Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Benchmarking Regions: Estimating the Counterfactual Distribution of Labor Market Outcomes

This paper develops and implements a new benchmarking approach for labor market regions. Based on panel data for regions, we use nonparametric matching techniques to account for observed labor market characteristics and for spatial proximity. As the benchmark, we estimate the counterfactual distribution of labor market outcomes for a region based on outcomes of similar regions. This allows to measure both the rank (relative performance) and the absolute performance based on the actual outcome for a region. Our outcome variable of interest is the hiring rate among the unemployed. We implement different similarity measures to account for differences in labor market conditions and spatial proximity, and we choose the tuning parameters in our matching approach based on a cross-validation procedure. The results show that both observed labor market characteristics and spatial proximity are important features to successfully match regions. Specifically, the modified Zhao (2004) distance measure and geographic distance in logs work best in our applications. Our estimated performance measures remain quite stable over time.
The impact of capital structure on performance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether capital structure affects the performance of non-financial firms in Pakistan. Design/methodology/approach – Panel econometric techniques namely pooled ordinary least squares (OLS), fixed effects, and random effects were used to investigate the impact of capital structure on performance of non-financial firms listed on the Karachi Stock Exchange Pakistan during 2004-2009. Findings – Empirical results indicate that all measures of capital structure (i.e. total debt ratio, long and short-term debt ratio) are negatively related to return on assets in all regressions. Moreover, total debt ratio and long-term debt ratio are negatively related to market-to-book ratio under the pooled OLS model, whereas these measures are positively related to market-to-book ratio under the fixed effects model. Short-term debt ratio is positively related to market-to-book ratio in all regressions, however the relationship is found insignificant. A negative relationship.
Essays in industrial economics : applications for marketing and management decisions

IT innovation is allowing enterprises to find new ways to harness the power of information assets for decision making. This thesis presents three econometric method applications to marketing and management decisions. The first chapter empirically studies retail network product assortment decisions under uncertain underlying demand parameters using structural estimation. I use detailed data from a beverage vending machine network in Tokyo and find that agents increase the expected total revenue of the network by 19.6% than the baseline, where 12.3% is attributable to learning from the sales data, and 7.3% is attributable to agents’ informative initial belief. However, it is below the revenue when the demand parameters are known, which is 45.5% higher than the baseline. Furthermore, if the principal company could precisely process the sales data, the expected total revenue could be 39.6% higher even if the initial beliefs are no more informative than the rational expectation. The last observation indicates that there are some costs for the principal associated with the development and utilisation of sales data processing capabilities. The second chapter studies the causal effects of product recommendation by conducting a field experiment using many vending machines in railway stations that programmatically offer recommendations for consumers after recognising their characteristics via a built-in camera. We study the effects of recommending popular products and unpopular products, and ask how the effects differ across times of day and consumer characteristics. We find that both popular and unpopular product recommendations increase vending machine sales and choice probability of recommended products. But unpopular product recommendations cause opposite effects in the morning. The negative effects are mainly from male customers in crowded vending machines. We attribute the decrease in morning vending machine sales to the congestion created by recommendations. We conjecture that the negative effect on choice probabilities in the morning is because of social pressure from the surrounding consumers. In the third chapter, I derive a necessary condition for stochastic rationalisability by a set of utility functions with a unique maximiser, which I name the strong axiom of revealed stochastic preference (SARSP). I propose a test of rationality based on the SARSP that allows for any type of heterogeneity. The test can be implemented at low computational cost. Monte Carlo simulation shows that the test has an empirical size below the nominal level and relatively strong power.
Fiscal Accountability Dilemma in Nigeria Public Sector: A Warning Model for Economic Retrogression

The diagnostic survey conducted in 2001 into the Federal Government public procurement revealed that Nigeria lost several hundred billions of Naira over the last few decades due of flagrant abuse of procedures, lack of transparency and merit in the award of contracts in the public sector. Measures like legislative committees, financial audit, ministerial control, judicial reviews, anti­corruption agencies, advisory committees, parliamentary questions and public hearing to ensure accountability in the public sector as in developed countries were adopted yet no tangible result has been achieved. This study investigated accountability in the Nigerian Public Sector. The population of the study is Nigeria public sector and the sample frames was drawn from Ministry of Finance, Presidency, Ministry of Works, and National Assembly. Source of data was primary and were collected through structured questionnaire which was distributed to 100 management staff of the above organizations at random. Data were analyzed using Pearson Product Moment Correlation with the aid of SPSS. The result showed that there is weak accountability in Nigeria due to weak accounting infrastructure, poor regulatory framework and attitude of government officials. It was recommended that the government, professional accounting bodies and citizens should work together to have a meaningful resolution on this issue as a matter of urgency Key words: Accountability, Accounting infrastructure, Public Sector, Economic Retrogression
The Migration Decision: What Role Does Job Mobility Play?

An important characteristic of the U.S. population is its geographic mobility. In 1970 18 percent of the population was living in a county that was different from their 1965 county of residence; half of these migrants had also moved across state lines. Previous work on geographic mobility can be classified into two categories. The first is composed of studies that have used aggregate data (for example Samuel Bowles Michael Greenwood 1969 Ira Lowry and Aba Schwartz) to examine the determinants of net or gross migration for SMSAs or other geographic divisions. The second category of research has used data on individuals (for example Julie DaVanzo Richard Kaluzny John Lansing and Eva Mueller and Solomon Polachek and Francis Horvath) to explore the relationship between an individuals characteristics and his decision to migrate. This article continues the work on the analysis of the individuals decision to migrate but differs from the previous studies by focusing on the relationship between job mobility and migration. First the proportion of geographic mobility that occurs in conjunction with a job change is calculated. Second it is shown that the true effects of human capital variables job characteristics and family variables on the decision to migrate are best measured when one takes account of the relationship between migration and job mobility. Third the effect of migration on the wage gains of individuals is studied and again the need for distinguishing among moves that were associated with quits layoffs and transfers is clearly shown. Finally by using three data sets that encompass different age groups (the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS) of Young and Mature Men and the Coleman-Rossi Retrospective Life History Study) the importance of the relationship between migration and job mobility is demonstrated at different points in the life cycle. Section I of the article presents some summary statistics on the extent of geographic mobility among the individuals in the samples and documents the relationship between migration and job mobility. In Section II a framework for analyzing the decision to migrate is discussed. Sections III and IV present the empirical results while Section V summarizes the analysis. (excerpt)
A note on non-linear electrodynamics, regular black holes and the entropy function

We examine four dimensional magnetically charged extremal black holes in certain non-linear U(1) gauge theories coupled to two derivative gravity. For a given coupling, one can tune the magnetic charge (or vice versa) so that the curvature singularity at the centre of the space-time is cancelled. Since these solutions have a horizon but no singularity, they have been called regular black holes. Contrary to recent claims in the literature, we find that the entropy function formalism reproduces the near horizon geometry and gives the correct entropy for these objects.
Thirty-Five Years of Research on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP Research Data Base. State of the Art or Pseudoscientific Decoration?

The huge popularity of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) therapies and training has not been accompanied by knowledge of the empirical underpinnings of the concept. The article presents the concept of NLP in the light of empirical research in the Neuro-Linguistic Programming Research Data Base. From among 315 articles the author selected 63 studies published in journals from the Master Journal List of ISI. Out of 33 studies, 18.2% show results supporting the tenets of NLP, 54.5% results non-supportive of the NLP tenets and 27.3% brings uncertain results. The qualitative analysis indicates the greater weight of the non-supportive studies and their greater methodological worth against the ones supporting the tenets. Results contradict the claim of an empirical basis of NLP.
The Pathogenic Potential of Campylobacter concisus Strains Associated with Chronic Intestinal Diseases

Campylobacter concisus has garnered increasing attention due to its association with intestinal disease, thus, the pathogenic potential of strains isolated from different intestinal diseases was investigated. A method to isolate C. concisus was developed and the ability of eight strains from chronic and acute intestinal diseases to adhere to and invade intestinal epithelial cells was determined. Features associated with bacterial invasion were investigated using comparative genomic analyses and the effect of C. concisus on host protein expression was examined using proteomics. Our isolation method from intestinal biopsies resulted in the isolation of three C. concisus strains from children with Crohn's disease or chronic gastroenteritis. Four C. concisus strains from patients with chronic intestinal diseases can attach to and invade host cells using mechanisms such as chemoattraction to mucin, aggregation, flagellum-mediated attachment, “membrane ruffling”, cell penetration and damage. C. concisus strains isolated from patients with chronic intestinal diseases have significantly higher invasive potential than those from acute intestinal diseases. Investigation of the cause of this increased pathogenic potential revealed a plasmid to be responsible. 78 and 47 proteins were upregulated and downregulated in cells infected with C. concisus, respectively. Functional analysis of these proteins showed that C. concisus infection regulated processes related to interleukin-12 production, proteasome activation and NF-κB activation. Infection with all eight C. concisus strains resulted in host cells producing high levels of interleukin-12, however, only strains capable of invading host cells resulted in interferon-γ production as confirmed by ELISA. These findings considerably support the emergence of C. concisus as an intestinal pathogen, but more significantly, provide novel insights into the host immune response and an explanation for the heterogeneity observed in the outcome of C. concisus infection. Moreover, response to infection with invasive strains has substantial similarities to that observed in the inflamed mucosa of Crohn's disease patients.
Local Solutions of the Dynamic Programming Equations and the Hamilton Jacobi Bellman PDE

We present methods for locally solving the Dynamic Programming Equations (DPE) and the Hamilton Jacobi Bellman (HJB) PDE that arise in the infinite horizon optimal control problem. The method for solving the DPE is the discrete time version of Al'brecht's procedure for locally approximating the solution of the HJB. We also prove the existence of the smooth solutions to the DPE that has the same Taylor series expansions as the formal solutions. Our procedure for solving the HJB PDE numerically begins with Al'brecht's local solution as the initial approximation and uses some Lyapunov criteria to piece together polynomial estimates. The polynomials are generated using the method in the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya Theorem.
An Identification of Themes in The Charted Course of the Church in Education

An Identification of Themes in The Charted Course of the Church in Education John Morrison Cannon Department of Communications Master of Arts This thesis operates under the assumption that the earliest form of mass communication is the religious sermon as recorded in the Bible. This thesis looks to Bormann, who used a sacred to secular approach and found similarities between Puritan sermons and the rhetoric of political speeches. This research reverses that order and moves from secular to sacred by looking first at well-known American speeches and then at landmark addresses to Seminary and Institutes of Religion teachers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—and specifically at Clark’s The Charted Course of the Church in Education. This single sermon, delivered in 1938, continues to shape the Seminary and Institutes program after more than seven decades. With the opening of the first LDS Seminary in 1912, the foundations of the program were laid. Yet, each generation seemed to drift away from those foundations enough that a realignment was needed. In 1938, the constitution of Church education was given in the form of the Charted Course and it has served as the realigning document ever since. Subsequent realignments occurred in 1954, and 1963. Since 1976, the Charted Course has been referenced regularly, particularly during the annual Evening with a General Authority address to Seminary and Institute teachers and, consequently, since that time, no great drift has occurred that required another major realignment. Instead, the Charted Course is now used consistently to prevent drift, not only to correct it.
Molecular Genetic Studies on Human Sarcomas

Genetic aberrations in sarcomas 10 2.1. Cytogenetic alterations 10 2.2. Molecular genetic changes 13 2.2.1. Structural alterations of cellular proto-oncogenes 13 2.2.2. Gene amplifications 13 2.2.3. Alterations of tumor suppressor genes and loss of 17 DNA sequences 2.3. Hereditary predisposition 18 3. DNA amplification 19 3.1. Structure and mechanisms of DNA amplification 20 4. Methods for detecting aberrations in DNA copy number and gene 21 expression 4.1. Comparative genomic hybridization 21 4.2. Microsatellite marker analysis 22 4.3. The array technique and cDNA microarrays 23 AIMS OF THE STUDY 2 4 MATERIALS AND METHODS 2 5 5. Materials 25 6. Methods 28 6.1. Microsatellite marker analysis (studies I-IV) 28 6.2. Southern blotting analysis (studies I and III) 29 6.3. Linkage analysis (study IV) 29 6.4. Genomic PCR and sequence analysis (study IV) 30 6.5. Restriction enzyme analysis (study IV) 30 6.6. cDNA microarray analysis (study V) 31 6.7. Reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) 31 (studies IV and V) RESULTS 3 3 7. Microsatellite markers as tools for the characterization of DNA 33 amplifications-applying the method to study the 12q amplicon (studies I and II) 8. Characterization of amplicon structure from the 17p region 34 by microsatellite marker analysis and Southern blotting (study III) 9. Linkage analysis and mutation detection of the EXT2 gene (study IV) 34 10. Changes in gene expression in human osteosarcoma cell lines 35 and primary tumors (study V) DISCUSSION 3 6 11. Applicability of microsatellite marker analysis in studies on DNA 36 amplifications (study II) 12. Genetic background of a Finnish family with hereditary multiple 39 exostoses (study IV) 14. Aberrant gene expression in human osteosarcoma (study V) 40 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 4 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 4 4
Predicting Persistence of and Recovery from Stuttering by the Teenage Years Based on Information Gathered at Age 8 Years

Objectives: Information obtained at around age 8 years was used to construct a model that predicted persistence of, and recovery from, stuttering several years later. A logistic regression model that classified children as persistent or recovered at the teenage years using stuttering history and symptom information obtained at around age 8 years was constructed and validated. Methods: A longitudinal study of 222 children who stuttered was conducted. The children were followed up from around age 8 until the teenage years. Persistence and recovery outcomes were established at the teenage years for 206 of the children, based on agreement across 3 standardized instruments. The data from 132 children were used to develop the model, and the data from the remaining 74 children were used to validate the model. Risk factors assessed at the beginning of the study were head injury, age at stuttering onset, family history of stuttering, handedness, whether a second language was spoken in the home, gender, and scores from the Stuttering Severity Instrument Version 3. The information about risk factors was obtained at around age 8 years by interview, except for the severity estimate, which was obtained by analysis of recordings and observations of physical concomitants associated with stuttering. The model was developed using logistic regression procedures. Results: The only factor to predict the persistence of, and recovery from, stuttering at the teenage years was stuttering severity at around age 8 years (none of the other factors being significant). For the initial model, the sensitivity (percentage of the group that was classified as persistent) was 84.1% and specificity (the percentage of the group that was classified as recovered) was 78.3%. For the validation, sensitivity was 76.3% and specificity was 72.2%. Conclusions: Persistence and recovery at teenage can be predicted from information that can be collected at around age 8 years with sensitivity and specificity of ∼80%.
First-line treatment of advanced ovarian cancer with paclitaxel/carboplatin with or without epirubicin (TEC versus TC)--a gynecologic cancer intergroup study of the NSGO, EORTC GCG and NCIC CTG.

BACKGROUND The addition of anthracyclines to platinum-based chemotherapy may provide benefit in survival in ovarian cancer patients. We evaluated the effect on survival of adding epirubicin to standard carboplatin and paclitaxel. PATIENTS AND METHODS We carried out a prospectively randomized phase III study comparing carboplatin plus paclitaxel (TC; area under the curve 5 and 175 mg/m(2)) with the same combination and epirubicin (TEC; 75 mg/m(2) i.v. ). Between March 1999 and August 2001, 887 patients with epithelial ovarian, tubal or peritoneal cancer International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics stages IIB-IV were randomized to receive either TC (442 patients) or TEC (445 patients). RESULTS Median time to progression was 16.4 months in the TEC arm and 16.0 months in the TC arm (hazard ratio 0.99; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.9-1.2). Median overall survival time was 42.4 months for the TEC arm and 40.2 for the TC arm (hazard ratio 0.96; 95% CI: 0.8-1.1). Grade 3/4 hematologic toxic effects and most grade 3/4 non-hematologic toxic effects were more frequent in the TEC arm. Accordingly, a quality-of-life analysis showed inferiority of TEC versus TC. CONCLUSION The addition of epirubicin to standard carboplatin and paclitaxel treatment did not improve survival in patients with advanced ovarian, tubal or peritoneal cancer.
Complexity classesde ned by counting quanti ers *

We study the polynomial time counting hierarchy, a hierarchy of complexity classes related to the notion of counting. We investigate some of their structural properties, settling many open questions dealing with oracle characterizations, closure under boolean operations, and relations with other complexity classes. We develop a new combinatorial technique to obtain relativized separations for some of the studied classes, which imply absolute separations for some logarithmic time bounded complexity classes.
Theory and Practice of Multicultural Organization Development

T chapter describes multicultural organization development (MCOD). MCOD refers to building organizations and organizational cultures that include people from multiple socially defi ned group identities: race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, class, religion, and other social and cultural groupings. The chapter begins with a history of this approach to organization development (OD). Then the theoretical tenets of MCOD are examined. This is followed by a discussion of MCOD practice, including the MCOD goal, development stages, and process for fostering change in organizations.
Light triggers expression of philanthotoxin‐insensitive Ca2+‐permeable AMPA receptors in the developing rat retina

Ca2+‐permeable AMPA receptors (AMPARs) are expressed throughout the adult CNS but yet their role in development is poorly understood. In the developing retina, most investigations have focused on Ca2+ influx through NMDARs in promoting synapse maturation and not on AMPARs. However, NMDARs are absent from many retinal cells suggesting that other Ca2+‐permeable glutamate receptors may be important to consider. Here we show that inhibitory horizontal and AII amacrine cells lack NMDARs but express Ca2+‐permeable AMPARs. Before eye‐opening, AMPARs were fully blocked by philanthotoxin (PhTX), a selective antagonist of Ca2+‐permeable AMPARs. After eye‐opening, however, a subpopulation of Ca2+‐permeable AMPARs were unexpectedly PhTX resistant. Furthermore, Joro spider toxin (JSTX) and IEM‐1460 also failed to antagonize, demonstrating that this novel pharmacology is shared by several AMPAR channel blockers. Interestingly, PhTX‐insensitive AMPARs failed to express in retinae from dark‐reared animals demonstrating that light entering the eye triggers their expression. Eye‐opening coincides with the consolidation of inhibitory cell connections suggesting that the developmental switch to a Ca2+‐permeable AMPAR with novel pharmacology may be critical to synapse maturation in the mammalian retina.