Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Design of an Optimal Insurance Policy: Note

In an article in this Review, Arthur Raviv (1979) examines Pareto optimal insurance policies when an insurer incurs settlement costs C induced by indemnity "I" for loss x. Raviv's main result is that a necessary and sufficient condition for the Pareto optimal deductible to equal zero is C'(I) = 0. This implies that deductible policies give the best tradeoff between risk sharing and economizing on costly claim settlements. Since in practice these costs are significant, the theorem is of considerable importance. Among others, this has been recognized by Robert Townsend (1979), Michael Brennan and Ray Solanki (1981), David Mayers and Clifford Smith (1981), Gur Huberman, Mayers, and Smith (1983), Harris Schlesinger (1981), and Stuart Turnbull (1983). The theorem is correct, but Raviv's proof is not. In this note a corrected proof for the theorem is given. The corrected proof is important in itself because it allows for a generalization to a greater variety of transactions costs than has previously been considered (see my 1984 paper for details). Section I develops the setting for the problem and the notation to be subsequently used. Raviv's error and the corrected proof are presented in Section II.
Effects of social policy reforms and the economy on welfare participation and employment among single mothers

Title of Document: EFFECTS OF SOCIAL POLICY REFORMS AND THE ECONOMY ON WELFARE PARTICIPATION AND EMPLOYMENT AMONG SINGLE MOTHERS Christopher M. Herbst, Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Directed By: William A. Galston College Park Professor School of Public Policy Child care subsidies and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) are vital government tools for increasing employment and reducing poverty among low-income families. This dissertation, therefore, explores many features of these policies, including their evolution, correlates of participation, and impacts on employment. Chapter 1 provides an overview of child care subsidies and the EITC, focusing on recent policy developments, labor supply incentives, and a critical review of the empirical employment literature. Chapter 2 explores why, despite substantial growth in funding, participation in child care subsidy programs remains comparatively low. Results suggest that although 30 percent of households with children are eligible for child care subsidies, take-up is 14 percent. The low take-up rate is driven by several factors: eligible non-recipients differ from recipients in ways that make subsidies unnecessary or undesirable; the practice by states to trade-off generosity in eligibility for additional generosity in benefits; and the practice by states to ration benefits according to specific household characteristics. Chapter 3 examines the effects of child care costs and net-of-taxes wages on the employment of single mothers. Although a substantial literature estimates separately the impact of prices and taxes, no study has created a modeling framework that accounts for both factors simultaneously. Merging empirical techniques from previous child care and EITC studies yields employment elasticities of -0.174 and 0.711, respectively. An implication of this finding is that price-effects are considerably smaller than those reported elsewhere, while tax-effects accord with previous estimates. Results also suggest that single mothers became less responsive to prices and more responsive to taxes throughout the 1990s, especially after expansions to subsidy programs and the EITC. Chapter 4 investigates heterogeneous employment effects of social policy reforms across varying economic conditions. Allowing the effects of policy reforms on single mothers to vary with the economy leads to several interesting results. Policy “carrots” are more likely to reveal heterogeneous effects at low intensity work margins, while policy “sticks” show significant variation at increasingly demanding margins. However, all policies produce the largest employment effects in favorable economic conditions, implying that a strong economy reinforces the incentives created by social policy
Differentiation strategies in mature small firms – the impact of uncertain environments

Mature small firms often struggle to grow profits as more competitors enter the market. These firms are also less likely to exhibit those entrepreneurial behaviours which underpin sustained performance. The use of differentiation strategies is one such approach which mature firms may be able to sustain – providing them with means to deal with uncertain environments. This article examines this supposition in a sample of firms employing fewer than 100 workers. Four hypotheses relating the business strategies of small firms to performance and age, organisational structure and environmental uncertainty are tested in an empirical study of 320 small firms. Structural equation analyses of the data indicate that innovative differentiation is significantly associated with performance, especially for firms operating in dynamic environments. However, it is found that mature firms are less likely to use differentiation strategies to nurture performance in such environments. These findings and their implications are elaborated in this article.
Supervision, Loss of Control, and the Optimum Size of the Firm

We show that limitation of firm size caused by loss of control across hierarchic levels depends crucially on the nature of the supervision process. If the employees cannot identify the times at which their performance is monitored, there is no limit imposed on the firm size by the heights of the hierarchical structure. "Loss of control" may impose such a limit if the employees are aware of the times at which they are being monitored. The analysis also shows the rationale for hierarchical wage differentials for essentially identical employees.
Does Childhood Predict Adult Life Satisfaction? Evidence from British Cohort Surveys

We investigate the extent to which childhood characteristics are predictive of adult life satisfaction using data from two British cohort studies. In total, variables observed up to age 16 predict around 7% of the variation in average adult life satisfaction. Adding contemporaneous adulthood variables increases the predictive power to 15.6%, while adding long lags of life satisfaction increases it to 35.5%. Overall, we estimate that around 30–45% of adult life satisfaction is fixed, suggesting that 55–70% is transitory in nature, and that a wide range of observed childhood circumstances capture about 15% of the fixed component.
Determinants of Extreme Right Reappearance in Cyprus: The National Popular Front (ELAM), Golden Dawn's Sister Party

The article focuses on the reappearance of the extreme right in Cyprus, with the aim of understanding the wider trends and local structural determinants that favoured its return. The research examines both the structure of opportunity favouring the reappearance of the extreme right—i.e. the current economic crisis and unemployment, the legitimacy crisis of the political and party systems, and the political and institutional context—and the way the extreme-right party (National Popular Front – ELAM) responded to these opportunities, capitalising on its special relationship with the Greek Golden Dawn. This paper will argue that the extreme right is the outgrowth of a systemic (economic and political) crisis, as well as a reflection of how Cypriot political actors regard and react to the extreme right's signatory issues.
The Journal of Counselor Preparation and Supervision Fall 2015 Full Issue

As a result of the Response to Intervention (RTI) mandate in schools across many states, school counselors are uniquely positioned to a take a leadership role within its implementation. This research study examines how school counselors in one such state perceive their training and knowledge of RTI and thus their confidence in implementing it. Implications for training, supervision, professional development and future research are discussed.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger: The evolution of competition and entry‐order advantages in economically turbulent contexts

We examine the evolution of competition and entry-order advantages in markets under macroeconomic distress. Through formal modeling of early-mover advantages along industry life cycles subjected to economic shocks and based on simulation findings, we propose that such shocks exogenously induce temporary industry discontinuities that shift the relative value of distinct asset endowments, thereby switching the bases for competitive advantages vis-a-vis those found in stable contexts. A vital trade-off then emerges between a firm's financial flexibility and its pace of investments in isolating mechanisms, such that the former operates as a contingency factor for the latter. As such, flexibility superiority boosts early-entrants' advantages, while it alternatively gives laggards a much desired strength to out trump first-mover rivals. Our study informs entry-order advantage theory and management practice in economically turbulent contexts.
Incubation of trypanosome-derived mitogenic and immunosuppressive products with peritoneal macrophages allows recovery of biological activities from soluble parasite fractions

This report describes further attempts to define the nature of the parasite product(s) responsible for the extensive changes in lymphoid tissue in mice during infection with Trypanosoma brucei. As previously described, potent mitogenic and immunosuppressive effects are induced by a trypanosome-derived crude membrane fraction in vivo. There was no enrichment in these activities when purified parasite surface membranes were used. Mitogenic activity can be recovered from soluble trypanosome material only when it is incubated with peritoneal macrophages before transfer into syngeneic recipients. Thus, by encouraging association with a critical target cell, soluble parasite products can be studied, and their active components can be separated by conventional methods. Preliminary fractionation of high-spin trypanosome supernatant over Sepharose 4B confined the mitogenic activity to the high-molecular-weight fraction, which is a macromolecular complex of proteins, glycoproteins, and lipid. Extracted lipid from this material was able to significantly suppress a primary immunoglobulin G anti-sheep erythrocyte response. The activity was periodate sensitive and pronase resistant. The use of macrophages in vitro may be a general method whereby important biological activities lost as a result of fractionation procedures can be recovered and the active components studied in greater detail.
The incidence of long-term unemployment: evidence from Greece

In this article, I use the 2000–2004 data from the Greek Labour Force Survey in order to estimate a logit model for the incidence of long-term unemployment. The model computed is similar to the one estimated by Obben et al . (2002). It is found that attributes of the individual such as gender, age category, marital status and region of residence affect the odds of being long-term unemployed. On the other hand, the level of someone's qualification does not affect the odds of whether someone will be short or long-term unemployed.
Family Income and Child Outcomes in Canada

A positive relationship between income and child outcomes has been observed in data from numerous countries. A key question concerns the extent to which this association represents a causal relationship as opposed to unobserved heterogeneity. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth to implement a series of empirical strategies for estimating the existence and size of the effect of income on three measures of cognition. Our results indicate that the effect of income on these outcomes may well be positive, but that it is likely to be smaller than conventional estimates.
Molecular Reproduction & Development 82 : 709 – 721 ( 2015 ) Generation of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells From Domestic Goats

The creation of geneticallymodified goats provides a powerful approach for improving animal health, enhancing production traits, animal pharming, and for ensuring food safety all of which are high-priority goals for animal agriculture. The availability of goat embryonic stem cells (ESCs) that are characteristically immortal in culturewould be of enormous benefit for developing genetically modified animals. As an alternative to long-sought goat ESCs,we generated induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) by forced expression of bovine POU5F1, SOX2, MYC, KLF4, LIN-28, and NANOG reprogramming factors in combination with aMIR302/367 cluster, delivered by lentiviral vectors. In order to minimize integrations, the reprogramming factor coding sequences were assembledwith porcine teschovirus-1 2A (P2A) self-cleaving peptides that allowed for tri-cistronic expression from each vector. The lentiviral-transduced cells were cultured on irradiated mouse feeder cells in a semi-defined, serum-free medium containing fibroblastgrowth factor (FGF)and/or leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF). Theresultinggoat iPSC exhibit cell and colony morphology typical of human and mouse ESCs that is, well-defined borders, a high nuclear-to-cytoplasmic ratio, a short cell-cycle interval, alkaline phosphatase expression, and the ability to generate teratomas in vivo. Additionally, these goat iPSC demonstrated the ability to differentiate into directed lineages in vitro. These results constitute the first steps in establishing integration and footprint-free iPSC from ruminants.
Frameworks for Understanding Business Process Re‐engineering

Introduces a number of concepts and frameworks developed during the first phase of an EPSRC/CDP grant entitled “A Specification of a Business Process Re‐engineering Methodology for Small and Medium Sized Manufacturing Enterprises”. A traditional, functionally oriented organization is characterized by fragmentation and staged inventories of work caused by a failure to integrate and synchronize activities. A process focused organization aims to optimize performance across the whole process. Outlines many of the key issues facing organizations seeking to adopt a process orientation. Presents two frameworks for analysis. The first identifies the major business processes in any manufacturing company, the second seeks to classify types of business process re‐engineering intervention. Concludes by discussing the major issues currently facing those researching into business process re‐engineering.
An alternative to labour-market orthodoxy: the post-Keynesian/institutionalist policy view

Following a tradition originally established by E. Applebaum and A.S. Eichner, this article attempts to sketch an outline of the post-Keynesian/institutionalist theory of the ‘labour market’ as well as to analyse the radical policy perspective that emerges from this approach. This heterodox analytical framework is then used to assess two well-known labour-market policy proposals that have been much discussed in recent years.
Effective Heuristics for Committee Scoring Rules

Committee scoring rules form an important class of multiwinner voting rules. As computing winning committees under such rules is generally intractable, in this paper we investigate efficient heuristics for this task. We design two novel heuristics for computing approximate results of multiwinner elections under arbitrary committee scoring rules; notably, one of these heuristics uses concepts from cooperative game theory. We then provide an experimental evaluation of our heuristics (and two others, known from the literature): we compare the scores of the committees output by our algorithms to the scores of the optimal committees, and also use the two-dimensional Euclidean domain to compare the visual representations of the outputs of our algorithms.
Consumers' Responses to Choice-based Letting Mechanisms

During the 1990s a large majority of the social rented sector managers in the Netherlands shifted towards an advert model of allocation in place of a waiting list system. This paper focuses on the consumer's response to this new letting mechanism. Three case studies were conducted, geared to evaluate consumers' appreciation and understanding of the advert model. Various additional local, regional or national evaluations are used to put the findings from the case studies in perspective. Generally, the public appreciates the advert model more than the distribution system. However, insufficient understanding of the complex do-it-yourself allocation system affects appreciation of the system and access to vacancies both negatively. On average, people on low income and ethnic minority members (overlapping groups) were more prone to lack of understanding and were less successful applicants as a result. Moreover, the allocation mechanism has not changed differences in resources and bargaining power and its effects on the outcome of the allocation process.
ADVERSE SELECTION, SPREAD BEHAVIOR, AND OVER-THE-COUNTER SEASONED EQUITY OFFERINGS

In this paper the effects of over‐the‐counter seasoned equity issuances on the percentage bid‐ask spreads around announcement and offer dates are examined. A declining spread in the pre‐announcement period suggests that resolution of information asymmetry begins well before the announcement date. Further, using issue size as a proxy for the extent of information asymmetry, we observe that spreads for larger issues reach “normal” levels before the first public disclosure of the offering. For smaller issues this occurs only on the offer date. Results are consistent with the dealer experiencing reduced adverse information risk as a result of information‐gathering efforts during the underwriting process.
On Ranking Opportunity Sets in Terms of Freedom of Choice

The paper explores the notion of freedom of choice which is of considerable importance in welfare economics and the theory of social choice. Three plausible axioms are introduced for ranking alternative opportunity sets in terms of the degrees of freedom that they offer to the agent making choices. It is shown that, under these axioms, judgements about degrees of freedom of choice have to be based on the naive principle of simply counting the number of available options.
Sample-Efficient Learning of Mixtures

We consider PAC learning of probability distributions (a.k.a. density estimation), where we are given an i.i. d. sample generated from an unknown target distribution, and want to output a distribution that is close to the target in total variation distance. Let F be an arbitrary class of probability distributions, and let Fk denote the class of k-mixtures of elements of F. Assuming the existence of a method for learning F with sample complexity m(ε), we provide a method for learning Fk with sample complexity O((k.log k .m(ε))/(ε2)). Our mixture learning algorithm has the property that, if the F-learner is proper and agnostic, then the Fk-learner would be proper and agnostic as well. This general result enables us to improve the best known sample complexity upper bounds for a variety of important mixture classes. First, we show that the class of mixtures of k axis-aligned Gaussians in Rd is PAC-learnable in the agnostic setting with O((kd)/(ε4)) samples, which is tight in k and d up to logarithmic factors. Second, we show that the class of mixtures of k Gaussians in Rd is PAC-learnable in the agnostic setting with sample complexity Õ((kd2)/(ε4)), which improves the previous known bounds of Õ((k3.d2)/(ε4)) and Õ(k4.d4/ε2) in its dependence on k and d. Finally, we show that the class of mixtures of k log-concave distributions over Rd is PAC-learnable using Õ(k.d((d+5)/2)ε(-(d+9)/2)) samples.
An Improved Deadbeat Current Control Scheme With a Novel Adaptive Self-Tuning Load Model for a Three-Phase PWM Voltage-Source Inverter

In this paper, an improved deadbeat current control scheme with a novel adaptive self-tuning load model for a three-phase pulsewidth-modulated (PWM) voltage-source inverter is proposed. First, to achieve high-bandwidth current control characteristics, an improved deadbeat current controller with delay compensation is adopted. The compensation method forces the delay elements, which are caused by voltage calculation, PWM, and synchronous frame rotation, to be equivalently placed outside the closed-loop control system. Hence, their effect on the closed-loop stability is eliminated, and the current controller can be designed with a higher bandwidth. Second, to relax the parameter sensitivity issue of the deadbeat controller and to realize a control scheme with reduced sensors, a novel adaptive self-tuning load model is emerged in the control structure. The adaptive model is designed with low computational demand to estimate in real time the load parameters (R,L) and the back-electromotive-force voltage simultaneously. A unified solution to the present nonlinear estimation problem is presented by adopting a parallel observer structure. Furthermore, the adaptive model has the necessary phase advance of the estimated quantities, which compensates for the total system's delay. Comparative evaluation results are presented to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed control scheme
Geographies of money and finance II

In this report, I examine the growing interest in financial subjects within economic geography and the wider social sciences. I begin by locating this literature within work on financialization and earlier geographical research on money and finance. I then review the contribution made by research into everyday and elite financial subjects to understandings of the geographies of money and finance. I argue that recent work examining the role of space and place in constituting financial subjectivities is particularly important in allowing geographers to engage with emerging academic and policy debates about the changing nature of financial subjectivities within neoliberal economies.
Neural network encoding approach comparison: an empirical study

The authors report the results of an empirical study about the effect of input encoding on the performance of a neural network in the classification of numerical data. Two types of encoding schemes were studied, namely numerical encoding and bit pattern encoding. Fisher Iris data were used to evaluate the performance of various encoding approaches. It was found that encoding approaches affect a neural network's ability to extract features from the raw data. Input encoding also affects the training errors, such as maximum error, root square error, the training times and cycles needed to attain these error thresholds. It was also noted that an encoding approach that uses more input nodes to represent a single parameter generally can result in relatively lower training errors for the same training cycles. <<ETX>>