Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Pharmaceutical Promotion: A Review and Assessment

This review discusses the role of consumer-directed and physician-directed promotion in the pharmaceutical market, based on the classic conceptual framework of whether such promotion is "persuasive" and/or "informative". Implications for public health and welfare partly depend on whether, and to what extent, advertising: 1) raises "selective" or brand-specific demand versus "primary" or industry-wide demand; 2) impacts drug costs; and 3) impacts competition. Empirical evidence from the literature bearing on these effects is surveyed. These studies show that pharmaceutical promotion has both informative and persuasive elements. Consumer advertising is more effective at enlarging the market, educating consumers, inducing physician contact, expanding drug treatment, and promoting adherence among existing users. Physician advertising is primarily persuasive in nature, effectively increasing selective brand demand. Evidence bearing on the effects of promotion on competition and prices is more limited. However, there is no strong evidence that drug promotion deters entry, and there is some suggestive evidence that it may even be mildly pro-competitive. With respect to costs, some studies suggests that consumer advertising may weakly raise the average wholesale price, which is a manufacturer's list price, but there is no strong indication that either consumer- or provider-directed promotion substantially raises retail-level prices. However, this is not to imply that potential promotion-driven substitution from non-advertised to advertised drugs cannot have effects on total drug costs. While most of these effects point to potential welfare improvements as a result of pharmaceutical promotion, there is also evidence that consumer ads may induce overuse and overtreatment in certain cases. Market expansion, overtreatment and shifting brands for non-therapeutic reasons further raise the concern of a sub-optimal patient-drug match at least for some marginal patients. A comprehensive evaluation of the welfare effects of pharmaceutical promotion requires a balanced assessment of these benefits and costs.
Validating an ATM security prototype — First results

Since years it is known that radio communication used by ATC can easily be intruded and is therefore subject to recurrent attacks. Nevertheless the voice communication between pilots and air traffic controllers is still the most flexible and efficient medium especially in a busy traffic environment, in non-standard situations or simply when exchanging air-ground messages in plain language is needed. As vulnerability seems not dominant compared to the number of crucial damages, voice communication is still the basic and most important communication method within the aeronautical mobile service. This motivated the development of a prototype called `Secure ATC Communications' (SACom) within the frame of the Global ATM Security Management (GAMMA) Project. The paper at hand describes the required functionalities of the prototype, the validation approach taken, using this security prototype as example, and conclusions for the results of validation, regarding the prototype itself as well as the validation methodology applied to the security context within ATM.
The First International Merger Wave (and the Fifth and Last U.S. Wave)

This article presents international evidence on takeover activity, and uses that evidence to argue that the current takeover wave can fairly be called the first-ever international merger wave, as much or more than it can be called the fifth U.S. merger wave. I also discuss the factors that contribute to the strength of the current takeover wave and why the takeover boom has engendered so little political concern.
Fragmentation of the Primordial Gas Clouds and the Lower Limit on the Mass of the First Stars

We discuss the fragmentation of primordial gas clouds in the universe after decoupling. Comparing the timescale of collapse with that of fragmentation, we obtain the typical mass of a fragment both numerically and analytically. We show that the estimated mass gives the minimum mass of a fragment that is formed from the primordial gas cloud and essentially determined by the Chandrasekhar mass.
TRADITIONAL FISH PROCESSING AND MARKETING OF THE GAMBIA

The artisanal sector is the major producer of cured fish as about 40% is marketed and consumed smoked and/or dried. Fish is the cheapest source of animal protein in the country, and traditional processing of fish in The Gambia is an important means of making fish available to consumers, especially those living in rural areas. Post harvest losses are high, estimated at 20-30%. The market for smoked fish is expanding, although inadequate market information and low level of organisation among producers and traders limit the efficiency of the trade. This paper is to assess the improvements required in order to improve the quality and profitability of the smoked fish. To do so the markets for smoked fish and status of the cured fish industry in The Gambia is analysed. Existing methods of fish processing in The Gambia are reviewed. Lessons are drawn from the techniques used in the Icelandic fish industry and how it can be applied in The Gambia. Further research and recommendations required to improve the quality and profitability of smoked fish are highlighted. The discussion on this paper is based on extensive literature review and recent project work. Methods of fish handling and processing are generally inadequate and result in major fish losses. The handling and processing techniques need to be improved. This will improve the quality of cured products, increasing availability and nutritional values of the fish to consumers and profitability for the producers. For the cured fish industry to experience growth and gain better access to lucrative markets, there is a need for an organised and structured cured fish industry with a reliable information network. The industry needs to abolish the individual operational strategy. This reorganisation should result in better co-operation between companies and individuals and thus improving the rate of value change from fishing to marketing. Final Project 2000
Regulation, Ownership Form, And The Economic Efficiency Of Rural Electric Distribution Cooperatives

This paper uses a translog profit function to analyze economic efficiency in rural electric distribution cooperatives for the period 1974-1982. Hypotheses dealing with absolute price efficiency, the effect of capital on profit and the effect of service area density on profit are tested. The paper uses a translog profit function analysis with both fixed and variable inputs to test the various hypotheses. Regulatory intensity variables are developed and used to examine the effect of regulation on technical efficiency. The results indicate that cooperatives are not profit maximizers, regulation has a negligible effect on technical efficiency, capital positively affects profit, and increasing service area density positively affects profit.
CLASSIC PAPERS REVISITED

The purpose of this study was to develop new approaches to the problem of describing and measuring pain in human subjects. Words used to describe pain were brought together and categorized, and an attempt was made to scale them on a common intensity dimension. The data show that: 1) there are many words in the English language to describe the varieties of pain experience; 2) there is a high level of agreement that the words fall into classes and subclasses that represent particular dimensions or properties of pain experience; 3) substantial portions of the words have approximately the same relative positions on a common intensity scale for people who have widely divergent backgrounds. The word lists provide a basis for a questionnaire to study the effects of anesthetic and analgesic agents on the experience of pain.
Delivery outcomes and patterns of morbidity and mortality for neonatal admissions in five Kenyan hospitals

A cross-sectional survey was conducted in neonatal and maternity units of five Kenyan district public hospitals. Data for 1 year were obtained: 3999 maternal and 1836 neonatal records plus tallies of maternal deaths, deliveries and stillbirths. There were 40 maternal deaths [maternal mortality ratio: 276 per 100 000 live births, 95% confidence interval (CI): 197–376]. Fresh stillbirths ranged from 11 to 43 per 1000 births. A fifth (19%, 263 of 1384, 95% CI: 11–30%) of the admitted neonates died. Compared with normal birth weight, odds of death were significantly higher in all of the low birth weight (LBW, <2500 g) categories, with the highest odds for the extremely LBW (<1000 g) category (odds ratio: 59, 95% CI: 21–158, p < 0.01). The observed maternal mortality, stillbirths and neonatal mortality call for implementation of the continuum of care approach to intervention delivery with particular emphasis on LBW babies.
Collection and Comparative Analysis of 1888 Full-length cDNAs from Wild Rice Oryza rufipogon Griff. W1943

A huge amount of cDNA and EST resources have been developed for cultivated rice species Oryza sativa; however, only few cDNA resources are available for wild rice species. In this study, we isolated and completely sequenced 1888 putative full-length cDNA (FLcDNA) clones from wild rice Oryza rufipogon Griff. W1943 for comparative analysis between wild and cultivated rice species. Two cDNA libraries were constructed from 3-week-old leaf samples under either normal or cold-treated conditions. Homology searching of these cDNA sequences revealed that >96.8% of the wild rice cDNAs were matched to the cultivated rice O. sativa ssp. japonica cv. Nipponbare genome sequence. However, <22% of them were fully matched to the cv. Nipponbare genome sequence. The comparative analysis showed that O. rufipogon W1943 had greater similarity to O. sativa ssp. japonica than to ssp. indica cultivars. In addition, 17 novel rice cDNAs were identified, and 41 putative tissue-specific expression genes were defined through searching the rice massively parallel signature-sequencing database. In conclusion, these FLcDNA clones are a resource for further function verification and could be broadly utilized in rice biological studies.
Qualitative Framing of Financial Incentives - A Case of Emotion Annotation

Online labor platforms, such as the Amazon Mechanical Turk, provide an effective framework for eliciting responses to judgment tasks. Previous work has shown that workers respond best to financial incentives, especially to extra bonuses. However, most of the tested incentives involve describing the bonus conditions in formulas instead of plain English. We believe that different incentives given in English (or in qualitative framing) will result in differences in workers' performance, especially when task difficulties vary. In this paper, we report the preliminary results of a crowdsourcing experiment comparing workers' performance using only qualitative framings of financial incentives. Our results demonstrate a significant increase in workers' performance using a specific well-formulated qualitative framing inspired by the Peer Truth Serum. This positive effect is observed only when the difficulty of the task is high, while when the task is easy there is no difference of which incentives to use.
The Effect of Tax Rates and Transaction Costs on the Tax Trading Option: Evidence from Stock Splits

Previous research suggests that investors' timing option on the realization of capital gains and losses is valuable when long-term and short-term capital gains tax rates differ. Prior studies simulate returns to a variety of tax strategies and find that the benefits of the tax trading option are sensitive to investors' assumed trading behavior as well as to tax rates, transaction costs, and stock price variances. However, the historical effects of changes in these conditions have not previously been estimated. In this study, we use the stock return variance changes that typically accompany stock splits to examine the effects of tax rates, transaction costs, and interest rates on the value of the tax trading option. Our results suggest an increase in the value of the tax option when trading costs declined after the 1975 elimination of fixed commissions. We also find evidence of a substantial reduction in the value of the tax option when the gap between short-and long-term capital gains tax rates was reduced in 1982.
Glove Type of Wearable Tactile Sensor Produced by Artificial Hollow Fiber

We previously proposed an artificial hollow fiber, as a new MEMS material, for the development of a fabric tactile sensor. The artificial hollow fiber is fabricated by uniformly laminating metal and insulation layers onto the surface of an elastic hollow fiber. The fabric tactile sensor is made by weaving the modified hollow fibers into a cloth. The sensor can detect the contact force by measuring changes in capacitance at the points where the warp and weft fibers intersect, and can detect 2D contact force distribution by sequentially scanning the capacitance changes at all intersecting points. We investigated the dependence of sensor output on normal load and tension. The normal load and tension were independently applied to the fiber elements in order to determine the basic characteristics of the fabric sensor. We also developed two different glove-type wearable tactile sensors. One was made by patching the sensor onto an existing glove, and the other was made by directly weaving the hollow fibers into the yarn of the glove. In experiments with the patched sensor, we confirmed that it was able to detect contact force.
Labor Supply and the Changing Household

The behavior of employment and labor force participation has changed markedly over the past 40 years. Participation has drifted up, a period that has also seen substantial changes in household structure, notably more single person households and more positive assortive matching. This paper documents these facts, and then provides a model that endogenizes many of them. The benchmark model is a modest extension of the neoclassical growth model to allow for 2-person households with home as well as market production. Unbalanced technical progress results in a shift from household to market production. The result is an increase in market labor supply over time, plus changes in the dynamic response of labor supply to various kinds of shocks. The model is calibrated to data from time use surveys, and yields responses similar to those that have occurred in the data. *Research Department, Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. I would like to thank Nathaniel Hilger and Ben Pugsley for valuable research assistance.
All Quiet in Globular Clusters

Cataclysmic variables (CVs) should be present in large numbers in globular clusters (GCs). Numerous low-luminosity X-ray sources identified over the past few years as candidate CVs in GCs support this notion. Yet, very few "cataclysms," the characteristic feature of this class of objects in the field, have been observed in GCs. We address this discrepancy here, within the framework of the standard disk instability model for CV outbursts. We argue that the paucity of outbursts in GCs is probably not a direct consequence of the donors' low metallicities. We present diagnostics based on outburst properties allowing tests of the hypothesis that rare cataclysms are entirely due to lower mass transfer rates in GCs relative to the field, and we argue against this explanation. Instead, we propose that a combination of low mass transfer rates (≳1014-1015 g s-1) and moderately strong white dwarf magnetic moments (≳1030 G cm3) stabilize CV disks in GCs and thus prevent most of them from experiencing frequent outbursts. If it is so, rare cataclysms in GCs would signal important evolutionary differences between field and cluster CVs.
Economic Consequences of Drug-Trafficking Violence in Mexico

This study contends that in Mexico there is a threshold above which drug-trafficking-related violence causes a general slowdown in the economy. Before that threshold is reached, firms and individuals pay for the increase in violence via protective security costs, a decision that is reflected in the job market. Once violent conflict has escalated to a substantial degree, economic agents’ medium- and long-term decision making is negatively affected, revealing a significant contraction in the economy. Using two different empirical strategies, this study proposes electricity consumption as an indicator of local economic activity. To estimate the marginal effects of violence on the economy, an instrumental variables regression is utilized; this regression uses as exogenous variation a tool developed by Mejia and Castillo (2012), which is based on record seizures of Colombian cocaine. To estimate the “threshold” effects of drug violence on the economy, a synthetic control method is used which consists of constructing counterfactual scenarios as an optimal weighted average of control units. It is found that an increase in the levels of violence has significant, negative effects on labor force participation and employment. It is also found that cities that experienced a dramatic spike in violence between 2006 and 2010 sharply curtailed their energy consumption in the years following the spike.
Non-Gaussian Radio-Wave Scattering in the Interstellar Medium

It was recently suggested by Boldyrev & Gwinn that the characteristics of radio scintillations from distant pulsars are best understood if the interstellar electron density fluctuations that cause the time broadening of the radio pulses obey non-Gaussian statistics. In this picture the density fluctuations are inferred to be strong on very small scales (~108-1010 cm). We argue that such density structures could correspond to the ionized boundaries of molecular regions (clouds) and demonstrate that the power-law distribution of scattering angles that is required to match the observations arises naturally from the expected intersections of our line of sight with randomly distributed, thin, approximately spherical ionized shells of this type. We show that the observed change in the time-broadening behavior for pulsar dispersion measures ≲30 pc cm-3 is consistent with the expected effect of the general ISM turbulence, which should dominate the scattering for nearby pulsars. We also point out that if the clouds are ionized by nearby stars, then their boundaries may become turbulent on account of an ionization front instability. This turbulence could be an alternative cause of the inferred density structures. An additional effect that might contribute to the strength of the small-scale fluctuations in this case is the expected flattening of the turbulent density spectrum when the eddy sizes approach the proton gyroscale.
How Do Lower-Income Families Think About Retirement?

How do low-income households think about retirement? Do they think about retirement? If so, when do they think they will retire, and what is it they plan to live on? In this paper, we present evidence on these questions based on 51 qualitative interviews with low-income families in the Detroit area. We find that the great majority of low-income households think about retirement, although this does not necessarily mean they are able to plan and/or save actively for retirement. Most respondents plan to retire as soon as they become eligible for Social Security or, in a few cases, private pensions.
The Timeline Representation Framework as a Planning and Scheduling Software Development Environment

A planner and/or a scheduler consists not only in an outstanding algorithm but also in a significant piece of software that identify it as a “system”. This is true both in case of applied research and when developing an implementation for experiments connected to research work on some innovative algorithm. A desiderata for all theses cases consists in having the possibility to shorten the time spent to synthesize software and potentially dedicate more time to the innovative aspects rather than to implementation details. We have been working for a while at creating a software development environment for a timeline based approach to planning and scheduling. In this paper we describe the status of our effort describing features of a software framework called TRF (Timelinebased Representation Framework) and showing how it can be used to support development of both a particular application, a simple “classical” planner and a basic constraint-based scheduler. This paper underscores the importance of a software framework and identify direction for its robustification in the immediate future.
Local content requirements and industrial development : economic analysis and cost modeling of the automotive supply chain

This dissertation addresses the issue of performance standards in developing nations, focusing on the role of local content requirements. It proposes a theoretical framework to understand the impact of this policy on the decisions of firms and the welfare of the domestic economy, and offers a methodology to apply the analysis to the context of the automotive supply chain. The central conclusion of the thesis relates to the existence of a gap between private and social opportunity returns and costs, an aspect that has been overlooked by previous literature. In a developing country, resources employed by foreign investors and their local suppliers often generate spillovers and learning effects that are not accounted for in the valuations of private economic agents. This creates an externality-from-entry, whereby positive economic effects of new domestic suppliers are overlooked in the sourcing decision of the foreign firm. This dissertation proposes a model to illustrate how this gap between social and private valuations justifies the enactment of domestic content requirements, which become welfare enhancing. The analysis also reveals that content requirements are a preferable policy to tariffs and subsidies as a means to increase domestic purchases and discusses the use of subsidies and requirements as incentive mechanisms to align firm decisions with government objectives. A case study of the automotive industry, where content restriction policies are extremely active, is used to demonstrate the applicability of the model. This entailed the development of a new methodology, called Systems Cost Modeling (SCM), which uses simple metrics and rules to build bottom-up cost structures where estimates for large number of components have to be considered. Detailed empirical data from a particular car is then used to build a sourcing cost structure. These costs are integrated with the domestic content model to show how, for existing market and policy conditions; there can be value to the enactment of modest levels of domestic content requirements in the auto industry. It also explains that the impact of the policy is very sensitive to project characteristics and that this should be factored into national decisions. Thesis Supervisor: Alice H. Amsden Title: Professor of Political Economy