Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Competitive Implications of Multimarket Bank Branching

Abstract Retail banking markets have traditionally been viewed as locally limited. However, recent studies have found evidence that large multimarket banking organizations tend to offer uniform interest rates for retail deposit accounts throughout the area that they serve, at least within a given state. This uniform pricing phenomenon raises questions about the continued relevance of the concept of local banking markets for both research and antitrust purposes. We address this issue by employing a model designed to explain the pricing behavior of single-market banks that face competition from multimarket banks. Empirical results are found to be consistent with the many implications of the model. We find that even with multimarket banks present in the market, local market concentration influences the pricing behavior of single-market banks; however, this relationship weakens as the market share of multimarket banks grows. We also find that, on average, multimarket banks offer lower deposit interest rates than do single-market banks operating in the same market, and, in most cases, greater multimarket bank presence is associated with lower deposit interest rates offered by single-market banks.
An empirical study on contractual heterogeneity within the firm: the ‘vertical integration–franchise contracts’ mix

This paper tests a discrete choice model on the mix of franchised and company owned outlets (contractual heterogeneity) within the firm. This is often explained by the existing literature as due to heterogeneous characteristics of the outlets. However, correspondence between outlets and contracts characteristics is not often observed in reality. An explanation is proposed which suggests that contract mixing is driven by the contractual choice of both principal and agents, and that heterogeneous agents will choose contracts that match their characteristics. This hypothesis is supported by econometric results, based on outlet level microdata collected by means of a survey of UK firms.
Silica-based nano-coating on zirconia surfaces using reactive magnetron sputtering: effect on chemical adhesion of resin cements.

PURPOSE To compare the effect of silica (Si)-based nano-coating deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering (RMP) with that of conventional surface conditioning using metal/zirconia primer alone or after air-particle abrasion on the adhesion of resin cements to zirconia ceramic. MATERIALS AND METHODS Two hundred forty zirconia ceramic blocks (Cercon) were sintered, finished with 1200- grit SiC paper under water cooling, and cleaned ultrasonically in distilled water for 10 min. The blocks (4.5 mm x 3.5 mm x 4.5 mm) were randomly divided into 24 groups (n = 10) according to 3 testing parameters: a) resin cements (Multilink, Panavia F, RelyX U100), b) surface conditioning (no conditioning as control group; Metal/Zirconia Primer; air abrasion + Metal/Zirconia Primer; Si-based nanofilm + Monobond s); c) aging (no aging vs thermocycling at 5°C to 55°C, 6000 cycles). The nanofilm was deposited by direct current using argon/oxygen plasma (8:1 in flux) on the zirconia surface. Resin cements were bonded to zirconia surfaces using polyethylene molds. The shear bond strength (SBS) test was performed using a universal testing machine (1 mm/min), and after debonding, the substrate and adherent surfaces were analyzed using optical and scanning electron microscopes to categorize the failure types. The data were statistically evaluated using 3-way ANOVA and Tukey's test (5%). RESULTS Resin cement type (p < 0.05), surface conditioning method (p < 0.05), and aging condition (p < 0.05) had a significant effect on the bond strength results. Interactions were also significant (p < 0.05). In the nonaged condition, while control groups presented the lowest results with all cements (0 to 5.2 MPa), the airabraded group in combination with RelyX U100 resulted in the highest SBS (21.8 ± 6.7 MPa). After aging, the SBS results decreased in the air-abraded groups for all cements (4.54 to 9.44 MPa) and showed no statistical significance compared to the Si-based nanocoated groups (4.24 to 6.44 MPa). After air-abrasion and primer application, only Panavia F and RelyX U100 cements showed exclusively mixed failures, but after nanofilm coating and silanization, all cements showed exclusively mixed failures with and without aging. CONCLUSION Chemical adhesion of the resin cements tested to zirconia was similar after silica-based nanofilm deposition and air abrasion followed by primer application.
Targeting New Candidate Genes by Small Molecules Approaching Neurodegenerative Diseases

Neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) are among the most feared of the disorders that afflict humankind for the lack of specific diagnostic tests and effective treatments. Understanding the molecular, cellular, biochemical changes of NDs may hold therapeutic promise against debilitating central nerve system (CNS) disorders. In the present review, we summarized the clinical presentations and biology backgrounds of NDs, including Parkinson’s disease (PD), Huntington’s disease (HD), and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and explored the role of molecular mechanisms, including dys-regulation of epigenetic control mechanisms, Ataxia-telangiectasia-mutated protein kinase (ATM), and neuroinflammation in the pathogenesis of NDs. Targeting these mechanisms may hold therapeutic promise against these devastating diseases.
Oscillation Modes in Symmetrical Wireless-Locked Systems

Time synchronization of multiple elements of a wireless network can be achieved through the wireless coupling of their oscillator circuits. Most previous works on wireless locking of oscillators analyze the system in an idealized manner, representing the oscillator elements with phase models and describing the propagation effects with constant scalar coefficients and time delays. Here, a realistic analysis of the wireless system is presented, which relies on the extraction of the oscillator models from harmonic-balance (HB) simulations and takes into account the antenna gains and propagation effects. The most usual network configurations, corresponding to ring, fully connected, and star topologies, are investigated in detail. In symmetric conditions, the oscillation modes are detected through an eigenvalue/eigenvector calculation of an equivalent coupling matrix. For each particular mode, the system is analyzed in the following manners: by means of an analytical formulation, able to provide all the coexistent solutions, and through a circuit-level HB simulation of an equivalent system with a reduced number of oscillator elements. The stability properties are determined by means of a perturbation system of general application to any coupled structure. A specific formulation is also derived to predict the impact of discrepancies between the oscillator elements. All the results have been validated with independent circuit-level simulations and measurements.
Qualitative characteristics of financial reporting: a historical perspective

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a historical review for several leading documents in relation to the objectives of financial statements. These documents are: The Trueblood Report, The Corporate Report, Making Corporate Reports Valuable; and Guidelines for Financial Reporting Standards. These documents have a significant importance in financial reporting literature.Design/methodology/approach – Content analysis approach was adopted in this study given its analytical and comparative nature of historical documents. In terms of studying historical data, content analysis main advantage is objectivity, in addition to its ability to provide unobtrusive evidence of historical trends.Findings – The historical review showed that the basic objective of financial statements is concerned with providing useful information for economic decision making. In addition, it emphasized that information is useful when: it shows economic reality of the financial statements (i.e. balance sheet, income statement and cash flow.
Extremely high birefringent terahertz fiber using a suspended elliptic core with slotted airholes.

A suspended core microstructured fiber with extremely high birefringence has been proposed for terahertz (THz) wave propagation. An elliptical-shaped core has been formed with slotted rectangular airholes to disrupt the vertical symmetry of the refractive index of the designed fiber. Different design parameters such as the core diameter, ellipticity, porosity, and suspended strut width have been checked to achieve optimum performance from the fiber. The resultant birefringence of the proposed fiber is unprecedented, of the order of 10-1 (1.057×10-1 to be precise) with a low effective material loss of 0.047 cm-1 and confinement loss of 9.4×10-3 cm-1 at 1 THz. The dispersion of the designed fiber is below 1 ps/THz/cm extended over a band of 500 GHz (1-1.5 THz) with almost flat profile. It is expected that this fiber could be useful in interferometry, filtering, and sensing applications in the THz range where polarized lights are favorably essential.
Two Essays in Macroeconomics

Title of dissertation: TWO ESSAYS IN MACROECONOMICS Dong Wu, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor John Shea Department of Economics Castro and Coen-Pirani (2008) document that aggregate skilled hours and employment both became more volatile after the mid-1980s, in contrast to the simultaneous volatility decline of most aggregates, including overall hours and employment and unskilled hours and employment. In chapter 1, I propose that rising efficiency in matching skilled workers to vacancies accounts for this change. The rise of general-purpose information technology made the skills of well-educated workers more transferable across firms and industries, and this increased the suitability of unemployed skilled workers for a broader range of job vacancies. In turn this implies a larger increase in the flow of skilled labor into employment during economic booms. This causes skilled aggregates to be more volatile. I embed a simple search and matching mechanism in a typical dynamic general equilibrium model to demonstrate this idea. The purpose of chapter 2 is to explore the contribution of capital-skill complementarity to short-run employment fluctuations. Given that such complementarity is a leading explanation for long-run changes in the skill premium, it is interesting to check its short-run implications for employment volatility. The numerical results show that complementarity can make skilled employment more volatile than the unskilled, but it can not improve standard DSGE models’ implications for overall labor market’ volatility. TWO ESSAYS IN MACROECONOMICS
Predicting Aesthetic Score Distribution through Cumulative Jensen-Shannon Divergence

Aesthetic quality prediction is a challenging task in the computer vision community because of the complex interplay with semantic contents and photographic technologies. Recent studies on the powerful deep learning based aesthetic quality assessment usually use a binary high-low label or a numerical score to represent the aesthetic quality. However the scalar representation cannot describe well the underlying varieties of the human perception of aesthetics. In this work, we propose to predict the aesthetic score distribution (i.e., a score distribution vector of the ordinal basic human ratings) using Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN). Conventional DCNNs which aim to minimize the difference between the predicted scalar numbers or vectors and the ground truth cannot be directly used for the ordinal basic rating distribution. Thus, a novel CNN based on the Cumulative distribution with Jensen-Shannon divergence (CJS-CNN) is presented to predict the aesthetic score distribution of human ratings, with a new reliability-sensitive learning method based on the kurtosis of the score distribution, which eliminates the requirement of the original full data of human ratings (without normalization). Experimental results on large scale aesthetic dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our introduced CJS-CNN in this task.
Note-Naive Diversification and Portfolio Risk-A Note

A number of authors have used the portfolio standard deviation to model the risk reduction advantages of naive diversification. Other authors have pointed out that when risk is modelled by the portfolio's variance the modelling process becomes much simpler and is computationally more efficient. In this note we derive an exact parametric relationship between portfolio standard deviation and size and thus highlight the dangers of using the standard deviation in conjunction with O.L. S. regression techniques to model the risk reduction advantages of naive diversification. It is then shown that past empirical studies which have used this methodology are deficient.
Distinguishing Adoption and Entrenchment of Management Practices: A Framework for Analysis

This paper distinguishes two stages of management practices in organizations initial adoption and institutional entrenchment. Adopted practices that are not yet entrenched are referred to as fads, and entrenchment is defined as the embedding of practices such that they are likely to endure and resist pressure for change. Next, the paper proposes five bases that give rise to both adoption and entrenchment: modelling, culture, education, regulation, and technical rationality. Modelling is seen to be operative mostly in the initial adoption phase, while culture and education are characteristic of the entrenchment stage. Based on these, a framework is offered to help researchers assess the extent to which a practice is a fad or has been entrenched. The framework is used in an abbreviated example to illustrate the differences between quality circles (a practice popular in the early 1980s) and total quality management (a complex set of practices indicative of institutionalization). The evidence, once organized within the framework, shows that TQM is indeed considerably more entrenched than quality circles were at similar stages in their usage in organizations. The paper ends with some suggestions for future research of which the key is that a clear distinction between mere adoption and entrenchment is vital to the development of institutional theory.
DESIGNING DIETARY INTERVENTIONS:A REAPPRAISAL OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF DIETARY CHOICE IN THE UK

The facilitation of healthier dietary choices by consumers is one of the key elements of the UK Government’s food strategy. Designing and targeting dietary interventions requires a clear understanding of the determinants of dietary choice. Conventional analysis of the determinants of dietary choice has focused on mean response functions which may mask significant differences in the dietary behaviour of different segments of the population. In this paper we use a quantile regression approach to investigate how food consumption behaviour varies amongst UK households in different segments of the population, especially in the upper and lower quantiles characterised by healthy or unhealthy consumption patterns. We find that the effect of demographic determinants of dietary choice on households that exhibit less healthy consumption patterns differs significantly from that on households that make healthier consumption choices. A more nuanced understanding of the differences in the behavioural responses of households making less-healthy eating choices provides useful insights for the design and targeting of measures to promote healthier diets.
Heightening comparativists concern for model choice: voting behavior in Great Britain and the Netherlands

As the research methodology more closely approximates the causal process being analyzed, the inferences and predictions derived from that methodology will better represent actual behavior. Statistical models were specified on the basis of accepted theories of voting behavior and political cleavages in the Netherlands and Great Britain. We hypothesize that multinomial models provide a more accurate characterization of voting behavior in countries with more than two political parties competing for votes. Binomial logit, multinomial logit, and nested multinomial logit models of voting behavior are estimated on Dutch and British National Election Study data. Compared to binomial methods, we find that multinomial models of voting behavior produce results that are more congruent with accepted theories of Dutch and British politics.
Identifying Risks in Emerging Market Sovereign and Corporate Bond Spreads

This study investigates the systematic risk factors driving emerging market (EM) credit risk by jointly modelling sovereign and corporate credit spreads at a global level. We use a multi-regional Bayesian panel VAR model, with time-varying betas and multivariate stochastic volatility. This model allows us to decompose credit spreads and to build indicators of EM risks. We find that indices of EM sovereign and corporate credit spreads differ because of their specific reactions to global risk factors. Following the failure of Lehman Brothers, EM sovereign spreads ‘decoupled’ from the US corporate market. In contrast, EM corporate bond spreads widened in response to higher US corporate default risk. We also find that the response of sovereign bond spreads to the VIX was short-lived. However, both EM sovereign and corporate bond spreads widened in flight-to-liquidity episodes, as proxied by the OIS-Treasury spread. Overall, the model is capable of generating other interesting results about the comovement of sovereign and corporate spreads.
The relationship between corporate governance attributes and firm performance before and after the revised code

Purpose – This paper examines the impact of corporate governance attributes and ownership structure patterns on corporate performance of Malaysian listed companies following the revised code on corporate governance in 2007. To provide an insightful assessment on the revised code's implications on firm performance, data before (2006) and after (2009) the revised code in 2007 were analyzed. Design/methodology/approach – The study involves analyses of 170 observations in a two-year period, 2006 and 2009. The sample of the study was selected on the basis of a stratified random sampling procedure to allow a representative sample of the various sectors listed on Bursa Malaysia. Based on data extracted from the annual reports of 2006 and 2009, corporate performance was captured using accounting performance indicators (return on assets and return on equity). In addition to descriptive analyses, multiple regression analysis was used to assess the influence of the governance and ownership structure attributes on fi.
A comparison of new firms in assisted and non–assisted areas in Great Britain

During the 1980s governments at all levels in western economies focused increasingly on new and small firms as a crucial ingredient in the development of a healthy economy. In recognition of this, in the European Community, the SME Task Force was elevated to the Twenty Third Directorate General. At the national level, governments sought to develop schemes and initiatives which would both stimulate the formation of new firms and encourage existing firms to grow. Attention was particularly focused on those areas or regions with special needs as reflected in, for example, mature and declining industries and growing unemployment. In Great Britain, these areas were selected for assisted area status and a special package of schemes designed. This paper examines the effect of these schemes by comparing the characteristics of new firm founders in non–assisted and assisted areas, their personal reasons for start–up, local culture as reflected in their personal attitudes to entrepreneurship, their perceptions of th.
FE Modeling and Analysis of Isotropic and Orthotropic Beams Using First Order Shear Deformation Theory

In the present work, a finite element model is developed to analyze the response of isotropic and orthotropic beams, a common structural element for aeronautics and astronautic applications. The assumed field displacements equations of the beams are represented by a first order shear deformation theory, the Timoshenko beam theory. The equations of motion of the beams are derived using Hamilton’s principle. The shear correction factor is used to improve the obtained results. A MATLAB code is constructed to compute the natural frequencies and the static deformations for both types of beams with different boundary conditions. Numerical calculations are carried out to clarify the effects of the thickness-to-length ratio on both the Eigen values and the deflections of the beams due to the applied mechanical load. The obtained results of the proposed model are compared to the available results of other investigators, good agreement is generally obtained.
Controlling or Complying? The Opportunities and Challenges of Coordinated Technological Change

In this dissertation, I examine firms' strategic actions and outcomes in multi-firm standards consortia, fast emerging as dominant organizational arrangements for coordinating technological change. Building on strategic networks, the resource-based view and technological change research, I demonstrate how firms' positions in technological (patent-based) and relational (alliance-based) networks affect their choices within and between technical standards organizations. Empirically, I focus on committees in the computer industry that devise peripheral interface standards. The first essay studies firm-level factors that affect progress towards the coordinated standard. Highlighting how the multiplex nature of inter-organizational relationships affects voting behavior of firms, I find that the influence of network resources is contingent upon the type of inter-organizational tie (technological vs. relational). When these ties are considered jointly, firms possessing superior positions both networks exhibit higher support for its progress as they stand to benefit more from the adoption of the standard. The second essay examines how divergence in member firms' interests may drive new inter-organizational relationships. Although firms that are peripheral in the technological network are disadvantaged with regard to knowledge relevance in the standard-setting process, I show that they can obtain relational benefits from technologically central firms. To enhance the standard's legitimacy by soliciting wide-ranging participation from firms, central firms may be motivated to forge such alliances. In the final essay, I explore how firms navigate two competing standards a voluntary standards committee and a sponsor-backed consortium. I examine and contrast firms' product introduction and patenting decisions on the sponsor-backed standard, arguing that while products accelerate the standard's adoption, patents hinder it. I find that while firms that possess prior technological and relational linkages with the sponsor firms tend to introduce more products but fewer patents, the opposite is observed for firms that are technologically central in the competing voluntary standards committee. Overall the findings from this dissertation greatly enhance our understanding of firms' strategies in multiorganizational contexts that adjudicate technological change and shape technological evolution. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Management First Advisor Lori Rosenkopf This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn. edu/edissertations/565
Imagine Being a Nice Guy: A Note on Hypothetical vs. Incentivized Social Preferences

We conducted an experimental study on social preferences using dictator games similar to Fehr et al. (2008). Our results show that social preferences differ between subjects who receive low-stakes monetary rewards for their decisions and subjects who consider hypothetical stakes. Our findings indicate that, apart from incentives, gender plays an important role for the categorization of different social preferences.