Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Subprime Lending and Real Estate Prices

This article establishes a theoretical and empirical link between the use of aggressive mortgage lending instruments, such as interest-only, negative-amortization or subprime mortgages, and the underlying house prices. Such instruments, which come into existence through innovation or financial deregulation, allow more borrowing than otherwise would occur in previously affordability-constrained markets. Within the context of a model with an endogenous rent-buy decision, we demonstrate that the supply of aggressive lending instruments temporarily increases the asset prices in the underlying market because agents find it more attractive to own or because their borrowing constraint is relaxed, or both. This result implies that the availability of aggressive mortgage lending instruments magnifies the real estate cycle and the effects of fundamental demand shocks. We empirically confirm the predictions of the model using recent subprime origination experience. In particular, we find that regions that receive a high concentration of aggressive lending instruments experience larger price increases and subsequent declines than areas with low concentration of such instruments. This result holds in the presence of various controls and instrumental variables.
Revisiting the Labor Demand Curve: The Wage Effects of Immigration and Women's Entry into the US Labor Force, 1960-2010

The debate over the wage effects of immigration for native workers is an old one. One side of the debate claims that immigration has little if any negative impact on wages among natives, whereas others suggest that immigration has large, negative effects on native wages. On the latter side of the debate, many point to the work of Borjas (2003), who takes a national view of the US economy and estimates a wage elasticity of -0.4 with respect to immigration. In this paper, we replicate and update Borjas with the 2010 US census data, and use the method to study an even larger, concurrent labor supply shock, namely the entry of women into the labor force. We both find a much lower wage elasticity than Borjas to immigration (-0.2) and estimate a positive, statistically significant relationship between menâ€™s wages and womenâ€™s entry into education-experience cells when wages are annualized. We take this evidence to suggest that the Borjas model is misspecified as it inadequately specifies substitution between immigrants and natives, and inadequately controls for structural change in the US economy.
High-Throughput Sequencing of Plasma MicroRNA in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis

Background MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are known to regulate many biological processes and their dysregulation has been associated with a variety of diseases including Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME). The recent discovery of stable and reproducible miRNA in plasma has raised the possibility that circulating miRNAs may serve as novel diagnostic markers. The objective of this study was to determine the role of plasma miRNA in CFS/ME. Results Using Illumina high-throughput sequencing we identified 19 miRNAs that were differentially expressed in the plasma of CFS/ME patients in comparison to non-fatigued controls. Following RT-qPCR analysis, we were able to confirm the significant up-regulation of three miRNAs (hsa-miR-127-3p, hsa-miR-142-5p and hsa-miR-143-3p) in the CFS/ME patients. Conclusion Our study is the first to identify circulating miRNAs from CFS/ME patients and also to confirm three differentially expressed circulating miRNAs in CFS/ME patients, providing a basis for further study to find useful CFS/ME biomarkers.
Multifractality in the Philippine Foreign Exchange Market

This paper investigates the multifractality of the daily exchange rate between the Philippine Peso and the US Dollar from January 2, 1998 to July 31, 2013 using the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis. The behavior of the generalized Hurst exponent detects the presence of multifractality in the peso-dollar exchange rate. Moreover, the small fluctuations in the exchange rate show persistence. By quantifying the contribution of long-range correlations and broad fat-tail distributions to multifractility, the paper shows that the multifractility of daily peso-dollar exchange rate is mainly due to the broad fat-tail distributions.
Prevalence of odontogenic sinus tracts in 728 endodontically treated teeth.

OBJECTIVES The primary aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of sinus tracts in endodontically treated teeth in an Iranian population. The second aim was to seek and analyze the relationship between the clinically detected sinus tracts and factors such as sex, age, tooth type and location. STUDY DESIGN A total of 728 patients' records and radiographs were reviewed of 427 females and 301 males for demographic data, preoperative pulpoperiapical status of treated teeth and the presence of sinus tract. Data were analyzed using chi-square test. RESULTS No significant differences were found for the prevalence of sinus tracts between two genders. Data showed that the highest prevalence of sinus tracts was in 10-19 year age group. Of 725 treated teeth, 107 teeth had sinus tracts (14.7%). Most odontogenic sinus tracts were associated with mandibular anterior teeth. Of 348 teeth with preoperative status of periapical inflammation and radiolucency, 107 teeth (30.75%) had an odontogenic sinus tract. CONCLUSION Data showed that almost one in seven teeth referred for root canal treatment had a sinus tract.
KEY FACTORS INFLUENCING PUPIL MOTIVATION IN DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

Introduction This article seeks to examine the relationship that exists between pupil motivation and the following internal and external factors: pupil performance in design and technology (D&T) project work, pupil skills associated with D&T project work, pupil personal goal orientation, pupil cognitive style, pupil creativity, teaching strategy, and teacher motivation. The data under discussion were collected as part of a four-year research project. The article examines the research investigated during the final year of the study when a sample of 50, 15 and 16-year-old pupils was selected from eight schools in the northeast region of England. Data were collected throughout a GCSE Design and Technology (D&T) course work project. A cognitive style test and a questionnaire ascertaining each pupil’s perception of their ability and enjoyment in D&T project work were given to the sample at the beginning of the academic year. A case study approach based on observation and informal interviews was then used to monitor the pupils throughout the designing and making of their projects. Upon completion of the project, a summative questionnaire, a goal orientation index, and a creativity test were completed by each pupil. Data about the school’s internal moderated mark for each pupil’s D&T project were also collected. In discussing the findings, the relationship between the internal factors and a pupil’s ability to perform and be motivated will be discussed. Conclusions will be drawn concerning the influence that external factors, such as assessment and teaching and learning strategies, have upon the attitude and ability of pupils, _____________________________
A Single Dominant Gene Ch for Chilling Resistance in Cucumber Seedlings

ADDITIONAL INDEX WORDS. cold tolerance, Cucumis sativus, vegetable breeding ABSTRACT. An experiment was conducted to determine the genetics of chilling resistance in cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) inbred NC-76 that was developed from PI 246930, an accession from the U.S. Department of Agriculture germplasm collection. NC-76 was crossed with 'Chipper' and breeding line Gy 14 to produce F1 ,F 1 reciprocal, F2, and BC1 generations for evaluation. Cucumber seedlings at the first true leaf stage were placed in growth chambers set at 4 8C for 7 h and a photosynthetic photon flux of 500 mmolm -2 s -1 . Segregation in the F2 fit a 3 : 1 inheritance pattern, with resistance being dominant. The backcross of the F1 to the susceptible parent produced a 1 : 1 ratio, confirming that chilling resistance was from a single gene. The single dominant gene controlling chilling resistance in NC-76 was given the symbol Ch.
Histopathologic Evaluation of Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease in Hypothyroidism-Induced Rats

It is speculated that thyroid hormones may be involved in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) pathogenesis. A literature scan, however, demonstrated conflicting results from studies investigating the relationship between hypothyroidism and NAFLD. Therefore, our study aims to evaluate NAFLD, from the histopathologic perspective, in hypothyroidism-induced rats. Wistar rats were divided into 2 groups: the experimental group consumed water containing methimazole 0.025% (MMI, Sigma, USA) for 12 weeks and the control group consumed tap water. At the end of week 12, serum glucose, ALT, AST, triglyceride, HDL, LDL, TSH, fT4, fT3, visfatin, and insulin assays were performed. Sections were stained with hematoxylin-eosin and “Oil Red-O” for histopathologic examination of the livers. In our study, we detected mild hepatosteatosis in all hypothyroidism-induced rats. There was statistically significant difference with respect to obesity between the two groups (p < 0.001). The mean fasting blood glucose was 126.25 ± 23.4 mg/dL in hypothyroidism-induced group and 102.63 ± 15.51 mg/dL in the control group, with a statistically significant difference between the groups (p = 0.032). The two groups did not differ statistically significantly with respect to visfatin levels (p > 0.05). In conclusion, we found that hypothyroidism-induced rats had mild hepatosteatosis as opposed to the control group histopathologically. Our study indicates that hypothyroidism can cause NAFLD.
Antiaging Gene Klotho Attenuates Pancreatic β-Cell Apoptosis in Type 1 Diabetes

Apoptosis is the major cause of death of insulin-producing β-cells in type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM). Klotho is a recently discovered antiaging gene. We found that the Klotho gene is expressed in pancreatic β-cells. Interestingly, halplodeficiency of Klotho (KL+/−) exacerbated streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetes (a model of T1DM), including hyperglycemia, glucose intolerance, diminished islet insulin storage, and increased apoptotic β-cells. Conversely, in vivo β-cell–specific expression of mouse Klotho gene (mKL) attenuated β-cell apoptosis and prevented STZ-induced diabetes. mKL promoted cell adhesion to collagen IV, increased FAK and Akt phosphorylation, and inhibited caspase 3 cleavage in cultured MIN6 β-cells. mKL abolished STZ- and TNFα-induced inhibition of FAK and Akt phosphorylation, caspase 3 cleavage, and β-cell apoptosis. These promoting effects of Klotho can be abolished by blocking integrin β1. Therefore, these cell-based studies indicated that Klotho protected β-cells by inhibiting β-cell apoptosis through activation of the integrin β1-FAK/Akt pathway, leading to inhibition of caspase 3 cleavage. In an autoimmune T1DM model (NOD), we showed that in vivo β-cell–specific expression of mKL improved glucose tolerance, attenuated β-cell apoptosis, enhanced insulin storage in β-cells, and increased plasma insulin levels. The beneficial effect of Klotho gene delivery is likely due to attenuation of T-cell infiltration in pancreatic islets in NOD mice. Overall, our results demonstrate for the first time that Klotho protected β-cells in T1DM via attenuating apoptosis.
Signal Orderings Based on Dispersion and the Supply of Private Information in Auctions

This paper provides a novel approach to ordering signals based on the property that more informative signals lead to greater variability of conditional expectations. We define two nested information criteria (supermodular precision and integral precision) by combining this approach with two variability orders (dispersive and convex orders). We relate precision criteria with orderings based on the value of information to a decision maker. We then use precision to study the incentives of an auctioneer to supply private information. Using integral precision, we obtain two results: (i) a more precise signal yields a more efficient allocation; (ii) the auctioneer provides less than the efficient level of information. Supermodular precision allows us to extend the previous analysis to the case in which supplying information is costly and to obtain an additional finding; (iii) there is a complementarity between information and competition, so that both the socially efficient and the auctioneer's optimal choice of precision increase with the number of bidders. Copyright 2010 The Econometric Society.
On the selection of thresholds for predicting species occurrence with presence‐only data

Abstract Presence‐only data present challenges for selecting thresholds to transform species distribution modeling results into binary outputs. In this article, we compare two recently published threshold selection methods (maxSSS and maxF pb) and examine the effectiveness of the threshold‐based prevalence estimation approach. Six virtual species with varying prevalence were simulated within a real landscape in southeastern Australia. Presence‐only models were built with DOMAIN, generalized linear model, Maxent, and Random Forest. Thresholds were selected with two methods maxSSS and maxF pb with four presence‐only datasets with different ratios of the number of known presences to the number of random points (KP–RP ratio). Sensitivity, specificity, true skill statistic, and F measure were used to evaluate the performance of the results. Species prevalence was estimated as the ratio of the number of predicted presences to the total number of points in the evaluation dataset. Thresholds selected with maxF pb varied as the KP–RP ratio of the threshold selection datasets changed. Datasets with the KP–RP ratio around 1 generally produced better results than scores distant from 1. Results produced by We conclude that maxFpb had specificity too low for very common species using Random Forest and Maxent models. In contrast, maxSSS produced consistent results whichever dataset was used. The estimation of prevalence was almost always biased, and the bias was very large for DOMAIN and Random Forest predictions. We conclude that maxF pb is affected by the KP–RP ratio of the threshold selection datasets, but maxSSS is almost unaffected by this ratio. Unbiased estimations of prevalence are difficult to be determined using the threshold‐based approach.
Discriminant analysis through a semiparametric model

We consider a semiparametric generalisation of normal-theory discriminant analysis. The semiparametric model assumes that, after unspecified univariate monotone transformations, the class distributions are multivariate normal. We introduce an estimation procedure based on the distribution quantiles, in which the parameters of the semiparametric model are estimated directly without estimating the nonparametric transformations. The procedure is computationally fast and the estimation accuracy is shown to have the usual parametric rate. The relationship between the method and more general nonparametric discriminant analysis is discussed. The semiparametric specification of the class densities is a submodel of the nonparametric log density functional analysis of variance model in which the main effects are completely nonparametric but the interaction terms are specified semiparametrically. Simulations and real examples are used to illustrate the procedure. Copyright Biometrika Trust 2003, Oxford University Press.
Linking the Neural Machine Translation and the Prediction of Organic Chemistry Reactions

Finding the main product of a chemical reaction is one of the important problems of organic chemistry. This paper describes a method of applying a neural machine translation model to the prediction of organic chemical reactions. In order to translate 'reactants and reagents' to 'products', a gated recurrent unit based sequence-to-sequence model and a parser to generate input tokens for model from reaction SMILES strings were built. Training sets are composed of reactions from the patent databases, and reactions manually generated applying the elementary reactions in an organic chemistry textbook of Wade. The trained models were tested by examples and problems in the textbook. The prediction process does not need manual encoding of rules (e.g., SMARTS transformations) to predict products, hence it only needs sufficient training reaction sets to learn new types of reactions.
Event Study Under Noisy Estimation Period

Since the contribution of Fama, Fisher, Jensen and Roll (1969), event studies have become an important reference tool for empirical research in finance. The original methodology has been improved in order to tackle numerous problems such as event-date uncertainty, event clustering, event-induced variance phenomena. Somewhat surprisingly, the determination of the estimation period has attracted less interest. It remains most frequently routinely determined as a fixed window prior to the event announcement day, during which it is supposed that no other significant events have happened. In practice, in large sample studies, validation of this assumption on a case-by-case basis is out of reach, despite the fact that it is known to be violated for some specific corporate events. The case of merger and acquisitions, in particular the behavior of bidders who make repetitive acquisitions (and acquisition attempts), is a typical example. In this work we propose an adaptation of the basic methodology by taking explicitly into account the likely existence of firm-specific events during the estimation period. We first realize a standard specification and power analysis, following the Brown and Warner (1980, 1985) scheme. We then show that the proposed method changes significantly the inferences realized on a sample of around 580 merger and acquisition operations concerning the bidders' abnormal returns.
Architectural and compiler support for effective instruction prefetching: a cooperative approach

Instruction cache miss latency is becoming an increasingly important performance bottleneck, especially for commercial applications. Although instruction prefetching is an attractive technique for tolerating this latency, we find that existing prefetching schemes are insufficient for modern superscalar processors, since they fail to issue prefetches early enough (particularly for nonsequential accesses). To overcome these limitations, we propose a new instruction prefetching technique whereby the hardware and software cooperate to hide the latency as follows. The hardware performs aggressive sequential prefetching combined with a novel prefetch filtering mechanism to allow it to get far ahead without polluting the cache. To hide the latency of nonsequential accesses, we propose and implement a novel compiler algorithm which automatically inserts instruction-prefetch the targets of control transfers far enough in advance. Our experimental results demonstrate that this new approach hides 50% or more tof the latecy remaining with the best previous techniques, while at the same time reduces the number of useless prefetches by a factor of six. We find that both the prefetch filtering and compiler-inserted prefetching components of our design are essential and complementary, and that the compiler can limit the code expansion to only 9% on average. In addition, we show that the performance of our technique can be further increased by using profiling information to help reduce cache conflicts and unnecessary prefetches. From an architectural perspective, these performance advantages are sustained over a range of common miss latencies and bandwidth. Finally, our technique is cost effective as well, since it delivers performance comparable to (or even better than) that of larger caches, but requires a much smaller hardware budget.
Health literacy : a neglected European public health disparity

• A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers.
Resolvin E2 Formation and Impact in Inflammation Resolution

Acute inflammation and its resolution are essential processes for tissue protection and homeostasis. In this context, specialized proresolving mediators derived from polyunsaturated fatty acids are of interest. In this study, we report that resolvin E2 (RvE2) from eicosapentaenoic acid is endogenously produced during self-limited murine peritonitis in both the initiation and resolution phases. RvE2 (1–10 nM) carries potent leukocyte-directed actions that include: 1) regulating chemotaxis of human neutrophils; and 2) enhancing phagocytosis and anti-inflammatory cytokine production. These actions appear to be mediated by leukocyte G-protein–coupled receptors as preparation of labeled RvE2 gave direct evidence for specific binding of radiolabeled RvE2 to neutrophils (Kd 24.7 ± 10.1 nM) and resolvin E1 activation of recombinant G-protein–coupled receptors was assessed. In addition to the murine inflammatory milieu, RvE2 was also identified in plasma from healthy human subjects. RvE2 rapidly downregulated surface expression of human leukocyte integrins in whole blood and dampened responses to platelet-activating factor. Together, these results indicate that RvE2 can stimulate host-protective actions throughout initiation and resolution in the innate inflammatory responses.
Optimal Income Taxation: An Example with a U-Shaped Pattern of Optimal Marginal Tax Rates

Using the Mirrlees optima! income tax model with quasi-linear preferences, the paper examines conditions for marginal tax rates to be rising at high income levels and declining in an interval containing the modal skill. It examines conditions for the marginal tax rate to be higher at a low skill level than at the high skill level with the same density—an argument only holding for skill levels above a cutoff where resources of a worker are marginally of the same value as resources of the government. Data on earnings rates are presented. {JEL H21)
A Test of an Efficiency Model of Grievance Activity

The authors develop a model in which the extent of use of a grievance system is determined by wage premiums and alternative job opportunities. Specifically, they hypothesize that when workers enjoy comparatively high wages or are faced with poor alternative job opportunities, they are less likely to use withdrawal mechanisms that might lead to dismissal (such as shirking or absenteeism) and more likely to use grievance procedures to address workplace problems. The results of an analysis of data for the year 1982 from a large manufacturing company are consistent with this hypothesis.