Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fundamental Determinants of the Effects of Fiscal Policy

We explore the underlying determinants of the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy and tax and social security reform using the Global Fiscal Model (GFM). We show that the planning horizon of consumers, access to financial markets, and the elasticity of labor supply, as well as the characteristics of utility and production functions, and the degree of competition are all critical for determining the impact of fiscal policy. Four topical fiscal policy issues, for a representative large and small economy, are examined: the effects of changes in government debt; higher government spending; tax reform; and privatization of retirement savings.
The emergent middle class in contemporary South Africa: Examining and comparing rival approaches

In light of the economic, political and social significance of the middle class for South Africa's emerging democracy, we critically examine contrasting conceptualisations of social class. We compare four rival approaches to empirical estimation of class: an occupational skill measure, a vulnerability indictor, an income polarisation approach and subjective social status. There is considerable variation in who is classified as middle class based on the definition that is employed and, in particular, a marked difference between subjective and objective notions of social class. We caution against overoptimistic predictions based on the growth of the black middle class. While the surge in the black middle class is expected to help dismantle the association between race and class in South Africa, the analysis suggests that notions of identity may adjust more slowly to these new realities and consequently racial integration and social cohesion may emerge with a substantial lag.
Does innovativeness of knowledge-intensive business services differ from other industries?

This article seeks to determine whether the innovative capabilities of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) do actually differ from other industries through comparing the innovation capacities and financial performance of KIBS with firms operating in other sectors (non-KIBS). Based upon a 1000-firm sample, the results of our estimated econometric model demonstrate that non-KIBS firms are in possession of significantly greater innovation capacities than KIBS firms. These differences were observed across factors such as organisational process innovation, the launch of already existing products in new markets, branding and new product designs. Nevertheless, as regards the actual importance attributed to product/service innovation, KIBS firms place a greater comparative importance on innovation in comparison with their non-KIBS peers. In addition, the empirical evidences display a significantly different range of effects of innovation capacities on financial performance and concludes that non-KIBS firms turn in better comparative performances than specialist KIBS firms.
Pre- and Post-Crisis Trust in Banks: Lessons from Transitional Countries

We study the factors determining the level of trust in banks before and after the 2007- 08 financial crisis and how this crisis reshaped banking trust in transitional countries. We find that younger, rural, educated, banked and generally trusting people tend to have higher confidence towards banks in both periods. Among country-level covariates, growth rate of GDP and Rule of Law remain significantly associated with banking trust in both periods. Finally, our findings indicate that the financial crisis has temporary impact on trust in banks since pulling back the rate of GDP growth tends to recover banking trust.
Generational value differences of baby boomers in Thailand

Researchers are expanding our knowledge of cultural value systems by exploring the diverse values that are held by different generations in various countries. The majority of these studies have focused on Western countries with little attention being given to cross cultural differences. This point is particularly true of Asian countries such as Thailand. To fill this research gap, this study explores the generational value differences of baby boomers in Thailand using the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS). The initial comparison is with the United States, which is the most studied country, and then concludes with observations on how Thailand's generational cultures contrast to the findings of similar studies throughout the world using the same RVS instrument.
Mapping of Soil Insect Infestations Sampled by Excavation and Acoustic Methods

Abstract Geostatistical analysis was used to map traditionally and acoustically sampled populations of soil invertebrates at two different times in a hayfield at Grove Hill, AL, and once in an Auburn, AL, hayfield. The distributions of nearly all the soil invertebrates and their sounds were nonrandom in all three mapping studies. The maps constructed by excavation and acoustic sampling methods were compared by correlating the estimated (kriged) soil invertebrate counts with the estimated (kriged) counts of sounds per minute (pulse rate). Acoustic and traditional estimates were positively correlated in the Auburn study. Kriged estimates for green June beetle grub counts overlapped significantly with kriged estimates of sound pulse rate (R2 = 0.47). Overlap with sound pulse rates increased slightly when other soil organisms were counted along with green June beetle grubs: estimates of sound pulse rates were significantly correlated with counts of all white grubs (R2 = 0.50), all white grubs with earthworms (R2 = 0.52), all white grubs with earthworms and earwigs (R2 = 0.59), and total invertebrates (R2 = 0.59). The correlation between acoustic and traditional estimates was not significant at Grove Hill in either year, possibly because of a lack of experience in signal analysis or because the soil invertebrates may not have generated enough sounds to be detected above the background noise levels. These results suggest that acoustic technology is a promising tool for detecting insect pests in soil, but that further study and additional analysis are needed to improve interpretation of acoustic data obtained in the field.
Cultural and Outcomes-Related Issues in Implementing an Interdisciplinary Cross-Campus Entrepreneurship Education Program

Abstract The aim of this paper is to present an interdisciplinary entrepreneurship education program (EEP) and to illustrate the potential learning objectives and the appropriate pedagogical methods of such a program. We also use it to illustrate issues in implementing cross-campus EEPs, which we classify into two categories: “cultural” and outcomes-related issues. The cultural issues are related to the problems inherent to interdisciplinarity, to the scientific legitimacy of entrepreneurship and to the fact that universities are oriented towards large, established firms. Potential solutions include developing short awareness-raising programs, making research more visible within one's own university and rewarding interdisciplinary initiatives. Outcomes-related issues consist of delayed effects in the impact of an EEP, selection processes biases and, sometimes, technology requirements excluding low-technology projects. To overcome these issues, the objectives of an EEP should not only be centered on the number of short-term business creations, but also on entrepreneurial activities, intentions and attitudes in their widest sense.
Reconfigurable nonuniform transmultiplexers based on uniform filter banks

This paper introduces reconfigurable nonuniform transmul-tiplexers (TMUXs) based on uniform modulated filter banks (FBs). Polyphase components, of any user, are processed by a number of synthesis FB and analysis FB branches of a uniform TMUX. One branch, of the TMUX, represents one granularity band and any user occupies integer multiples of a granularity band. By adjusting the number of branches, assigned to each user, a nonuniform TMUX is obtained. This only requires adjustable commutators which add no extra arithmetic complexity. The application of both cosine modulated and modified discrete Fourier transform FBs are considered and the formulations related to the appropriate choice of parameters are outlined. Examples are provided for illustration.
Robust Anomalies? A Close Look at Accrual‐Based Trading Strategy Returns

The last 40 years have seen an extensive literature documenting so‐called anomalies in major capital markets. Evidence of ‘abnormal’ returns associated with trading strategies based on readily observable phenomena such as accounting‐based data involves experimental design choices that can be expected to influence the results. We show how evidence of an accrual anomaly in Australia is sensitive to research design specifications such as the choice of proxy for total accruals; the definition of abnormal returns (i.e. the return generating model); the impact of data trimming as a response to exceptionally large returns; and the choice between value and equal weighting of returns. We show that research design choices do matter and help reconcile conflicting prior evidence of any accrual anomaly in Australia. More broadly, our results suggest the need for caution in drawing inferences from trading strategy tests which claim to identify anomalies.
Initial Public Offerings: Daily Returns, Offering Types and the Price Effect

Initial public offerings (IPOs) generate abnormally high returns immediately following their issuance. An examination of daily returns for 649 firms that went public between 1975 and 1982 reveals how these returns are distributed across time (from the day of issuance through the 190 aftermarket trading days); across initial offering price categories; and across types of offerings. The sample's mean return on the initial day was a statistically significant 21.65 per cent; the first day of aftermarket trading also experienced a significant positive abnormal return. The entire aftermarket period had a cumulative return of 17.99 per cent, suggesting that significant abnormal returns continued beyond the initial offering day. While the initial day's abnormal return was positive across all price groups, it was much greater for the IPOs originally priced at $Z.00 or less than for any other group. The lowest priced IPOs also accounted for most of the sample's abnormal returns over the aftermarket trading period. The initial and aftermarket performances of firms using firm commitnment offerings closely approximated the performances of the entire sample (as 88.4 per cent of the IPOs samnpled used this form). The best efforts offerings, however, outperformed the firm commitment offerings both on the offering day and over the aftermarket trading period. These higher returns are attributable, again, to the returns on stocks priced at $ . 00 or less; over 70 per cent of the best efforts offerings fell into this price category.
Comparative Study of Intravitreal Bevacizumab (Avastin) versus Ranibizumab (Lucentis) in the Treatment of Neovascular Age-Related Macular Degeneration

Aims: To compare the safety and efficacy of 2 anti-vascular-endothelial-growth-factor agents – bevacizumab (Avastin) versus ranibizumab (Lucentis) – in the treatment of patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Methods: Retrospective analysis of patients who received intravitreal injections of bevacizumab or ranibizumab for neovascular AMD. Primary outcome measures were best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) and central foveal thickness (CFT) assessed by Spectral Domain scanning laser ophthalmoscope-optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). A secondary outcome measure was the report of any adverse events in the 2 groups. Results: The number of injections in the bevacizumab group was 184 (average of 4.7 per eye) compared to 187 in the ranibizumab group (average of 5.5 per eye). The mean logMAR equivalent of BCVA at 1 month after the injection improved by 0.18 in the bevacizumab group (p = 0.009) and by 0.13 in the ranibizumab group (p = 0.004). The average SD-OCT CFT decreased from 325 ± 72 to 300 ± 69 μm in the bevacizumab group (p = 0.016) and from 307 ± 57 to 289 ± 56 μm in the ranibizumab group (p = 0.017). In the bevacizumab group, there was 1 event of lower extremity pain (0.54%) and 1 event of increased arterial blood pressure (0.54%). In the ranibizumab group, there were 2 events of transiently increased intraocular pressure (1.1%) and 1 event (0.53%) of intraocular inflammation following injection. Conclusions: Bevacizumab and ranibizumab treatments resulted in similar gains in visual acuity and reduction in macular thickness, documented each month following injection. Intravitreal bevacizumab appears to be as safe and effective as intravitreal ranibizumab in the treatment of exudative AMD.
Pedestrian Alignment Network for Large-scale Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (re-ID) is mostly viewed as an image retrieval problem. This task aims to search a query person in a large image pool. In practice, person re-ID usually adopts automatic detectors to obtain cropped pedestrian images. However, this process suffers from two types of detector errors: excessive background and part missing. Both errors deteriorate the quality of pedestrian alignment and may compromise pedestrian matching due to the position and scale variances. To address the misalignment problem, we propose that alignment be learned from an identification procedure. We introduce the pedestrian alignment network (PAN) which allows discriminative embedding learning pedestrian alignment without extra annotations. We observe that when the convolutional neural network learns to discriminate between different identities, the learned feature maps usually exhibit strong activations on the human body rather than the background. The proposed network thus takes advantage of this attention mechanism to adaptively locate and align pedestrians within a bounding box. Visual examples show that pedestrians are better aligned with PAN. Experiments on three large-scale re-ID datasets confirm that PAN improves the discriminative ability of the feature embeddings and yields competitive accuracy with the state-of-the-art methods.
Rates of Return, Concentration Levels and Strategic Change in the British Railway Industry, 1830–1912

This article presents new data on rates of return for different sectors of the railway industry and on levels of industrial concentration across the period from 1830 until shortly before the start of the First World War and considers their implications for existing views on strategic change in the industry. The authors first identify the main characteristics of the pre-First World War railway industry in Britain and then examine governmental regulation and competition policies, as they affected that industry. The following two sections examine the issue of industrial concentration and its linkages with profitability; new findings are presented on changes in levels of industrial concentration and rates of return for different sectors of the industry. These focus on the period from 1830, when scheduled passenger services began on the Liverpool & Manchester Line, until shortly before the First World War. The authors conclude that the period of 1870 to 1912 was one of structural stasis in which the legitimate interests of those who had funded the railways were progressively abandoned in favor of the interests of their trader/customers and society at large.
Polycomb-mediated chromatin loops revealed by a subkilobase-resolution chromatin interaction map

Significance Chromatin loops, detected by chemical cross-linking and DNA sequencing, are frequently bounded by the polycomb repressive complex 1 in Drosophila. The loops are associated with important developmental genes, often in a repressed state. These results are in contrast with previous studies on mammalian cells, in which chromatin loops are commonly bounded by CTCF protein, and with the generally accepted role of looping in gene activation. The locations of chromatin loops in Drosophila were determined by Hi-C (chemical cross-linking, restriction digestion, ligation, and high-throughput DNA sequencing). Whereas most loop boundaries or “anchors” are associated with CTCF protein in mammals, loop anchors in Drosophila were found most often in association with the polycomb group (PcG) protein Polycomb (Pc), a subunit of polycomb repressive complex 1 (PRC1). Loops were frequently located within domains of PcG-repressed chromatin. Promoters located at PRC1 loop anchors regulate some of the most important developmental genes and are less likely to be expressed than those not at PRC1 loop anchors. Although DNA looping has most commonly been associated with enhancer–promoter communication, our results indicate that loops are also associated with gene repression.
Pro-Social Missions and Worker Motivation: An Experimental Study

Do employees work harder if their job has the right mission? In a laboratory labor market experiment, we test whether subjects provide higher effort if they can choose the mission of their job. We observe that subjects do not provide higher effort than in a control treatment. Surprised by this finding, we run a second experiment in which subjects can choose whether they want to work on a job with their preferred mission or not. A subgroup of agents (roughly one third) is willing to do so even if this option is more costly than choosing the alternative job. Moreover, we find that these subjects provide substantially higher effort. These results suggest that relatively few workers can be motivated by missions and that selection into mission-oriented organizations is important to explain empirical findings of lower wages and high motivation in the latter.
The housing crisis and its local dimensions

Abstract One result of the current combination of widespread speculative housing promotion, reduced state provision and volatile regional and sub‐regional employment variations seems to be a growing polarisation between the ability of the housing system to cope with housing needs and demands at a local level. The paper examines the links between housing provision and economic restructuring in three contrasting British sub‐regions and argues that there are considerable differences in the type of housing problems experienced, together with greater variety in the responses adopted.
Healthy Country, Healthy People: Policy Implications of Links between Indigenous Human Health and Environmental Condition in Tropical Australia

Investment in programs that help Indigenous people undertake work maintaining the environmental health of their country has benefits for the environment as well as the physical, mental and cultural health of the Indigenous people involved. For health these findings have direct implications for some national health policies, service provision to homelands, health promotion and Indigenous health research. There are also direct implications for environmental investment in northern Australia and the design and regulation of markets in resource entitlements. Indirectly the findings should be important for economic, employment and education policies as well as those promoting social harmony. Given the range of benefits there is a strong argument for cross-agency investment in working on country by Indigenous people.
Previous injury as a risk factor for injury in elite football: a prospective study over two consecutive seasons

Background: Previous injury is often proposed to be a risk factor for football injury, but most studies rely on players reporting their own medical history and are thus potentially subject to recall bias. Little is known about the natural variation in injury pattern between seasons. Objectives: To study whether prospectively recorded injuries during one season are associated with injuries sustained during the following season, and to compare injury risk and injury pattern between consecutive seasons. Methods: The medical staffs of 12 elite Swedish male football teams prospectively recorded individual exposure and time loss injuries over two full consecutive seasons (2001 and 2002). A multivariate model was used to determine the relation between previous injury, anthropometric data, and the risk of injury. Results: The training and match injury incidences were similar between seasons (5.1 v 5.3 injuries/1000 training hours and 25.9 v 22.7/1000 match hours), but analysis of injury severity and injury patterns showed variations between seasons. Players who were injured in the 2001 season were at greater risk of any injury in the following season compared with non-injured players (hazard ratio 2.7; 95% confidence interval 1.7 to 4.3, p<0.0001). Players with a previous hamstring injury, groin injury, and knee joint trauma were two to three times more likely to suffer an identical injury in the following season, whereas no such relation was found for ankle sprain. Age was not associated with an increased injury risk. Conclusions: This study confirmed previous results showing that previous injury is an important risk factor for football injury. Overall injury incidences were similar between consecutive seasons, indicating that an injury surveillance study covering one full season can provide a reasonable overview of the injury problem among elite football players in a specific environment. However, a prolonged study period is recommended for analyses of specific injury patterns.
Dopamine in crayfish and other crustaceans: Distribution in the central nervous system and physiological functions

Dopamine is widely distributed in the crustacean nervous system and has a diverse array of physiological effects. Immunocytochemical studies of several species have shown that dopamine‐ and/or tyrosine hydroxylase–containing cells occur in all ganglia of the central nervous system and that processes from some of these cells link ganglia of the ventral nerve cord. This study describes the distribution of tyrosine hydroxylase–containing cells in the central nervous system of a crayfish (Orconectes rusticus) and compares this information to available data from other species. The distribution of tyrosine hydroxylase (an enzyme in the synthetic pathway between tyrosine and dopamine) in O. rusticus is similar to that reported for marine species. However, differences were observed in the number of neurons in some ganglia and in the axonal projections of the L cell, which were more extensive in O. rusticus than in other species studied thus far. We also review the physiological effects of dopamine in crayfish and other crustaceans, focusing on the amine's actions in the endocrine, cardiovascular, and nervous systems, and on behavior when injected into freely‐moving animals. Microsc. Res. Tech. 60:325–335, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.