Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
International Financial Liberalization, Corruption, and Economic Growth

This paper examines the effects of capital account liberalization on the long-run growth of a developing economy. A general-equilibrium, endogenous growth model is constructed in which corruption forms an integral part of the governance system of the country. By undermining the profitability of innovations, corruption lowers the rate of return to capital and reduces the rate of technological change. The impact of international financial liberalization on long-run growth in this model can be either positive or negative. A drop in growth is obtained when the level of corruption is high enough to cause domestic rates of return to capital before liberalization to drop below those in the rest of the world. In this case, liberalization generates capital outflows, which act as a constraining force on innovation, reducing the rate of technological change and lowering output growth. On the other hand, if the level of corruption is sufficiently low, the capital account liberalization will serve as a boost to the country's technical change and growth. Copyright 2001 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Does downside beta matter in asset pricing?

By carefully choosing a data-generating process and appropriate distributional assumptions, we formulate a nested econometric model to examine how many equities are explained well by the downside beta or a general asymmetric response model rather than the conventional capital asset pricing model (CAPM) beta. Using UK equity data, we show that the downside beta explains 15–25% of equities in addition to CAPM that explains 50–80% of equities. These results suggest that although the lower partial moment CAPM explains equity returns better than the conventional CAPM, the proportion of equities benefiting from using the downside beta is not large enough to improve asset pricing models significantly.
Anti‐Competitive Interconnection: The Effects of the Elasticity of Consumers' Expectations and the Shape of the Network Effects Function

type="main"> I find that interconnection might cause the market to be less competitive, and might lead to an increase in the price firms charge for their product. Absent interconnection, firms compete for a consumer for two reasons. The first reason is to obtain revenue from selling the product to a consumer (as in the case without network effects). The second reason is that by expanding the network by one more consumer, the product becomes more attractive to all other consumers. Interconnection eliminates the second reason—when firms interconnect, they are no longer concerned with consumers' following the crowd. I show that consumers and society might be worse off from interconnection. I focus on two factors that make the (post-interconnection) price increase larger: consumer expectations that are highly sensitive to prices and consumers putting a high value on small increases in network size at the equilibrium market shares. Both of these factors make firms highly competitive, but only if the firms' products' networks are not interconnected.
Emerging Markets and Financial Globalization: Sovereign Bond Spreads in 1870-1913 and Today

The frequency and virulence of recent financial crises have led to calls for reform of the current international financial architecture. In an effort to learn more about today's international financial environment, the authors turn to an earlier era of financial globalization between 1870 and 1913. By examining data on sovereign bonds issued by borrowing developing countries in this earlier period and in the present day, the authors are able to identify the characteristics of successful borrowers in the two periods. They are then able to show that global crises or contagion are a feature of the 1990s which was hardly known in the previous era of globalization. Finally, the authors draw lessons for today from archival data on mechanisms used by British investors in the 19th century to address sovereign defaults. Using new qualitative and quantitative data, the authors skillfully apply a variety of approaches in order to better understand how problems of volatility and debt crises are dealt with in international financial markets.
Board governance and company performance: any correlations?

There persists the belief that a firm’s only responsibility to society is to maximize profits without breaking the law, hence the role of corporate governance is to provide appropriate corporate control. Research suggests that there is a growing perception that corporations are social entities overall, answerable to social constituencies and that the role of corporate governance is to understand and adequately address the interest of such social and political constituents. A review of research studies in the area of corporate governance’s contribution to corporate performance reveals that there is no conclusive evidence of contribution. Moreover, it illuminates the need for a boarder criteria of performance and for the adoption of a political model of corporate governance in order to facilitate a corporation’s external accountabilities.
Australian Capital City Real House Prices, 1979–1993

Real house prices have increased by 35 per cent in Australian capital cities during the last 15 years, with Brisbane, Canberra, and Sydney experiencing rises of 48 to 61 per cent and Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth having increases of 20 per cent or less. This article estimates a single model for the six cities to explain the divergent real price behaviour over time and space. It is concluded that the fundamental forces driving real house prices are the growth rate in real wage income (primarily due to employment growth) and the growth in population caused by net overseas migration. Copyright 1995 The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.
Capsule Network Performance on Complex Data

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have played an important role in the field of deep learning. Variants of CNN's have proven to be very successful in classification tasks across different domains. However, there are two big drawbacks to CNN's: their failure to take into account of important spatial hierarchies between features, and their lack of rotational invariance. As long as certain key features of an object are present in the test data, CNN's classify the test data as the object, disregarding features' relative spatial orientation to each other. This causes false positives. The lack of rotational invariance in CNN's would cause the network to incorrectly assign the object another label, causing false negatives. To address this concern, Hinton et al. propose a novel type of neural network using the concept of capsules in a recent paper. With the use of dynamic routing and reconstruction regularization, the capsule network model would be both rotation invariant and spatially aware. The capsule network has shown its potential by achieving a state-of-the-art result of 0.25% test error on MNIST without data augmentation such as rotation and scaling, better than the previous baseline of 0.39%. To further test out the application of capsule networks on data with higher dimensionality, we attempt to find the best set of configurations that yield the optimal test error on CIFAR10 dataset.
Expression of long‐term potentiation in aged rats involves perforated synapses but dendritic spine branching results from high‐frequency stimulation alone

Evidence for morphological substrates of long‐term changes in synaptic efficacy is controversial, partly because it is difficult to employ an unambiguous control. We have used a high‐frequency stimulation protocol in vivo to induce long‐term potentiation (LTP) in the hippocampal dentate gyrus of aged (22‐month‐old) rats and have found a clear distinction between animals that sustain LTP and those that fail to sustain it. The “failure group” was used as a specific/“like‐with‐like” control for morphological changes associated with the expression of LTP per se. Quantitative optical and electron microscopy was used to analyze large populations of dendritic spines and excitatory perforant path synapses; LTP was found to be associated with an increase in numbers of segmented (perforated) postsynaptic densities in spine synapses. In contrast, an increase in the number of branched spines appears to result from high‐frequency stimulation alone. These data shed light on the current controversy about the expression mechanism of LTP. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Why do US banks borrow from the Fed? A fresh look at the ‘reluctance’ phenomenon

The role of several theoretical factors in determining the demand of US banks for borrowed reserves from the Fed is empirically investigated. The main objective is to isolate the candidate(s) most likely responsible for the recent observed phenomenon of banks reluctance to borrow from the Fed, particularly since the mid-1980s. The results indicate that the declining number of banks due to mergers and consolidations holds much of the weight for explaining the weakened demand for borrowed reserves since the mid-1980s. Consistent evidence is found suggesting that US banks may have been unlawfully exploiting the discount window service for profit-taking purposes. This finding proves credible and suggests the need for further loan scrutiny at the Federal discount window.
An investigation into explosive force variation using occlusal bites.

OBJECTIVE To analyse the relationship between occlusion, posture and athletic performance in 15 professional basketball players. MATERIALS AND METHOD; The athletes were divided into two groups; the 8 subjects in the test group were fitted with retainers and the 7 subjects in the other group were used as control. All of the athletes underwent electromyographic and kinaesiographic examination with Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) before and after muscular relaxation to identify the myocentric position and to permit individualisation of the retainers. The effect of the intraoral devices on explosive force was evaluated via two functional tests: the countermovement jump (CMJ), and unilateral (UL) and bilateral (BL) stiffness jumps. The functional tests were carried out both before (T0) and immediately after (T1) fitting the retainer in an initial session, and then again, in a second session held two months later both without (T2) and with the retainer in place (T3). RESULTS Statistical analysis of the data obtained revealed a statistically significant difference between T3 and T0, and between T3 and T2 in the study group, and between T0 and T3 in the control group; no statistically significant differences between the two groups were found. CONCLUSION The results of this analysis lead us to conclude that the retainers had no effect on athletic performance, and that the improvement in this criteria noted in both groups in the second session was probably brought about by training.
Do Aggregate Demand Factors Influence Current Inflation Developments

The relationship between inflation developments and aggregate demand is usually modeled with a Phillips curve. This study estimates the Phillips curve for Austria and, for the sake of comparison, for the euro area as well as for four euro area member countries. In order to test the robustness of our results, we estimate both the traditional and the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) for the period from 1970 to 2007. We also investigate whether the relationship between economic activity and inflation has changed over time. The results show that there was indeed a significant relationship between inflation and the output gap in most countries; but its coefficient diminished over the years, and became insignificant in almost all countries toward the end of the estimation period. Exceptions are Austria and the Netherlands: For these countries the estimates are not significant, and for Austria we get contradictory results. We can conclude from this and from the observation that the output gap in the countries under review is now slightly negative, or at best closed, that the current rise in inflation is not the result of an overheating economy.
Embeddedness and collaborative venture networks among Korean construction firms for overseas construction projects

AbstractFinding competent collaborators while executing construction projects overseas is of paramount importance for project success. The partner choice and project performance cannot be understood only from an economic viewpoint because it is constrained by the firms’ embeddedness in social relations. Based on this premise, this paper provides not only a theoretical explanation of the impact of structural and relational embeddedness on firms’ economic behaviour and outcomes, but also empirical evidence by analysing the collaborative process among Korean construction firms working overseas during the past 18 years. Three conclusions are drawn. First, the inter-firm network, at least asymptotically, has scale-free network properties with variance. Second, the network retained endogamic characteristics in that a great majority of smaller firms had worked with only one large firm, forming strong subgroups. Last, there is a plausible evidence of the impact of both structural embeddedness and relational embed.
Managing Time in Domestic Space

Much research shows that paid work performed at home supports a gendered division of household labor, leaving women disproportionately responsible for unpaid domestic work. For contract professionals, however, the flexibility to manage working time outside the constraints of a standard job allows both men and women to meld paid employment with household responsibilities. Interspersing paid and unpaid work, home-based contractors—both women and men—accommodate family needs. They arrange daily schedules to be available parents and household managers, and they develop longer-term career trajectories that allow adjustment over time. For women, however, long-standing notions of domesticity make such accommodation invisible, normative, and unremarkable. For men, in contrast, home-based contracting can create the space with which to challenge gender norms. For these home workers, therefore, the same arrangement simultaneously reinforces and resists conventional constructions of gender.
Two sources of voicing neutralization in Lithuanian

This study compares two processes that result in voicing neu tralization in Lithuanian: regressive voicing assimilation in obstruent clusters and final devoicing of obstruents. Acoustic data is analyzed to assess the behavi our of three acoustic cues to obstruent voicing (i.e. closure and preceding vowel duration and voi cing during closure) in both neutralizing environments. The results show that, although both processes result in incomplete voicing neutralization, they us e the acoustic cues differently. This suggests that final devoicing and voicing assimil ation have different acoustic realizations, supporting their analysis as two di fferent processes.
Genetic variation of aryl hydrocarbon hydroxylase in human lymphocytes.

Aryl hydrocarbon hydroxylase (AHH) is one of the mixed function oxidases [1] in the microsomal fraction of many mammalian tissues. While the exact physiological role of this membrane-bound enzyme is not understood, it is known to hydroxylate a wide variety of exogenous hydrocarbons including many drugs, insecticides, steroids, and chemical carcinogens [2, 3]. The initial step in the microsomal oxidation of polycyclic hydrocarbons, catalyzed by AHH, involves the formation of epoxides [4] which are considered to be the active form of the carcinogen [5, 6]. The AHH enzyme is inducible, with an increase up to 10 times resting levels within 1-3 days after presentation of the inducing agent. A variety of substances act as inducers, including the hydrocarbon substrates [7], barbiturates, and others [8, 9]. Animal studies have demonstrated that extent of induction varies widely within a species [10]. Further, genetic studies of mouse strains suggest that the capacity for induction is controlled by a single autosomal locus [10, 11]. We recently demonstrated [12] that there is wide variation in extent of AHH inducibility in human lymphocytes. The present study was undertaken to determine if such variation is under genetic control.
The effects of the late 2000s global financial crisis on Australia's construction demand

An accurate measurement of the impacts of external shocks on construction demand will enable construction industry policymakers and developers to make allowances for future occurrences and advance the construction industry in a sustainable manner. This paper aims to measurethe dynamic effects of the late 2000s global financial crisis on the level of demand in the Australian construction industry. The vector error correction (VEC) model with intervention indicators is employed to estimate the external impact from the crisis on a macro-level construction economic indicator, namely construction demand. The methodology comprises six main stages to produce appropriate VEC models that describe the characteristics of the underlying process. Research findings suggestthat overall residential and non-residential construction demand were affected significantly by the recent crisis and seasonality. Non-residentialconstruction demand was disrupted more than residential construction demand at the crisis onset. The residential constructionindustry is more reactive and is able to recover faster following the crisis in comparison with the non-residential industry. The VEC model with intervention indicators developed in this study can be used as an experiment for an advanced econometric method. This can be used to analyse the effects of special eventsand factors not only on construction but also on other industries.
Alternative Monetary Regimes in a DSGE Model of a Small Open Economy with Two Sectors and Sticky Prices and Wages

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium(DSGE) model for a small open economy (SOE) that can be calibrated to simulate the macro dynamics of a semi-industrialized developing country like Argentina. We consider a multilateral non-commodity trade environment, with the U.S.A. and Europe as trade partners, and assume that the Law of One Price does not hold for the goods that the U.S.A. and Europe trade between them. We show that this makes the U.S.A. ´s multilateral real exchange rate (MRER) a key fundamental for the SOE´s MRER, in addition to its terms of trade. The SOE produces and consumes exportable and non tradable goods using labor (and in the case of exportables, imports). There is a representative, perfectly competitive firm producing exportables and operating under perfectly flexible export and import prices. Monopolistic competition with price (wage) stickiness prevails for non-tradable firms (households). These set prices (wages) subject to a price/wage adjustment cost function. There coexist both forward and backward looking firms. The latter use a "rule of thumb" to change prices that gradually corrects their price to that of optimizing firms. Alternative monetary or foreign exchange policy rules, including a fixed exchange rate, inflation targeting under a pure float and inflation targeting under a managed float, complete the dynamic systems. The non-stochastic steady state is analyzed in detail for the alternative models and the log-linearized systems are obtained.
INSURANCE AND REAL OUTPUT: THE KEY ROLE OF BANKING ACTIVITIES

This paper applies panel cointegration tests and panel vector error correction models for 17 OECD countries and considers cross-sectional dependence and structural breaks to investigate the interrelationship between an insurance market's development and real output, controlling for banking activities. We first obtain evidence of a fairly strong long-run equilibrium relationship among them. Second, we find that insurance market development has positive effects on real output and that banking activities have an unfavorable, if not negative, effect on real output. In fact, insurance market activity is much more productive than banking sector activity. Finally, there exists bidirectional causality between insurance premiums and economic growth in the long run, suggesting the existence of the feedback hypothesis for the insurance–output nexus.
Effect of Regulatory Oversight on the Association between Internal Governance Characteristics and Audit Fees

We examine the relationship between internal governance, external audit monitoring and regulatory oversight for a sample comprising industrial companies and financial/utility companies subject to additional industry-specific regulation. Our results indicate that the association between audit fees and board/audit committee independence and size are weaker for regulated companies. These observations are consistent with the notion that regulatory oversight partially substitutes the external audit as a monitoring mechanism. However, boards/audit committees with more multiple directorships demand a more extensive audit in the presence of regulatory oversight to protect their reputation capital. Our study enhances our understanding of the complex relationships among the major corporate governance elements.
Research management and policy: incentives and obstacles to a better public‐private interaction

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the public‐private linkage within the Danish research and technological development (RTD) and innovation system, seen from the point of view of the private sector. The relationship between public and private research is an issue of growing interest to management and public policy.Design/methodology/approach – Based on interviews with business managers, the article identifies obstacles that enterprises experience when cooperating with public research institutions and highlights conditions that influence the relationship.Findings – The paper points to ways to strengthen linkages and provides information on how to further stimulate public‐private interaction and thus make better use of resources through synergy.Originality/value – The analysis in the paper offers an insight that can serve as a reference for researchers, managers and policymakers in countries with conditions similar to those of the Danish.