Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Professional accounting bodies' perceptions of ethical issues, causes of ethical failure and ethics education

Purpose - Given the calls for increased ethics education following recent corporate collapses, this paper aims to examine the significance of ethical issues that challenge the profession and, more specifically, professional accounting bodies. Design/methodology/approach - The study assesses the perceptions via an online survey of 66 professional accounting bodies worldwide in respect of ethical issues, potential causes of ethical failure and the need for ethics education. Findings - Respondents identified a number of important challenges including conflicts of interest, earnings management and whistle-blowing. The findings also demonstrate strong support for participation in prescribing the nature of ethics education by members of professional accounting bodies. Research limitations/implications - The results of this study are based on feedback from 41 per cent of member bodies of the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC). Despite a number of follow-up reminder notices, some regions are under-represented in the responses to the survey distributed to the (then) 160 member bodies of IFAC. Geographic isolation and language limitations contributed to the failure to gain a higher response rate. Practical implications - The findings demonstrate that professional bodies support ethics education at the pre- and post-qualifying levels of education and a willingness to take an active role in promoting ethics education to their members. Originality/value - By addressing member bodies' attitudes to ethics education, this paper fills a gap in prior literature that has been restricted to addressing the attitudes of academics, students and business organisations.
Finding Sensitivity to Scope in Nonmarket Valuation

Data limitations frequently prevent using actual consumer behavior in determining natural resource values, so stated preference methods are used. Whether value estimates show sensitivity to the scope of resource valued is a key test for their validity, which several studies fail. Developing a correlated panel mixed logit model of households' water quality valuations in California, we show that false negatives in scope tests can result when individual preference variation and correlation are ignored and split‐sample comparisons are used. Monte Carlo simulations further demonstrate potentially prevalent false rejections of scope sensitivity even when within‐subject comparisons of willingness to pay portray strong scope sensitivity. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
COSMOGRAIL: the COSmological MOnitoring of GRAvItational Lenses - XVI. Time delays for the quadruply imaged quasar DES J0408−5354 with high-cadence photometric monitoring

This work is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). S. H. Suyu and D. C. Y. Chao thank the Max Planck Society for support through the Max Planck Research Group for SHS. T. Treu acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation through grant 1450141, by the Packard Foundation through a Packard Research Fellowship and by the UCLA Dean of Physical Sciences. K. Rojas is supported by Becas de Doctorado Nacional CONICYT 2017. T. Anguita and M. Chijani acknowledge support by proyecto FONDECYT 11130630 and by the Ministry for the Economy, Development, and Tourism’s Programa Inicativa Cientifica Milenio through grant IC 12009, awarded to The Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS). M. Tewes acknowledges support from the DFG grant Hi 1495/2-1. J. Garcia-Bellido is supported by the Research Project FPA2015-68048 [MINECO-FEDER], and the Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa Program SEV-2012-0249. C. D. Fassnacht acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation grant AST-1312329 and from the UC Davis Physics Department and Dean of Math and Physical Sciences. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the US Department of Energy, the US National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico and the Ministerio da Ciencia, Tecnologia e Inovacao, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey . The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number AST-1138766. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MINECO under grants AYA2015-71825, ESP2015-88861, FPA2015-68048, SEV-2012-0234, SEV-2012-0249, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA programme of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
Controlling Federal Agencies: The Contingent Impact of External Controls on Worker Discretion and Productivity

ABSTRACT Previous scholarship has investigated why legislatures sometimes choose to delegate policy choice to executive agencies, but there is little research on the consequences of the choice to delegate or not. Using a multiple principal-agent framework, this paper provides empirical evidence regarding the impact of legislative delegation and agency discretion on the work of U.S. government employees. Findings suggest that delegation directly reduces employee discretion only in client service agencies; its direct effects on employee productivity are more evident but varied. Legislative delegation is also associated with more executive political appointees, whose presence reduces both employee discretion and productivity. Whether employees with more discretion are more productive than those with less depends on their commitment to the job: employees who like their work more than their pay use their discretion to enhance productivity, while employees who like their pay more than their work use their discretion to reduce productivity.
Are Youth Really Different? New Beliefs for Old Practices in Entrepreneurship

This article reviews and systematises prior studies focusing on the differences between young and old people in entrepreneurship. This study highlights that the young are different in several areas: accumulation of resources and skills; psychological, cognitive and motivational attributes; and reaction to influences from the environment, culture and norms. This article provides guidance about promising avenues for future research and encourages policy attention for the field of youth entrepreneurship.
Comparing the Agency Costs of Family and Non–Family Firms: Conceptual Issues and Exploratory Evidence

Family involvement in a business has the potential to both increase and decrease financial performance due to agency costs. In this article we discuss the different nature of agency costs in family firms and specify the combination of conditions necessary to determine the relative levels of agency costs in family and non–family firms through the impacts of agency cost control mechanisms on performance. We also present exploratory results based on a study of 1,141 small privately held U.S. family and non–family firms that suggest the overall agency problem in family firms could be less serious than that in non–family firms.
Price and Authority in Inter-Profit Center Transactions

Price and authority have traditionally been regarded as alternative social mechanisms for allocating resources. However, actual transactions-whether inter- or intrafirm-can be evaluated in terms of the extent to which they combine both of these mechanisms. An especially revealing example of this is the exchange of goods between two profit centers in the multi-profit center firm. Three of the most common arrangements, or transfer pricing polices, for effecting these transactions are examined here. Exchange autonomy transfers depend primarily on price, with no or minimal use of authority. Mandated full cost transfers involve a substantial exercise of authority relative to the use of price. Mandated market based transfers use both authority and price in important ways. For all three policies, the transaction costs of these internal transactions may exceed these costs on external transactions.
Optimal Wage and Income Taxation with Wage Uncertainty

Optimal taxation in a two-period model with human-capital investment and second-period wage uncertainty is analyzed. A proportional tax on wages dominates lump-sum taxation and the socially-optimal level of human capital exceeds that which individuals choose. A tax on interest income may raise welfare by encouraging investment in human capital. The interest-income tax reduces the difference between returns to physical and human capital from individuals' inability to reduce human-capital risk through diversification. A positive interest-income tax rate may therefore be optimal, even with an optimal wage tax, by encouraging m ore investment in human capital. Copyright 1987 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.
ISO 9000: Outside the Iron Cage

Adopted by an increasing number of organizations around the world, the ISO 9000 standards have become a growing concern for more and more managers who are often compelled to adopt this system without really knowing its requirements and implications for employees. Though the effects of this standard on quality management and on performance improvement have been widely debated, there is little knowledge of how the managers and employees who are asked to implement and maintain it perceive the ISO 9000 standards or resist its use. This study will thus attempt to analyze this perception and resistance with regard to both the standard and the certification process. So as to avoid the traditional and idealised view of this standard, whose commercial stakes often give rise to uncritical statements, almost 50 interviews were conducted outside of the workplace. The results of these interviews revealed highly contrasting attitudes that were frequently critical of the ISO 9000 system, which was often given only superficial support. A qualitative analysis of the data allowed us to identify three types of respondents. They were grouped according to their opinions and attitudes about the implementation of this standard. The three groups were ceremonial integrators, quality enthusiasts and dissidents. Although the "quality enthusiasts" discourse often reflects managers' "rhetoric of success" described by Zbaracki (1998) about the implementation of total quality programs, this rhetoric is not shared by the other respondent categories. Hence, this research project contributes to a better understanding of how institutional pressures, which create "isomorphic" organizations by leading them to adopt identical management models, are reinterpreted, renegotiated, and modified within organizations. The proposed typology casts doubt on the mechanistic, consensual, and monolithic view of the ISO 9000 system that underlies most of the work on this theme. In particular, this study demonstrates the relevance of adopting both the institutionalist and critical approaches in efforts to explain the respondents' opinions. In so doing, the personnel's support for the ISO 9000 system and the certification process can then be analyzed from different angles. This certification process would ultimately appear to be a rite of passage that gives rise to various strategies that depend on the respondents' category and their support for the standard.
SNNN: Promoting Word Sentiment and Negation in Neural Sentiment Classification

We mainly investigate word influence in neural sentiment classification, which results in a novel approach to promoting word sentiment and negation as attentions. Particularly, a sentiment and negation neural network (SNNN) is proposed, including a sentiment neural network (SNN) and a negation neural network (NNN). First, we modify the word level by embedding the word sentiment and negation information as the extra layers for the input. Second, we adopt a hierarchical LSTM model to generate the word-level, sentence-level and document-level representations respectively. After that, we enhance word sentiment and negation as attentions over the semantic level. Finally, the experiments conducting on the IMDB and Yelp data sets show that our approach is superior to the state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, we draw the interesting conclusions that (1) LSTM performs better than CNN and RNN for neural sentiment classification; (2) word sentiment and negation are a strong alliance with attention, while overfitting occurs when they are simultaneously applied at the embedding layer; and (3) word sentiment/negation can be singly implemented for better performance as both embedding layer and attention at the same time.
Wagner’s Law: Is It Valid in India?

The paper investigates the validity of a long-run relationship between public expenditure and income (Wagner’s Law) in the case of India over the period 1970-2004. The study, by using the modern time series econometric technique, finds evidence of long-run relationship between public expenditure and income but rules out the validity of Wagner’s Law. This is because there is no unidirectional causality from income to public expenditure. However, the study finds evidence of a unidirectional causality from public expenditure to income. It eventually suggests that public expenditure is an important policy tool to influence income level in the economy.
Uncertainty, identifiability and the propagation of prediction errors: A case study of lake ontario

Most models of environmental systems can be expected to suffer, to a varying extent, from a lack of identifiability. Overparameterization seems both intrinsic and an intractable problem. As a result, interpretation of past observed behaviour through a model is ambiguous, and this will have obvious implications for any predictions of future behaviour. There has been much study of this issue of uncertainty in environmental modelling, yet very limited investigation of its consequences in the use of larger-scale models. The paper examines some of these consequences for a model of the carbon and phosphorus cycles in Lake Ontario having 24 state variables and thirteen parameters. Filtering theory is used to provide both the conceptual framework for the analysis and a specific, recursive algorithm for the propagation of a variance-covariance matrix of state prediction errors. Special attention is given to examining the ambiguities that may arise in the making of predictions, and the possibility of generating contradictory statements about future behaviour is introduced. It is found that with this relatively large model the propagation of prediction error variances is insensitive to the degree of correlation among the parameter-estimation errors and to changes of the nominal estimated values of small subsets of parameters.
Review of distance education research (2000 to 2008): Analysis of research areas, methods, and authorship patterns

This paper presents a review of distance education literature to describe the status thereof and to identify gaps and priority areas in distance education research based on a validated classification of research areas. The articles ( N = 695) published in five prominent distance education journals between 2000 and 2008 were reviewed for this study. The conclusion is that distance education research is strongly dominated by issues related to instructional design and individual learning processes; whereas, other important areas (e.g., innovation and change management or intercultural aspects of distance learning) are dreadfully neglected. There is a significant trend towards collaborative research and more qualitative studies. Over 80% of all articles originate from only five countries.
The effect of corruption on entrepreneurship in developed vs non-developed countries

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the relationship between corruption and productive entrepreneurship in general and whether it depends on countries’ specific characteristics in particular. Design/methodology/approach – The authors used a unique data set of entrepreneurial activity within 176 countries, collected from the professional networking site LinkedIn. The authors used OLS regression to estimate the level of entrepreneurship. The main independent variable was the CPI score (Transparency International). In addition, two sub-samples were used, 70 less-developed countries and 34 OECD countries, and numerous control variables. Findings – The paper makes three important contributions to the field. First, it proposes worldwide empirical evidence that countries with high levels of corruption usually face low levels of productive entrepreneurship. Second, the paper suggests that the negative effect is much more significant in developed countries than in developing countries. Third, the pa.
Insights into the Momentum Life Cycle for European Stocks

This article evaluates price and earnings momentum strategies constructed using either single or multiple criteria not only to establish how these strategies performed in the major European markets over the last 15 years but also to enhance our knowledge as to how to place a stock in its momentum life cycle. In terms of performance, we established that price momentum strategies outperformed earnings momentum strategies but that they complemented each other when combined. We also established means for enhancing both price and earnings momentum strategies and determined what combination of price momentum with enhanced earnings momentum produced the best results both at the country/region level and the aggregated level. These findings suggest that the earnings forecasts made by the equity analysts provide a good indication as to the positioning of a stock in its momentum life cycle. However, subsequent analysis established that this is only true for wining stocks and that these forecast provide no incremental information when it comes to predicting the future performance of losing stocks over the holding periods considered.
Percutaneous ablation procedures in cirrhotic patients with hepatocellular carcinoma submitted to liver transplantation: Assessment of efficacy at explant analysis and of safety for tumor recurrence

Aims of this retrospective study were to analyze the efficacy and safety of percutaneous ethanol injection (PEI) and radiofrequency ablation (RFA) in cirrhotic patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) submitted to orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT). We studied 40 patients undergoing OLT in whom 46 HCC nodules had been treated with PEI (13 nodules), RFA (30 nodules), or PEI+RFA (3 nodules). Child‐Turcotte‐Pugh class was A in 18 cases, B in 18, and C in 4. The mean waiting time for OLT was 9.5 months. The effectiveness of ablation techniques was evaluated by histological examination of the explanted livers. Complete necrosis was found in 19 nodules (41.3%), partial or absent necrosis in 27 nodules (58.7%). Among the 30 nodules treated by RFA, 14 were completely necrotic (46.7%) and 16 demonstrated partial necrosis (53.3%). Considering the 13 neoplasms undergoing PEI, 3 nodules showed complete necrosis (23.1%), 6 partial necrosis (46.1%), and 4 absent necrosis (30.8%). The rate of complete necrosis was 53.1% for nodules smaller than 3 cm and 14.3% for larger lesions (P = 0.033) but increased to 61.9% when considering only the lesions smaller than 3 cm treated by RFA. During the follow up, HCC recurred in 3 patients treated by PEI. No cases of HCC recurrence at the abdominal wall level were recorded. Percutaneous ablation procedures are effective treatments in cirrhotic patients with HCC submitted to OLT and are not associated to an increased risk of tumor recurrence. RFA provides complete necrosis in most nodules smaller than 3 cm, and appears to be the best treatment option in these cases. (Liver Transpl 2005;11:1117–1126.)
Nutritional, Therapeutic, and Prophylactic Properties of Vigna subterranea and Moringa oleifera

Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea (L.) Verdc. ) [BGN] is an easy-to-cultivate legume seed classified under the family Fabaceae, sub-family Faboidea and genus Vigna [1]. Two botanical varieties exist, namely V. subterranea var. spontanea (wild varieties) and V. subterranea var. subterranea (cultivated varieties). BGN originated in West Africa from the Bambara district near Timbuktu and is now widely grown throughout tropical Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Central and South America and some parts of Northern Australia [2-4]. BGN is known by many common names such as Madagascar groundnut, baffin pea, voandzou, indhlubu, underground bean, nzama [Malawi], Epa-Roro [Nigeria], jugo beans [South Africa] and Nyimo beans [Zimbabwe] [1, 5]. Considered as one of the main attributes of BGN, is its tolerance of poor soils and drought, as well as its ability to yield in conditions in which groundnut fails completely. BGN also has an extremely tough seed coat, which makes it resistant to weevil attack and allows for storage of the seeds for long periods without loss [6]. Favourable characteristics making BGN an ideal crop includes its ability to be intercropped with other crops (i.e. maize, babala and sorghum), therefore not taking up areas designated to crops seen as more lucrative/important, its abundance in nitrogen which improves soil fertility and makes it useful in crop rotation, and the possibility to be grown without the use of expensive chemicals and fertilisers which are usually difficult to obtain in isolated areas [4].
The Impact of Basel III Bank Regulation on Lending Spreads

We estimate required increase in banks’ lending spreads assuming that banks would raise lending spreads among the measures they could take to prevent ROE from falling when the capital regulation is tightened following the estimation methodology employed by King (2010) and Elliott (2009). We find that the required lending spreads vary from 0.1bp for real estate & mortgage banks to 9.1bp for commercial banks over the sample periods of 2005-2010. Countries such as Brazil, China, India, and Mexico require the banks to have large lending spreads ranging from 13.2bp to 29.7bp. On the other hand, countries such as Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Netherland require them to increase smaller lending spreads for the increase in the regulatory capital. We find that liquidity regulation (NSFR) increases lending rates by 20.0bp for the commercial banks of the sample countries.