Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multilateral, Regional and Bilateral Trade-Policy Options for the United States and Japan

We have used the Michigan Model of World Production and Trade to simulate the economic effects on the United States, Japan, and other major trading countries/regions of the Doha Round of WTO multilateral trade negotiations and a variety of regional/bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) involving the United States and Japan. We estimate that an assumed reduction of post-Uruguay Round tariffs and other barriers on agricultural and industrial products and services by 33 per cent in the Doha Round would increase world welfare by $686.4 billion, with gains of $164.0 billion for the United States, $132.6 billion for Japan, and significant gains for all other industrialised and developing countries/regions. If there were global free trade with all post-Uruguay Round trade barriers completely removed, world welfare would increase by $2.1 trillion, with gains of $497.0 billion (5.5 per cent of GNP) for the United States and $401.9 billion (6.2 per cent of GNP) for Japan. Regional agreements such as an APEC FTA, an ASEAN Plus 3 FTA, and a Western Hemisphere FTA would increase global and member country welfare but much less so than the Doha multilateral trade round would. Separate bilateral FTAs involving Japan with Singapore, Mexico, Chile and Korea, and the United States with Chile, Singapore and Korea would have positive, though generally small, welfare effects on the partner countries, but potentially disruptive sectoral employment shifts in some countries. There would be trade diversion and detrimental welfare effects on some non-member countries for both the regional and bilateral FTAs analysed. The welfare gains from multilateral trade liberalisation are therefore considerably greater than the gains from preferential trading arrangements and more uniformly positive for all countries.
A Structural Econometric Model of Joint Consumption of Goods and Recreational Time: An Application to Pick‐Your‐Own Fruit

This article develops a structural econometric consumer demand model for goods, which have time and monetary costs, and where time spent obtaining the goods also enters into the utility function. The model is used to analyze customers' decision to buy pick-your-own versus preharvested strawberries at North Carolina pick-your-own fruit operations. The analysis distinguishes the effect of time as a resource constraint and time that provides utility. Demand for strawberries sold at the operations is price elastic, and demand for pick-your-own strawberries is less price elastic than demand for preharvested strawberries. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.
Differences in Customers’ Online Service Satisfaction Across Cultures: The Role of Thinking Style

ABSTRACT Online retailers constantly strive to improve customer satisfaction. However, satisfaction levels can vary significantly across cultures when customers experience mixed quality services, that is, services with a mixture of high and low quality service attributes. Based on two studies, we find that Westerners (e.g., European Americans) react more negatively than East Asians (e.g., Chinese) toward mixed quality online services. Our findings show that due to differences in thinking style, Westerners (analytic thinkers) are more likely to focus on negative service attributes than East Asians (holistic thinkers), who tend to consider the amalgam of high and low quality service attributes as an integrated whole when forming their overall perceptions and levels of satisfaction. Moreover, the results suggest that for online retailers marketing across cultures, providing superior quality on each individual service attribute may be more important to achieving satisfaction for customers from Western rather than Eastern cultures.
Prediction of bank failures in emerging financial markets: an ANN approach

Purpose - The recent financial crises in the world have brought attention to the need for a new international financial architecture which rests on crisis prevention, crisis prediction and crisis management. It is therefore both desirable and vital to explore new predictive techniques for providing early warnings to regulatory agencies. The purpose of this study is to propose a new technique to prevent future crises, with reference to the last banking crises in Turkey. Design/methodology/approach - ANN is utilized as an inductive algorithm in discovering predictive knowledge structures in financial data and used to explain previous bank failures in the Turkish banking sector as a special case of EFMs (emerging financial markets). Findings - The empirical results indicate that ANN is proved to differentiate patterns or trends in financial data. Most of the bank failures could be predicted long before, with the utilization of an ANN classification approach, but more importantly it could be proposed to detect early warning signals of potential failures, as in the case of the Turkish banking sector. Practical implications - The regulatory agencies could use ANN as an alternative method to predict and prevent future systemic banking crises in order to minimize the cost to the economy. Originality/value - This paper reveals that the ANN approach can be proposed as a promising method of evaluating financial conditions in terms of predictive accuracy, adaptability and robustness, and as an alternative early warning method that can be used along with the most common alternatives such as CAMEL, financial ratio and peer group analysis, comprehensive bank risk assessment, and econometric models.
An information theoretic analysis of stock returns, volatility and trading volumes

Information theory is used to examine the dynamic relationships between stock returns, volatility and trading volumes for S&P500 stocks. This provides an alternative approach to traditional Granger causality tests when dealing with nonlinear relationships. The article highlights the dominant role played by trading volumes in all of these relationships – even in the return–volatility relation – and finds evidence of a market level feedback effect from index returns to the return–volatility relation at the stock level. The article also produces a number of stylized facts from an information theoretic perspective.
‘Part-time and Part-committed’?: The Challenges of Part-time Work in Policing

In police services, both in Australia and internationally, attention has been focused on increasing the representation of women. The availability of part-time work has been identified as a key mechanism to retain women who have been recruited. To date, however, the take-up of part-time work remains low. It is also concentrated in administrative work and non-operational policing work. In this article, we draw on research in Victoria Police around the experiences of, and attitudes towards, part-time work. The research suggests that there are a number of policy constraints to the take up of part-time work, particularly by police officers. There are also significant cultural barriers to both increasing and integrating part-time work, which influence attitudes to part-time work at all levels of the organization. However, these barriers are intertwined with and reinforced by institutional structures and processes that position part-time work as ‘other’ and a gendered understanding of police work. In increasing access to part-time work, the challenge for police services is to address both institutional and cultural barriers to the integration of part-time and full-time work.
EXPLICIT INFRASTRUCTURE FOR REAL QUADRATIC FUNCTION FIELDS AND REAL HYPERELLIPTIC CURVES

In 1989, Koblitz first proposed the Jacobian of a an imaginary hyperelliptic curve for use in public-key cryptographic protocols. This concept is a generalization of elliptic curve cryptography. It can be used with the same assumed key-per-bit strength for small genus. More recently, real hyperelliptic curves of small genus have been introduced as another source for cryptographic protocols. The arithmetic is more involved than its imaginary counterparts and it is based on the so-called infrastructure of the set of reduced principal ideals in the ring of regular functions of the curve. This infrastructure is an interesting phenomenon. The main purpose of this article is to explain the infrastructure in explicit terms and thus extend Shanks’ infrastructure ideas in real quadratic number fields to the case of real quadratic congruence function fields and their curves. Hereby, we first present an elementary introduction to the continued fraction expansion of real quadratic irrationalities and then generalize important results for reduced ideals.
Students as Customers: The Influence of Neoliberal Ideology and Free-Market Logic on Entering First-Year College Students

ideas about education and students’ person al educational experiences as they research the extent to which students express a cus tomer orientation towards their education. Further, these results suggest that neo liberal ideology may have influenced students’ overall understandings of their education l world, but have not as substantially affected students’ views and planned behaviors of t heir own education. The findings of this study also have important impl ications regarding the idea of contradictory consciousness and the manifestations of eoliberal ideology in colleges and
Characterization of a New DGKE Intronic Mutation in Genetically Unsolved Cases of Familial Atypical Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Genetic and acquired abnormalities causing dysregulation of the complement alternative pathway contribute to atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome (aHUS), a rare disorder characterized by thrombocytopenia, nonimmune microangiopathic hemolytic anemia, and acute kidney failure. However, in a substantial proportion of patients the disease-associated alterations are still unknown. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS Whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing were performed in two unrelated families with infantile recessive aHUS. Sequencing of cDNA from affected individuals was used to test for the presence of aberrant mRNA species. Expression of mutant diacylglycerol kinase epsilon (DGKE) protein was evaluated with western blotting. RESULTS Whole-exome sequencing analysis with conventional variant filtering parameters did not reveal any obvious candidate mutation in the first family. The report of aHUS-associated mutations in DGKE, encoding DGKE, led to re-examination of the noncoding DGKE variants obtained from next-generation sequencing, allowing identification of a novel intronic DGKE mutation (c.888+40A>G) that segregated with disease. Sequencing of cDNA from affected individuals revealed aberrant forms of DGKE mRNA predicted to cause profound abnormalities in the protein catalytic site. By whole-genome sequencing, the same mutation was found in compound heterozygosity with a second nonsense DGKE mutation in all affected siblings of another unrelated family. Homozygous and compound heterozygous patients presented similar clinical features, including aHUS presentation in the first year of life, multiple relapsing episodes, and proteinuria, which are prototypical of DGKE-associated aHUS. CONCLUSIONS This is the first report of a mutation located beyond the exon-intron boundaries in aHUS. Intronic mutations such as these are underreported because conventional filtering parameters used to process next-generation sequencing data routinely exclude these regions from downstream analyses in both research and clinical settings. The results suggest that analysis of noncoding regions of aHUS-associated genes coupled with mRNA sequencing might provide a tool to explain genetically unsolved aHUS cases.
Regulatory Burden, Rule of Law, and Entry of Strategic Entrepreneurs: An International Panel Study

Entry into entrepreneurship is a strategic act for individuals who seek an optimal way to exploit their human, social, and financial capital. Trade‐offs associated with this choice are influenced by institutional conditions. We use signalling theory, employment choice theory, and theory on strategic entry to develop hypotheses on the effect of business regulations and rule of law on strategic and non‐strategic entrepreneurial entry. Analysing a six‐year panel of 54 countries, we find lighter burden of regulation associated with a higher rate and relative prevalence of strategic entrepreneurial entry. Rule of law moderates this effect such that regulation has a significant effect on strategic entry only when rule of law is strong. These findings are robust against alternative proxies. Implications are drawn for prospective entrepreneurs, existing organizations, policy, and further research.
Let me in the cloud: analysis of the benefit and risk assessment of cloud platform

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the vulnerabilities of the cloud platform affecting businesses trading on the internet. It aims to examine the appropriateness of the cloud computing, its benefits to the industry and helps to identify security concerns for businesses that plan to deploy one of the cloud platforms. It helps to identify areas where businesses should focus before choosing an appropriate Cloud Service Provider (CSP). Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents the findings of an original research survey (200 IT professionals working both in the public and private sectors) undertaken to examine their privacy, and data security concerns associated with the cloud platform. Views of those who have yet to deploy cloud were analysed to detect the patterns of common security issues. Cyber fraud and trust concerns of the organisations are addressed and deployment of the secured cloud environment is outlined.Findings – The survey analysis highlighted that the top conce.
INAA to Determine Trace Element Concentrations in the Hair of Street Children of Isfahan City, Iran

This study aimed to assess trace element concentrations in the hair of street children. Nutritional status was assessed by 24 hours’ dietary recall and anthropometric measurements. Data analysis found that Br, Sc, Sm and Ti concentrations show a normal distribution, and there is no significant difference between street children and control group. However, in the street children’s hair, the levels of Au, U, V are decreased and the levels of Co, La, Sb, Th are increased compared to the control group.
Bequest motives in a life-cycle model with intergenerational interactions

This paper revisits the debate on altruism vs exchange motive for bequest and studies to what extent the saving behavior of elderly Europeans is di↵erent in the presence or absence of adult children. To this purpose, we develop a structural model with two overlapping generations, namely elderly parents and their adult children. For each generation, we formulate a separate lifecycle model in which individuals consume and save. Children care about their elderly parents’ health and may choose to support them via money transfers and time assistance. Parents, on the other hand, must cover the health costs resulting from heterogeneous health and medical spending shocks, and they can do so via formal insurance (purchased beforehand), informal insurance (provided through time and money transfers by their children) and out-of-pocket. We join the two lifecycle models in a dynamic game between parents and children, which we show has a unique Markov perfect equilibrium. We estimate the model on SHARE data using the simulated method of moments. Preliminary results show a significant bequest motive for savings in Europe. In an altruistic world, children have a considerable incentive to provide both time and financial help, and this greatly impacts the parents’ savings behavior. Moreover, health, medical spending and health insurance also appear to be crucial in determining the old age saving patterns. Finally, counterfactual experiments show that considering only the strategic motive for bequest cannot explain the slow wealth decumulation in old age or the children’s transfers patterns.
Asset Characteristics and Boom and Bust Periods: An Experimental Study

We examine the impact of transaction costs, short selling restrictions and divisibility of assets on market efficiency in experimental asset markets. We find that transaction costs do not exacerbate the inefficiency of the market. They reduce the magnitude of bubbles and push prices closer to fundamentals. More divisible assets exhibit smaller deviations of prices from fundamentals. Short selling restrictions contribute to prolonged bubbles, while relaxing them increases the occurrence of “bust cycles. ” We also find that experimental real estate markets display larger deviations of prices from fundamental values, longer boom and bust cycles and smaller turnover than experimental financial markets.
Maximizing an economic recession through strategic organizational repositioning

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the possibilities for strategically and politically repositioning a library, despite economic hardships, for stronger relations with administration, local government, and user communities.Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a case study of Murray State University Libraries' efforts to seize the current recession to conduct capital construction planning, donor development, and political positioning for a new library facility. Additionally, the case study details some of the activities undertaken during the recession to implement a pay‐per‐view journal article process and value‐added reference services.Findings – This case study finds that strategically repositioning a library with administration, local government, or the user community can be undertaken on either larger or smaller scales, depending on the particular circumstances in which a library operates.Originality/value – While the literature is rife with papers urging libraries and .
Correlates of Child Maltreatment Among Adolescent Mothers With Young Children

Child maltreatment and teen pregnancy are serious social problems facing America today. In 2010, 3.3 million referrals of child abuse and neglect resulted in approximately 461,297 confirmed victims. Teen pregnancy has similarly been a cause of serious political and social concern. Although the teen birth rate has declined overall during the last half century, the United States still has a higher teen birth rate than other industrialized countries. Young maternal age is generally considered a risk factor for child maltreatment. What is not known is what separates adolescent mothers who maltreat their children and those who do not. This study compares the ecological correlates of adolescent mothers who maltreat their children to adolescent mothers who do not maltreat. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.
Evaluation of community planning and life of senior cohousing projects in northern European countries1

Cohousing schemes were evolved as alternative housing to reduce housework for working women, and to reduce loneliness of elderly people by promoting active mutual relationship with community residents in northern European countries. This article discusses how residents manage their life in senior cohousing projects in Sweden and Denmark. The purpose of this study is to investigate residents' life satisfaction connected with demographic characteristics of residents, physical environment and common activities in the senior cohousing communities, so that it could offer usable information for the establishment of new senior cohousing projects in other countries, as well as an empirical evaluation of the existing projects in Scandinavian countries themselves. Important variables influential to residents' life satisfaction are also discussed in order to improve senior citizens' quality of life. The methods used for the study are literature review, interviews, field trips and questionnaire. Nine hundred and thirty‐five postal questionnares were sent to 28 senior cohousing communities throughout Denmark and Sweden. Of those 536 replies were collected and analysed by SPSS program using frequency, mean and Chi‐square test. As a result, it was found out that most of the respondents are healthy, 70‐year‐olds, and satisfied with their current living in the community. The majority of them also would like to strongly recommend others to move to senior cohousing schemes to improve quality of life in their later years. Residents' intensive concern about building location and design is a noteworthy reminder for designers and architects as well as for professionals and decision‐makers who work in the elderly welfare sector.
The potential of the CDM to deliver pro-poor benefits

The potential of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects to deliver pro-poor benefits at the community level is examined. Both regular CDM and premium add-on standard projects are evaluated, including the Gold Standard and Climate, Community and Biodiversity (CCB) Standard, through the use of seven poverty indicators. Some key characteristics associated with providing pro-poor benefits are also identified. Finally, the market potential of a revised or new premium add-on standard explicitly designed to deliver pro-poor benefits is assessed through the use of a survey. The results indicate that regular CDM projects are only moderately successful at delivering pro-poor benefits. Although the few projects registered that utilize the CCB Standard all performed well in delivering pro-poor benefits, those that used the Gold Standard performed only slightly better than regular CDM projects. Characteristics associated with providing pro-poor benefits include the use of add-on standards, a high level of stakeholder participation, and the development of projects by not-for-profit and government/intergovernmental organizations. The survey of carbon market participants indicated both an interest and desire for Certified Emission Reduction (CER) credits with pro-poor benefits attached and shows that the market potential for such a standard to be quite good. Policy relevance This analysis of the CDM goes beyond sustainable development to consider the potential of a project to deliver pro-poor benefits at the local community level. Specific characteristics associated with projects are identified that appear to deliver pro-poor benefits that may benefit future project design. Through this analysis and identifying these characteristics, actions may be taken to incorporate those into CDM project requirements or guidelines to advance the mechanism as a means to contribute to poverty alleviation.
JOBS-HOUSING BALANCE REVISITED: TRENDS AND IMPACTS IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA.

Abstract Regions in California have recently set jobs-housing balance targets, to relieve traffic congestion and improve air quality. Critics of such targets charge that many factors prevent people from living near their workplaces, and that market forces, left unobstructed, work to produce balance—that is, people and firms co-locate to reduce imbalances. This article examines changes in the ratios of jobs to employed residents in 23 large San Francisco Bay Area cities during the 1980s. Imbalances were found to have declined generally, mainly because dormitory communities in 1980 had attracted businesses by 1990. However, imbalances generally worsened in job-surplus cities, particularly in the Silicon Valley. The research also reveals little association between jobs-housing balance and self-containment. Several Bay Area cities are nearly perfectly balanced, yet fewer than a third of their workers reside locally, and even smaller shares of residents work locally. Restricted housing production, especially i.