Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Role of Productivity and Financial Frictions in the Business Cycles of a Small Open Economy: Hong Kong 1984–2011

This paper analyzes the business cycle properties of the Hong Kong economy during the 1984–2011 period, which includes the financial crisis experienced in 1997/98 and the economic crisis of 2008–2010. We show that the volatility respectively, of output, of the growth rate of output and of real interest rates in Hong Kong are higher than the corresponding average volatility among developed economies. Furthermore, interest rates are countercyclical. We build a stochastic neoclassical small open-economy model estimated with a Bayesian likelihood approach that seeks to replicate the main business cycle characteristics of Hong Kong, and through which we try to quantify the role played by exogenous total factor productivity (TFP) shocks (transitory and permanent), real interest rate shocks and financial frictions. The main finding is that financial frictions, jointly with the assumption that the country spread is endogenous, seem important in explaining the countercyclicality of the real interest rates.
Reasoned Action and Food Choice in a Transitional Economy

ABSTRACT This study examines predictive factors of consumer behaviour in food, employing a study of 485 Romanian respondents using the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA). Drawing on a structural equation models approach, causal paths for six products were estimated. Habit emerged as the most significant predictor of behavioral intention. The results of this empirical study support the notion that attitudes and habits influence behavioral intentions toward food consumption. A modification of the TRA, within the context of income constraints, is proposed in the form of willingness to consume. Competing structural models are discussed, and the implications of the study for both marketers and consumers are highlighted.
On the performance of modified runs rules charts with estimated parameters

ABSTRACT It is known that Shewhart chart is not sensitive in the detection of small process average shifts. A solution to this problem is the use of stopping rules based on the theory of runs. However, their practical implementation is based on the assumption that the parameters of the process are known, which rarely happens in practice. In this work, the performance of modified runs-rules schemes is studied (using a Markov chain technique) when the parameters of the process have been estimated from a preliminary in-control sample. Guidelines regarding the effective application of these schemes in practice are also provided.
Changing Urban Climate and CO2 Emissions: Implications for the Development of Policies for Sustainable Cities

Current planning strategies for future urban development often target issues such as housing, transport, water and infrastructure; but very few strategies comprehensively consider the urban climate and its interaction with the built environment. By drawing on recent research conducted in Melbourne, Australia, this article demonstrates the importance of incorporating urban climate understanding and knowledge into urban planning processes to better develop cities that are more sustainable. Melbourne currently experiences the effects of a modified urban climate, with research demonstrating that during the night, urban areas are often warmer than surrounding rural landscapes: an effect known as the ‘urban heat island’. Recent studies also suggest that continuing current patterns of development without intervention would produce degraded urban climates with further exacerbated urban temperatures. With the urgency regarding the enhanced greenhouse effect, the urban heat island is an extremely important issue, as the growing urban population could be further exposed to elevated temperatures. Given our improved understanding of the interactions between the built environment and urban climates, those involved in urban planning and development should begin to adopt this knowledge. Many opportunities exist to intentionally modify the built environment (e.g. cool roofs; water-sensitive urban design) to minimise the risks of developing unfavourable urban climates.
The Time Series Properties of Financial Ratios: Lev Revisited

This paper re-evaluates the time series properties of financial ratios. It presents new empirical analysis which explicitly allows for the possibility that financial ratios can be characterized as non-linear mean-reverting processes. Financial ratios are widely employed as explanatory variables in accounting and finance research with applications ranging from the determinants of auditors' compensation to explaining firms' investment decisions. An implicit assumption in this empirical work is that the ratios are stationary so that the postulated models can be estimated by classical regression methods. However, recent empirical work on the time series properties of corporate financial ratios has reported that the level of the majority of ratios is described by non-stationary, "I"(1), integrated processes and that the ratio differences are parsimoniously described by random walks. We hypothesize that financial ratios may follow a random walk near their target level, but that the more distant a ratio is from target, the more likely the firm is to take remedial action to bring it back towards target. This behavior will result in a significant size distortion of the conventional stationarity tests and lead to frequent non-rejection of the null hypothesis of non-stationarity, a finding which undermines the use of these ratios as reliable conditioning variables for the explanation of firms' decisions. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2003.
Demand for Milk Produced With and Without Recombinant Bovine Somatotropin

This study focuses on the nature of Texas consumer perception and willingness to purchase milk produced using recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST). Future, the possibility of market segmentation is analyzed by estimating the price sensitivity of consumer demand for conventionally produced milk versus rBST-produced milk. Results show that the price elasticities of demand for the two types of milk are different, indicating potential to develop niche markets for both rBST-produced and conventionally produced milk in Texas.
Corporate social responsibility terminologies in small businesses: insights from Malaysia

Purpose – Since understanding the corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of small businesses in any country requires investigating the terminologies used by their small businesses for such social practices, the aim of this paper is to gain an understanding of the common terminologies used by SME owners/manager/directors in a developing country, namely Malaysia.Design/methodology/approach – This is a quantitative study which used a sample of 100 small businesses is its survey. Most of the investigated SMEs were based in Northern states of Malaysia.Findings – This study showed that the most common terminology for CSR among investigated Malaysia SMEs was “responsible business practice” followed by “corporate social responsibility”, “social/ societal engagement” and “environmental involvement”. Research limitations/implications – The main limitations of this research are associated with its sample size and geographical distribution of samples. Findings of the study warn researchers to be cautious in s.
Market expectations of the short rate and the term structure of interest rates: a new perspective from the classic model

Based on the classic Gaussian dynamic term structure model A_0(3), I rotate the model to a special representation, the so called 'Companion Form Realization', in which the state variables comprises the short rate and its related expectations. This unique feature makes the representation very useful in analyzing the response of the yield curve to the shocks in the short rate and its related expectations, and monitoring market expectations. Using the estimated model, I quantify a variety of yield responses to the changes in these important state variables; and also give an 'unsurprising' pattern in which changes in state variables have little impact on the long end of the yield curve. Two case studies of recent unconventional monetary policies are also included.
Bitplane coding for correlations exploitation in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a compression scheme called spatial set-partitioning in hierarchical trees which exploits the spatial and temporal correlations present in sensor data. This scheme allows progressive transmission and provides scalability in adapting to the underlying correlation structure of sensed data. It uses flexible Slepian-Wolf coding based on low density parity-check codes. Two different decoding schemes are proposed for different types of resource constrained sensor nodes. This scheme outperforms known codecs by a large margin of decibel in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio. This scheme has O(n) complexity for encoding and O(nlog(n)) complexity for decoding using message passing, where n is the codeword length. Experiments and simulation results with field data sets demonstrate the viability of our proposed scheme to wireless sensor networks.
Understanding Image Impressiveness Inspired by Instantaneous Human Perceptual Cues

With the explosion of visual information nowadays, millions of digital images are available to the users. How to efficiently explore a large set of images and retrieve useful information thus becomes extremely important. Unfortunately only some of the images can impress the user at first glance. Others that make little sense in human perception are often discarded, while still costing valuable time and space. Therefore, it is significant to identify these two kinds of images for relieving the load of online repositories and accelerating information retrieval process. However, most of the existing image properties, e.g., memorability and popularity, are based on repeated human interactions, which limit the research and application of evaluating image quality in terms of instantaneous impression. In this paper, we propose a novel image property, called impressiveness, that measures how images impress people with a short-term contact. This is based on an impression-driven model inspired by a number of important human perceptual cues. To achieve this, we first collect three datasets in various domains, which are labeled according to the instantaneous sensation of the annotators. Then we investigate the impressiveness property via six established human perceptual cues as well as the corresponding features from pixel to semantic levels. Sequentially, we verify the consistency of the impressiveness which can be quantitatively measured by multiple visual representations, and evaluate their latent relationships. Finally, we apply the proposed impressiveness property to rank the images for an efficient image recommendation system.
The Effects of Inter-Korean Integration Type on Economic Performance: The Role of Wage Policy

This paper analyses the effects of various possible types of inter-Korean integration on economic performance in the northern part of Korea after reunification, focusing on the role of wage policy. The wage policy of reunified Germany is generally said to have been one of the major reasons for the increase in unification costs there, because it led to East German worker wages in excess of their productivity level. To reduce the costs of unification, Korea therefore needs to apply wage policies different from reunified Germany's and from South Korea's, which requires a new type of integration. Against this backdrop, this paper classifies the integration types into three – a unitary state, a federation, and an SAR (Special Administrative Region) – and analyzes their relative economic effects under the assumption that each type is accompanied by different wage policies. According to this analysis, the federation type shows unemployment and growth patterns similar to those observed in East Germany, the unitary state type higher unemployment and lower growth than in East Germany, and the SAR type lower unemployment and higher growth.
Approximate Inference via Weighted Rademacher Complexity

Rademacher complexity is often used to characterize the learnability of a hypothesis class and is known to be related to the class size. We leverage this observation and introduce a new technique for estimating the size of an arbitrary weighted set, defined as the sum of weights of all elements in the set. Our technique provides upper and lower bounds on a novel generalization of Rademacher complexity to the weighted setting in terms of the weighted set size. This generalizes Massart’s Lemma, a known upper bound on the Rademacher complexity in terms of the unweighted set size. We show that the weighted Rademacher complexity can be estimated by solving a randomly perturbed optimization problem, allowing us to derive high probability bounds on the size of any weighted set. We apply our method to the problems of calculating the partition function of an Ising model and computing propositional model counts (#SAT). Our experiments demonstrate that we can produce tighter bounds than competing methods in both the weighted and unweighted settings.
Musculoskeletal pain, disability and health-seeking behavior in adult Kuwaitis using a validated Arabic version of the WHO-ILAR COPCORD Core Questionnaire.

OBJECTIVE The WHO-ILAR Community Oriented Program for Control of Rheumatic Diseases (COPCORD) primarily aims to estimate the burden of musculoskeletal symptoms/disorders. We investigated data on musculoskeletal pain, disability and health-seeking behavior in the first community-based COPCORD study in Kuwait. METHODS The validated Arabic version of the WHO-ILAR COPCORD Core Questionnaire was used in 2,500 randomly selected Kuwaiti households. The target population comprised Kuwaiti nationals aged 15 years and older. Twenty-four trained field workers completed the survey in 8 weeks. Those subjects reporting musculoskeletal pain were identified (Phase 1), and were asked to complete a self-evaluation questionnaire (Phase 2) prior to rheumatological examination (Phase 3). Phase 2 included questions on the site and severity of pain, traumatic events, functional disability, and treatment. Patients marked their pain sites on a mannequin during their interviews. "Sufferers" were defined as those with musculoskeletal pain and no history of trauma. RESULTS A total of 7,670 adults were interviewed (response rate 88%), of whom 2,057 had musculoskeletal pain not related to trauma. Knees, back, and shoulders were the common sites of pain. Most of the sufferers reported the severity of pain as being moderate to severe. Functional disability was reported in 39.1% of the sufferers. The age-sex population adjusted prevalence rate for musculoskeletal pain was 35.7% in females and 20.2% in males. The most common sources for advice on treatment were physicians in hospitals (68.8%) and general practitioners (30.4%). 82% had prescriptions for their medications, while 19.4% had self prescribed tablets. CONCLUSION Musculoskeletal pain is a major health problem among Kuwaitis and deserves intense government attention.
FLUORESCENCE SPECTRA OF THE INTERMEDIATES OF RHODOPSIN BLEACHING

THE OBSERVATION of fluorescence from samples of cattle rhodopsin after illumination in the visible region has been reported[l]. Further work, which we now report, has established the existence of fluorescence from several of the intermediates of bleaching. This information should be useful in studies concerning the environment of the rhodopsin chromophore in the rod-outer segment or in the digitonin micelle and in further assessing the role of energy transfer in visual excitation[2,3]. The bleaching pathway for rhodopsin has been worked out in numerous studies [4,5], and these have been reviewed by Abrahamson and Ostroy[6]. Beginning with the absorption of light by rhodopsin, as a digitonin extract, the intermediates are formed as follows, where all transformations after the first are dark reactions:
Modeling Relationships Among Securitized Property Markets, Stock Markets, and Macroeconomic Variables

This paper investigates the dynamic interactions among securitized property markets, stock markets and key macroeconomic factors for ten developed nations throughout North America, Europe, Australia and Asia. The results indicate that each property market is co-integrated with its respective stock market and with key macroeconomic factors in the long-run and is also influenced by the overall economy in the short-run. Further analysis also reveals that, for the overwhelming majority of countries involved, shocks to the stock market, GDP, money supply and inflation induce a positive response in property returns, while shocks to long-term interest rate induce a negative response, although the extent of the response differs across countries/regions.
Strategic framework for mainstreaming citizen engagement in World Bank Group operations : engaging with citizens for improved results

The objective of this strategic framework is to mainstream citizen engagement in World Bank Group (WBG)-supported policies, programs, projects, and advisory services and analytics to improve their development results and within the scope of these operations, contribute to building sustainable national systems for citizen engagement with governments and the private sector. This framework will capture the diverse experiences, assess lessons learned, and outline methods and entry points to provide a more systematic and results-focused approach for the WBG. Progress toward this objective will be assessed using indicators included in program, project, and corporate results frameworks. The WBG strategy incorporates citizen engagement, including beneficiary feedback, specifically in its treatment of inclusion, which entails empowering citizens to participate in the development process and integrating citizen voice in development programs as key accelerators to achieving results. This framework builds on stocktaking and lessons learned from WBG-financed operations across regions and sectors. A key lesson is the importance of country context, government ownership, and clear objectives for citizen engagement. The approach to mainstreaming citizen engagement in WBG-supported operations is guided by five principles: 1) it is results-focused; 2) it involves engaging throughout the operational cycle; 3) it seeks to strengthen country systems; 4) it is context-specific; and 5) it is gradual. Under the right circumstances, citizen engagement can contribute to achieving development outcomes in support of the goals the WBG aims to support through all of the operations it funds: eradicating extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity in a sustainable manner.
Essays on price overreaction and price limits in emerging markets: the case of the Egyptian stock exchange

The main objective of this thesis is to investigate the short and long–term overreaction phenomenon in the Egyptian stock market. In addition, the thesis investigates links between stock market regulatory policies (price limits and circuit breakers) and the profitability of contrarian strategies. Finally, the study examines the effect of regime switch – from strict price limits to circuit breakers – on the volatility spillover, delayed price discovery and trading interference hypotheses. Using data from the Egyptian stock exchange, I find that a panel data approach adds a new dimension to the existing models, offers interesting additional insights and reveals the importance of the role of unobservable firm-specific factors in addition to observable factors in the analysis of the overreaction phenomenon. Moreover, portfolios based on unobserved factors i.e. management quality, corporate governance and political connections of board members, significantly outperform traditional portfolios based on size. Results also show evidence of genuine long-term overreaction phenomenon in the Egyptian stock market as the contrarian profits of the arbitrage portfolio cannot be attributed to the small firm effect, formation period length, and stability of time varying factor or seasonality effect. Finally, switching from a strict price limit to a circuit breakers regime increases stock price volatility and disrupts the price discovery mechanism in the Egyptian stock market.
2[125I]Iodomelatonin binding and interaction with β‐adrenergic signaling in chick heart/coronary artery physiology

2[125I]Iodomelatonin ([125I]Mel) binding sites were characterized on membrane preparations of young chick hearts. [125I]Mel binding was rapid, saturable, stable, reversible, specific and of picomolar affinity and femtomolar density. Guanosine 5′‐O‐(3‐thiotriphosphate) significantly lowered the binding affinity by one‐ to twofold, supporting G‐protein linkage of melatonin receptors. Binding was detected as early as embryonic day‐9 (E9), and increased steadily peaking at E13 before it slowly declined to about 15% of the peak level a week posthatch. Specific [125I]Mel binding was significantly increased by in ovo administration of inotropic agents dopamine and isoproterenol. Melatonin or 2‐iodo‐N‐butanoyl‐tryptamine inhibited isoproterenol‐stimulated cAMP accumulation in primary heart cell cultures and the effect was attenuated after pretreatment with pertussis toxin (PTX). Localization of melatonin receptors using autoradiography showed intense labeling in the coronary arteries in all age groups whereas those in the myoblasts decreased as the heart matured. While the myoblasts and undifferentiated developing coronary arteries expressed melatonin MT1 receptor subtype in E11 hearts as detected by immunostaining with anti‐MT1 receptor serum, immunoreactivities were observed mostly on the endothelium/subendothelium and smooth muscle cells of the well developed coronary vessels in posthatch hearts. Collectively, our data suggest the presence of PTX‐sensitive, G protein‐coupled melatonin receptors, whose expression is up‐regulated by dopamine and isoproterenol, in the chick heart. Activation of these receptors, which include MT1 subtype, may modulate β‐adrenergic receptor‐mediated cAMP signaling in the control of chick heart and coronary artery physiology.
Effect of the addition of antimicrobial agents on Shore A hardness and roughness of soft lining materials.

PURPOSE While the incorporation of antimicrobial agents into soft denture liners has been suggested as a reliable alternative treatment for denture stomatitis, it may affect the liner's properties. The effect of addition of antimicrobial agents for the treatment of denture stomatitis on the surface roughness and Shore A hardness of soft lining materials was evaluated. MATERIALS AND METHODS The test groups comprised specimens (36 × 7 × 6 mm(3) ) of soft materials (Softone and Trusoft) without (control) or with incorporation of drugs (nystatin, miconazole, ketoconazole, chlorhexidine diacetate, and itraconazole). Hardness (Shore A) and roughness (Ra) were evaluated after immersion of specimens (n = 10) in distilled water at 37°C for 24 hours, 7 and 14 days. Data were analyzed by 3-way ANOVA/Tukey's test (α = 0.05). RESULTS After 14 days, an increase (p < 0.05) was observed in the hardness of soft materials with time for the modified specimens, except for itraconazole. Addition of drugs increased the Softone roughness only for the addition of miconazole and chlorhexidine (p < 0.05), and did not increase the roughness of Trusoft with time. Only chlorhexidine and itraconazole altered the roughness compared to the control for each material (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS The smallest changes of hardness and roughness with time in the modified groups compared to controls were observed for itraconazole groups for both materials.