Juvenile (cellular) adenofibromas. A clinicopathologic study.

"Juvenile" adenofibromas that presented in 25 patients were reviewed. All of the patients were in the second decade of life. The tumors were solitary in 19 patients and multiple and bilateral in six patients. All were distinguished microscopically by prominent cellularity of both epithelium and stroma. Patients who presented with solitary tumors, regardless of size, microscopic pattern, or manner of excision, had no recurrence. In contrast, all patients who presented with multiple tumors developed additional benign masses, often requiring re-excision. We believe that solitary "juvenile adenofibromas," regardless of size, should be excised so as to preserve as much breast tissue as possible. Those patients with multiple, bilateral tumors may anticipate recurrences, but malignant change is not seen. Tumors with this microscopic pattern also may occur, albeit uncommonly, in adults.
Alternative model for teaching microsurgery

Animals have been widely used as a training model for teaching microsurgery. However, unlimited access to the animal laboratory is not always possible, and increased scrutiny of the ethical use of laboratory animals is a major factor to consider when teaching microsurgery. In such situations, an alternative method is required for microsurgical training techniques, such as medical grading tubes, and surgical gloves. These alternative teaching tools provide an ideal training model and present an alternative for teaching microsurgical techniques. They are readily available and abundant in the laboratory. In addition, these alternative tools can be used to provide initial training before entering the clinical setting. A practice card designed from surgical gloves and medical grading tube was used to practice simple sutures. The training progressed to a more difficult level, using medical‐grade tubing for end‐to‐end anastomosis, end‐to‐side anastomosis, side‐to‐side anastomosis, and free graft placement. This alternative proved challenging for the trainees, but improved hand coordination was observed. The alternative models familiarized trainees with the instruments and with developing a surgical approach before moving on to more clinical settings. The use of surgical gloves and medical grading tubes resulted in a significant reduction in the numbers of laboratory animals used for teaching microsurgery, as well as reduced cost. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc. MICROSURGERY 21:379‐382; 2001
Why are Stock Splits Declining?

type="main"> The percentage of firms undertaking stock splits has fallen from a peak of 23% in 1982 to less than 1% in 2009. Controlling for time trends and other economic determinants, the declining incidence of stock splits is significantly associated with a drop in household investors’ equity holdings and with a rise in household income. We also report a decline in the size of split factors that is associated with an increase in institutional ownership of equity and with an increase in household income. Collectively, the evidence is consistent with firms responding rationally to changes in investor characteristics.