Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Market and Regional Segmentation and Risk Premia in the First Era of Financial Globalization

We study market segmentation effects using data on U.S. railroads that list their bonds in New York and London between 1873 and 1913. This sample provides a unique setting for such analysis because of the precision offered by bond yields in cost of capital estimation, the geography-specific nature of railroad assets, and ongoing substantial technological change. We document a significant reduction in market segmentation over time. While New York bond yields exceeded those in London in the 1870s, this premium disappeared by the early 1900s. However, the segmentation premium persisted in the more remote regions of the United States. Received June 18, 2015; editorial decision October 4, 2017 by Editor Robin Greenwood.
An examination of expatriate failure: analysis of the experiences of participants in German expatriate assignments in China

The costs of failure of an expatriate assignment continue to be significant challenges for multinational enterprises in today’s fast changing global business environment. While previous research supported the view that the result of an expatriate assignment was related to the expatriate’s ability to adjust to the unfamiliar environment, and the adjustment process was influenced by the relationships between the expatriate and the various other participants in the expatriate assignment, this present research intents to combine the fragmented literature on various issues of expatriate management with the main stream literature and suggests that the result of an expatriate assignment is more complex. Little attention has been given in the literature to investigating failure of expatriate assignments in which expatriates were able to adjust to the unfamiliar hostcountry environment. This study explores the possible causes of the perceived assignment failures of German expatriates in China assignments who apparently were able to adjust to the unfamiliar cultural and working environment. This qualitative study applies the method of semi-structured in-depth personal interviews to explore possible causes for expatriate failure in cases where the expatriate was able to adjust to the unfamiliar host-country environment. By interviewing German expatriates working in China, parent country superiors of German expatriates in China, parent country human resource managers who were involved in German expatriates assignments in China, and Chinese subordinates who worked with German expatriates the study identifies a gap in research on qualifications and training of these parent-company and host-company key players. The results from exploration of the respondents’ rich personal experiences identify possible weaknesses in the adjustment of the parentcountry superiors, parent-country managers and host-country subordinates to the work environment in which the expatriate has to perform. The insights from this study provide a more holistic view of causes of expatriate failure and include the role of other major players in an expatriate assignment process. Implications are drawn from theory and practice.
High-Tech Human Capital: Do the Richest Countries Invest the Most?

Research and Development (R&D) endogenous growth models predict and most evidence show that investment in R&D increases with economic development. We consider the type of human capital mainly used in research labs and show that the richest countries are investing proportionally less than middle income countries in engineering and technical human capital. We generalize this result, controlling for other explanatory variables, cross-time error correlations, heteroskedasticity and endogeneity bias. Thus, we establish a stylized fact (about human capital composition) that is a puzzle to economic theory: the ratio of high-tech to low-tech human capital presents an inverted U-shaped relationship with GDP per capita.
Efficient Statistical Simulation of Microwave Devices Via Stochastic Testing-Based Circuit Equivalents of Nonlinear Components

This paper delivers a considerable improvement in the framework of the statistical simulation of highly nonlinear devices via polynomial chaos-based circuit equivalents. Specifically, a far more efficient and “black-box” approach is proposed that reduces the model complexity for nonlinear components. Based on recent literature, the “stochastic testing” method is used in place of a Galerkin approach to find the pertinent circuit equivalents. The technique is demonstrated via the statistical analysis of a low-noise power amplifier and its features in terms of accuracy and efficiency are highlighted.
Automating the Generation of Privacy Policies for Context-Sharing Applications

Enabling the automated recognition and sharing of a user's context is a primary motivation for many pervasive computing applications. In the past, a significant amount of research has been focusing on the aspect of effective and efficient recognition. Yet, when context is shared with others, the resulting disclosure of personal information can have undesirable privacy implications. A common solution to this problem is the manual creation of an application-specific privacy policy that defines which information may be shared with whom. However, as the number of applications increases, such a manual approach becomes increasingly cumbersome and over time, it is likely to lead to incomplete or even inconsistent policies. In this paper, we discuss how a privacy policy can be derived automatically by analyzing the user's sharing behaviour when using online collaboration tools. Our approach retrieves shared content and the associated sharing settings, detects context types and automatically derives a privacy policy that reflects the user's past sharing behaviour. To validate our approach, we have implemented it as an extensible software library for the Android platform and we have developed plug-ins for two popular collaboration tools, namely Google Calendar and Facebook.
The Readability of Information and Consent Forms in Clinical Research in France

Background Quantitative tools have been developed to evaluate the readability of written documents and have been used in several studies to evaluate information and consent forms. These studies all showed that such documents had a low level of readability. Our objective is to evaluate the readability of Information and Consent Forms (ICFs) used in clinical research. Methods and Findings Clinical research protocols were collected from four public clinical research centers in France. Readability was evaluated based on three criteria: the presence of an illustration, the length of the text and its Flesch score. Potential effects of protocol characteristics on the length and readability of the ICFs were determined. Medical and statutory parts of the ICF form were analyzed separately. The readability of these documents was compared with that of everyday contracts, press articles, literary extracts and political speeches. We included 209 protocols and the corresponding 275 ICFs. The median length was 1304 words. Their Flesch readability scores were low (median: 24), and only about half that of selected press articles. ICF s for industrially sponsored and randomized protocols were the longest and had the highest readability scores. More than half (52%) of the text in ICFs concerned medical information, and this information was statistically (p<0.05) more readable (Flesch: 28) than statutory information (Flesch: 21). Conclusion Regardless of the field of research, the ICFs for protocols included had poor readability scores. However, a prospective analysis of this test in French should be carried out before it is put into general use.
Prevention of Prostate Cancer with Oleanane Synthetic Triterpenoid CDDO-Me in the TRAMP Mouse Model of Prostate Cancer

2-Cyano-3,12-dioxooleana-1,9(11)-dien-28-oic acid (CDDO), a synthetic analog of oleanolic acid, and its C28 methyl ester derivative (CDDO-Me), have shown potent antitumorigenic activity against a wide range of cancer cell lines, including prostate cancer cells in vitro, and inhibited the development of liver and lung cancer in vivo. In the present study, we examined the efficacy of CDDO-Me in preventing the development and progression of prostate cancer in the transgenic adenocarinoma of the mouse prostate (TRAMP) model. CDDO-Me inhibited the growth of murine TRAMPC-1 prostate cancer cells by inducing apoptosis through the inhibition of antiapoptotic p-Akt, p-mTOR and NF-κB. Early intervention with CDDO-Me (7.5 mg/kg) initiated at five weeks of age for 20 wk inhibited the progression of the preneoplastic lesions (low-grade PIN and high-grade-PIN) to adenocarcinoma in the dorsolateral prostate (DLP) and ventral prostate (VP) lobes of TRAMP mice. Even delayed administration of CDDO-Me started at 12 wk of age for 12 wk inhibited the development of adenocarcimona of the prostate. Both early and late treatment with CDDO-Me inhibited the metastasis of tumor to the distant organs. Treatment with CDDO-Me inhibited the expression of prosurvival p-Akt and NF-κB in the prostate and knocking-down Akt in TRAMPC-1 tumor cells sensitized them to CDDO-Me. These findings indicated that Akt is a target for apoptoxicity in TRAMPC-1 cells in vitro and potentially a target of CDDO-Me for inhibition of prostate cancer in vivo.
Self-Enforcing Agreements on Water Allocation

Many water allocation agreements in transboundary river basins are inherently unstable. Due to stochastic river flow, agreements may be broken in case of drought. The objective of this paper is to analyse whether water allocation agreements can be self-enforcing. An agreement is modelled as the outcome of bargaining game on river water allocation. Given this agreement, the bargaining game is followed by a repeated extensive-form game in which countries decide whether or not to comply with the agreement. I assess under what conditions such agreements are self-enforcing, given stochastic river flow. The results show that, for sufficiently low discounting, every efficient agreement can be sustained in subgame perfect equilibrium. Requiring renegotiation-proofness may shrink the set of possible agreements to a unique self-enforcing agreement. The solution induced by this particular agreement implements the “downstream incremental distribution”, an axiomatic solution to water allocation that assigns all gains from cooperation to downstream countries.
Affiliation of Authors in Transportation and Logistics Academic Journals: A Reassessment

This article updates an ongoing study of author affiliation and institutional productivity based on articles published in peer-reviewed logistics, supply chain management, and transportation journals. Additionally, the authors consider the current status and future trends of journals in electronic format. Our findings show an increasing percentage of contributions by academic as opposed to nonacademic authors. We also find reasonable stability in the publication output of the top ten ranked institutions. However, several new universities, including non-North American schools, have entered the top twenty-five ranked institutions.
The algT Gene of Pseudomonas syringae pv. glycinea andNew Insights into the Transcriptional Organization of thealgT-muc Gene Cluster

ABSTRACT The phytopathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas syringae pv. glycinea infects soybean plants and causes bacterial blight. In addition to P. syringae, the human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa and the soil bacterium Azotobacter vinelandii produce the exopolysaccharide alginate, a copolymer of d-mannuronic and l-guluronic acids. Alginate production in P. syringae has been associated with increased fitness and virulence in planta. Alginate biosynthesis is tightly controlled by proteins encoded by the algT-muc regulatory gene cluster in P. aeruginosa and A. vinelandii. These genes encode the alternative sigma factor AlgT (σ22), its anti-sigma factors MucA and MucB, MucC, a protein with a controversial function that is absent in P. syringae, and MucD, a periplasmic serine protease and homolog of HtrA in Escherichia coli. We compared an alginate-deficient algT mutant of P. syringae pv. glycinea with an alginate-producing derivative in which algT is intact. The alginate-producing derivative grew significantly slower in vitro growth but showed increased epiphytic fitness and better symptom development in planta. Evaluation of expression levels for algT, mucA, mucB, mucD, and algD, which encodes an alginate biosynthesis gene, showed that mucD transcription is not dependent on AlgT in P. syringae in vitro. Promoter mapping using primer extension experiments confirmed this finding. Results of reverse transcription-PCR demonstrated that algT, mucA, and mucB are cotranscribed as an operon in P. syringae. Northern blot analysis revealed that mucD was expressed as a 1.75-kb monocistronic mRNA in P. syringae.
An Efficient Multicast-based Binding Update Scheme for Network Mobility

Mobile IP (MIP) is the solution supporting the mobility of Mobile Nodes (MNs), however, it is known to lack the support for NEtwork MObility (NEMO). NEMO manages situations when an entire network, composed of one or more subnets, dynamically changes its point of attachment to the Internet. NEMO Basic Support (NBS) protocol ensures session continuity for all the nodes in a mobile network, however, there exists a serious pinball routing problem. To overcome this weakness, there are many Route Optimization (RO) solutions such as Bi-directional Tunneling (BT) mechanism, Aggregation and Surrogate (A&S) mechanism, Recursive Approach, etc. The A&S RO mechanism is known to outperform the other RO mechanisms, except for the Binding Update (BU) cost. Although Improved Prefix Delegation (IPD) reduces the cost problem of Prefix Delegation (PD), a well-known A&S protocol, the BU cost problem still presents, especially when a large number of Mobile Routers (MRs) and MNs exist in the environment such as train, bus, ship, or aircraft. In this paper, a solution to reduce the cost of delivering the BU messages is proposed using a multicast mechanism instead of unicasting such as the traditional BU of the RO. The performance of the proposed multicast-based BU scheme is examined with an analytical model which shows that the BU cost enhancement is up to 32.9% over IPDbased, hence, it is feasible to predict that the proposed scheme could benefit in other NEMO RO protocols.
An evaluation of 'teacher as co-researcher' as a methodology for staff development

This study describes, analyses and evaluates a specific methodology for staff development known as Teacher as Coreseacher'. It is a methodology which is based on the collaborative enterprise of teachers working with their students and other interested stakeholders in the education process. It uses naturalistic principles of inquiry to examine both common and individual interests and concerns about literacy and language teaching and learning in the classroom. Naturalistic and ethnographic research methodologies were used to explore the nature of the co-researching process, how it worked and its potential value for the professional growth and development of the participants. Two different sources of data were used. The first presented the experiential responses of two teachers in different school contexts, working collaboratively with an 'outsider', an educational administrator. The second source presented the retrospective recall of a number of educators (teachers, a principal and two academics) who had used the Teacher as Co­ researcher methodology for several years. This group of informants provided retrospective insights into how the process worked and how the relationship developed over time. Final analysis of the data provided understandings of the nature of the Teacher as Co-researcher process by revealing a number of key characteristics upon which effective collaborative enterprise is dependent. It shed light on the nature of interactions that transpired during the collaboration and how these affected and were affected by the nature of the relationship. Furthermore, the study highlighted the developmental nature of the collaborative enterprise. Of specific interest was the nature of the relationship between participants as revealed through the nature of the discourse. Issues related to status, role definitions, reciprocity, autonomy, ownership, control and responsibility were discovered to be critical elements of the initial and ongoing negotiations of the co-researching relationship. Acknowledgements Abstract TABLE OF CONTENTS
Relationship between Information Communications Technology, Economic Growth and Carbon Emissions: Evidence from Panel Analysis of the G20

The paper deals with the contribution of information and communications technology (ICT) to economic growth and environmental sustainability by examining the long-run equilibrium relationships between ICT, carbon emissions and economic growth. The paper employs cointegration techniques, fixed-effects and random-effects models for panel data of the G20 countries from 1991 to 2010. The test results indicate that a long-run equilibrium relationship exists among these variables. In testing short-run relationship, ICT has been an important contributor to economic growth while the role of ICT as an important contributor to carbon emissions has been marginalised in advanced economies over the past two decades. In rapidly developing economies, ICT has also been an important contributor to economic growth while ICT is associated with a large increase in carbon emissions.
Comparison of salivary Candida profile in patients with fixed and removable orthodontic appliances therapy

Background and Objectives Long-term usage of fixed and removable orthodontic appliances creates a favorable environment for the augmentation of oral normal microflora particularly Candida species, which can increases the risk of periodontal lesions. The aim of this study was to assess quantitative and qualitative alterations in the carrier rate of Candida spp. after placement of fixed and removable orthodontic appliances on permanent dentition. Materials and Methods Patients enrolled in this study were children aged 7-18 years, who having fixed or removable orthodontic appliances, attended in orthodontics clinic for periodical provision. Six months after beginning of their orthodontic therapy, saliva samples were collected and cultured on Sabouraud dextrose agar for identification and enumerating of isolated Candida colonies. Candida species were identified using the germ tube test and API 20C AUX identification system. Data was analyzed with T-test and Chi square using SPSS 17 software. Results The average number of Candida colonies isolated from saliva in patients with fixed orthodontic was more than patients with removable appliance (P=0.001). Also frequency of non-albicans Candida species was higher in patients with fixed orthodontic appliances in compare with fixed group (p=0.001). Conclusions The results suggest that fixed orthodontic appliances treatment promotes an increase in salivary Candida carriers particularly non-albicans Candida species in compare with removable ones. This can indicate a more cautious approach when providing fixed orthodontic treatments for immunocompromised children regarding the increased possibility of candidal infection.
Inter-Election Vote Swings for the Turkish Ruling Party: The Impact of Economic Performance and Other Factors

Inter-election vote swings for the AKP, the incumbent party in Turkey, during 2002, 2004, 2007, 2009 and 2011 elections are decomposed into parts attributable to economic conditions, strategic voting, cost of ruling, incumbency advantage, political realignment and other factors. For this purpose a vote equation, fitted to data covering twenty-seven National Assembly, Senate, and Provincial Council elections, held between 1950 and 2011 is used. The results show the pivotal role played by the economy on the political fortunes of incumbent parties.
Invading the Mediterranean Sea: biodiversity patterns shaped by human activities

Human activities, such as shipping, aquaculture, and the opening of the Suez Canal, have led to the introduction of nearly 1,000 alien species into the Mediterranean Sea. We investigated how human activities, by providing pathways for the introduction of alien species, may shape the biodiversity patterns in the Mediterranean Sea. Richness of Red Sea species introduced through the Suez Canal (Lessepsian species) is very high along the eastern Mediterranean coastline, reaching a maximum of 129 species per 100 km2, and declines towards the north and west. The distribution of species introduced by shipping is strikingly different, with several hotspot areas occurring throughout the Mediterranean basin. Two main hotspots for aquaculture-introduced species are observed (the Thau and Venice lagoons). Certain taxonomic groups were mostly introduced through specific pathways – fish through the Suez Canal, macrophytes by aquaculture, and invertebrates through the Suez Canal and by shipping. Hence, the local taxonomic identity of the alien species was greatly dependent on the dominant maritime activities/interventions and the related pathways of introduction. The composition of alien species differs among Mediterranean ecoregions; such differences are greater for Lessepsian and aquaculture-introduced species. The spatial pattern of native species biodiversity differs from that of alien species: the overall richness of native species declines from the north-western to the south-eastern regions, while the opposite trend is observed for alien species. The biodiversity of the Mediterranean Sea is changing, and further research is needed to better understand how the new biodiversity patterns shaped by human activities will affect the Mediterranean food webs, ecosystem functioning, and the provision of ecosystem services.
Changes in Job Tenure and Job Stability in Canada

Using monthly data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey the author investigates changes in the complete lengths of new job spells from 1981 through 1994. While the average complete length of new jobs did not increase or decrease over the period, changes in the distribution of complete job lengths suggest that there is an increase in the proportion of short-term jobs and a decrease in the proportion of medium term jobs created over the period. The proportion of long-term jobs remained unchanged. This pattern of change was found among all virtually all demographic subgroups examined suggesting that an economy wide (rather than a sectoral or demographic) explanation must be sought.
Firm Size and Efficiency in Innovation: Reply

Economic activity moved away from large firms to small, predominantly young firms in the 1970s and 1980s. Acs and Audretsch (1993) and Carlsson (1992) show evidence of manufacturing industries in countries in varying stages of economic development Carlsson mentions two explanations for this shift. The first deals with fundamental changes in the world economy from the 1970s onwards. These changes relate to the increase of global competition, the rising degree of uncertainty and the growth in market fragmentation. The second deals with changes in the character of technological progress. He shows that flexible automation has various effects resulting in a shift from large to smaller firms. The pervasiveness of these changes results in a structural shift which affects the economies of all industri-