Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Assessment of Financial Literacy on Loan Repayment by Small and Medium Entreprnuers in Ngara, Nairobi County

The SMEs form a great percentage of all enterprises in the world. The global economy is heavily dependent on the success of Small Medium Entrepreneurship (SME) which creates employment, poverty alleviation and balanced developments which brings about economic growth in rural and urban setups. The government of Kenya is determined to raise the middle class status of the nation by the year 2030 through the participation of SMEs. This initiative has received the support of the banking sector, particularly Equity Bank. These enterprises allow the marginalized groups to diversify their levels of income. Equity bank has established financial literacy programs to provide the SMEs with financial skills necessary to create efficiency and effectiveness in entrepreneurship. Despite all these, the SMEs in Kenya face challenges that hinder them from attaining economies of scale. They lack training and management capacity to manage the business resources effectively. Financial literacy therefore is regarded as one of the strategies used by bankers to provide knowledge and skills needed to change attitude and attract more potential users of agent banking. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the influence of financial literacy on SMEs loan repayment. The specific objectives of this study is to establish the impact of book keeping skills, credit management and budgeting skills influence loan repayment by the beneficiaries. The study was conducted among the beneficiaries of Equity Group Foundation Training Program (EGFTP) on SMEs in Ngara, Nairobi County. A sample of 30 SMEs was selected for the study using stratified random sampling technique. The study used a descriptive survey research to investigate the factors influencing loan repayment among the beneficiaries. The researcher used self administered structured questionnaires to collect primary data from a sample of selected beneficiaries. The collected data was coded and entered in computer software for analysis. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used for data analysis. The study concludes that book keeping, credit management and budgeting skills significantly influenced the ability of SMEs to repay loans. The study recommends that the SMEs should enroll in financial related programs to enhance their capacities. The government and other industry players should emphasize on the importance of financial skills in to day running of their business. There is need also to initiate more financial literacy programs to reach to many SMEs for proper credit management skills hence improvement of loans repayment. Key words: Financial Literacy, Small Medium Entrepreneurs, Equity Group Foundation
Modeling Monetary Economies

Thoroughly updated and expanded with a new chapter on blockchain and increased coverage of cryptocurrency, as well as new data, this established advanced undergraduate textbook approaches the subject via first principles. It builds on a simple, clear monetary model and applies this framework consistently to a variety of monetary questions. Starting with trade being mutually beneficial, the authors demonstrate that money makes people better off, and that government money competes against other means of payments, including other types of government payments. After developing each of these topics, the book tackles the issue of money competing against other stores of value, examining issues associated with trade, finance, and modern banking. From simple economies to modern economies, the authors address the role banks play in making more trade possible, concluding with the information problems plaguing modern banking.
Fast inverse kinematics and kinetics solver for human-like figures

Applying complex motions to humanoids involves to deal with different kinematic, kinetic and dynamic constraints. Although dynamics is more accurate to simulate humanoids, inverse kinematics is an alternative to rapidly calculate plausible movements required for motion planning. Humanoids motion planning that deals with numerous degrees of freedom requires numerous calls to inverse kinematics solvers that make computation time increase significantly. We propose a new approach that is able to solve complex character positioning while dealing with the center of mass position with very few computation time. An iterative hierarchical process is proposed: analytical solutions are proposed for groups of body segments while a higher solver is applied to drive the whole body and is repeated until stability is reached. With such a system, we are able to animate from 22 to 177 characters at 30 Hz on a classical P4 computer
Adenoviral CCN3/NOV gene transfer fails to mitigate liver fibrosis in an experimental bile duct ligation model because of hepatocyte apoptosis

CCN3/NOV, a matricellular protein of the CYR61‐CTGF‐NOV (CCN) family, comprises six secreted proteins that associate specifically with the extracellular matrix. CCN proteins lack specific high‐affinity receptors; instead, they regulate crucial biological processes, such as fibrosis, by signalling via integrins and proteoglycans. Recent studies have linked overexpression of CCN3/NOV to mitigate kidney fibrosis. This study aims to investigate CCN3/NOV overexpression in liver fibrogenesis in vivo.
Distribution Channel Relational Cohesion Exchange Model: A Small‐to‐Medium Enterprise Manufacturer's Perspective

This study investigated the influence of dealers' expert, referent, and legitimate sources of power on small‐to‐medium enterprise manufacturers' relationship commitment in distribution channel systems. A theoretical model drawing on the relational cohesion theory and the extant marketing literature is developed and tested empirically using a sample data set of 452 from imbabwe. In this model, expert, referent, and legitimate powers are the predictors, whereas trust, cooperation, and relationship satisfaction are the mediators, and relationship commitment is the outcome variable. Analysis reveals that these three powers positively influence the mediators and outcome variable in a significant way, except for legitimate power to cooperation relationship. Managerial implications and future studies are suggested.
Community Satisfaction in Post-socialist Cities: Factors and Implications

Community satisfaction is an important determinant of the perceived overall quality of life, and can be defined as a function of opportunities a community provides to its residents. Although measurable at a specific point in time, it does not only reflect current communal activities, but also past developments and their path dependency. In this paper we identify and empirically verify factors influencing community satisfaction in post-socialist urban settlements. In the process we are using the Slovenian post-socialist cities of Nova Gorica and Velenje as illustrative examples, and the average Slovenian community satisfaction in urban settlements as a benchmark. This unique combination of data allows us to derive important lessons for community residents, community planners, and local policy-makers.
Clinical Application and Pharmacodynamic Monitoring of Apixaban in a Patient with End‐Stage Renal Disease Requiring Chronic Hemodialysis

Despite prescribing guidance, limited data exist to describe the use of apixaban in patients with end‐stage renal disease (ESRD) requiring hemodialysis (HD). Current apixaban dosing recommendations for this patient population are based largely on a single‐dose pharmacokinetic study of eight patients. We describe the clinical application and pharmacodynamic monitoring of apixaban in a 62‐year‐old 156‐kg African‐American woman with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation and ESRD requiring hemodialysis who developed calciphylaxis while receiving warfarin therapy. Based on a multidisciplinary clinical judgment decision due to concern for drug accumulation after multiple doses in patients with ESRD receiving HD, she was anticoagulated with apixaban 2.5 mg twice/day, as opposed to 5 mg twice/day as recommended by the package insert. Antifactor Xa monitoring was used, and resultant peak and trough apixaban concentrations were above the upper limit of detection for our clinical laboratory (more than 2.00 IU/ml). On day 7 of her hospitalization, the patient developed gastrointestinal bleeding, and apixaban was discontinued; no further clinical signs of bleeding occurred during her subsequent hospitalization course. Use of the Naranjo Adverse Drug Reaction Probability Scale indicated a probable relationship (score of 6) between apixaban exposure and the manifestation of gastrointestinal bleeding. The patient ultimately died 44 days after the acute bleeding event; however, coagulation concerns were not implicated in the patient's death. To our knowledge, this is the first case report that describes apixaban use and associated antifactor Xa monitoring in a patient with ESRD receiving HD, and it provides concern for current apixaban dosing recommendations in this patient population. Further pharmacokinetic and clinical data are likely necessary to better characterize apixaban use in these patients to optimize safety and efficacy.
Debt, Managerial Compensation and Learning

Using a dynamic model with uncertainty and asymmetric information, we study the impact of debt and bankruptcy on managerial compensation and learning. In this model, compensation has two roles to play - providing incentives to the manager and learning about his type. We show that debt, through bankruptcy, acts as a substitute of compensation in both dimensions and derive conditions under which debt lowers average compensation, pay-performance sensitivity and increases learning. We also examine the choice of debt and show that firm value can be increased due to debt's effect on managerial compensation, abstracting from other costs and benefits of debt. Finally, we conduct comparative statics with respect to the underlying parameters.
Ultra‐high‐resolution scanning electron microscopy of mitochondria and sarcoplasmic reticulum arrangement in human red, white, and intermediate muscle fibers

ABSTRACT Background: Human skeletal muscle fibers are the red, white, and intermediate fibers. They differ in their mitochondrial structure and enzyme activity. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used on specially prepared specimens to determine the distinctive features of mitochondria and sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) in each fiber type.
Labour Policy and Determinants of Employment and Wages in a Developing Economy with Labour Shortage

Using data from a sample of 1,099 workers, this paper investigates the determinants of employment and wages for workers in the United Arab Emirates. The paper further examines the wage distribution and the decomposition of the wage gap between the public and the private sectors. Results of the study are consistent with the dual labour market theory and indicate that the labour market in the United Arab Emirates is segmented based on sectors (public versus private) and types of workers (nationals versus non-nationals). The study concludes with a discussion of the implication of these findings for the effectiveness of labour and economic policy.
RISK, TRANSACTIONS CHARGES, AND THE MARKET FOR FOREIGN EXCHANGE SERVICES

This paper suggests that transactions charges in foreign exchange markets, rather than being solely brokerage fees, represent exchange rate uncertainty in periods of great fluctuations by including remuneration for the assumption of risk by foreign exchange dealers. Since most of the cost of exchange rate uncertainty may be largely endogenously included in the foreign exchange markets, attempts to examine the efficient market hypothesis in these markets should most appropriately include specific consideration of transactions costs. There appears to be empirical support for the premise that transactions charges are positively related to exchange rate risk, and, as well, inclusion of contemporaneous bid-ask spreads into the interest parity schedule leaves few unexplained profits from dollar-pound covered interest arbitrage during the 1970's and underscores the notion of classifying periods by degree of turbulence in analyzing covered interest arbitrage.
Competition for private and state school teachers

We analyse the role of private schools in the teachers’ labour market. Private schools employ an increasingly‐disproportionate share of teachers in Britain, relative to the number of their pupils. Their teachers are more likely than state school teachers to possess post‐graduate qualifications, and to be specialists in shortage subjects. Recruitment from the state sector is an important and growing source of new teaching staff for private schools, and a small though increasing deduction from the supply of new teachers available to state schools. Private school teachers enjoy greater job satisfaction, work with fewer pupils, enjoy longer holidays and, in the case of women, shorter weekly hours. Among women, pay is lower in the private sector, which we interpret as a compensating differential. For men, there is no significant inter‐sectoral difference in pay. However, for both men and women there is evidence of a substantial pay premium for private‐school teachers trained in shortage subjects.
The Service Economy in OECD Countries

Improving the performance of the services sector is important to enhance aggregate economic growth. This is primarily since the service sector has become the quantitatively most important sector in all OECD economies. The growing role of services is not only the result of a resource re-allocation towards services, as the sector with low productivity growth. It is also related to demand side factors, such as a high income elasticity of demand for some services, demographic developments, the provision of certain services as public goods, and the growing role of services as providers of intermediate inputs. The empirical evidence points to several areas where employment and productivity growth in services is held back. For example, labour-intensive production in many services industries may reduce the potential for productivity growth. Innovation is held back by obstacles that are particularly relevant for services industries. The evidence also shows that the regulatory environment for services in product and labour markets may affect the scope for employment and productivity growth. However, policy should not necessarily look at services separately from manufacturing industries. In contrast, several services industries show characteristics and problems similar to those of manufacturing industries and the blurring of the two sectors is becoming more and more prevalent. Moreover, addressing some of the problems faced by services may also improve the performance of other industries, since services provide key intermediate inputs to such sectors.
Stochastic Trends and Technical Change: The Case of Energy Consumption in the British Industrial and Domestic Sectors

This paper estimates energy demand in the British domestic and industrial sectors and analyzes the extent to which energy-saving technological change is exogenous, or induced by the energy price. The paper implements models with a linear trend, models making use of the price decomposition of Dargay and Gately (1995a) and the Structural Time Series Models (STSMs) of Harvey (1989). Stochastic trends have been found to be rather important while in neither of the sectors assessed in this study could the hypothesis of symmetric price effects be rejected. Following Hunt and Judge (2005), stochastic trend and asymmetric price effects are found to be substitutes in the industrial sector. In particular we conclude that asymmetric price effects can substitute for the slope in the stochastic trend. Finally, energy consumption in the industrial sector is strongly influenced by price while the effect of price in the domestic sector is markedly smaller.
Disclosure choices of foreign registrants in the United States

This study provides descriptive evidence on the nature and timing of disclosures of foreign registrants (hereafter "issuers") in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC has exempted foreign issuers from some disclosure requirements applicable to U.S.based registrants in order to encourage foreign firms to enter U.S. capital markets (Silkenat [1994]). ' For example, under current SEC annual reporting rules, a foreign issuer that does not wish to make a public offering of securities in the United States may omit disclosures about income taxes, leases, pensions, nonconsolidated affiliates, related parties, and complete industry and geographic segment information. While these exemptions may stimulate listing in the U.S., they may also impair investors' ability to evaluate the financial performance of the affected firms. In particular, the SEC has relaxed disclosure requirements in areas cited by the AICPA Special Committee on Financial Reporting as the most useful to financial
Welfare State Developments in the Russian Federation: Oil-Led Social Policy and 'The Russian Miracle'

This article investigates the main welfare state developments of the Russian Federation that have occurred since the fall of communism. It argues that the contemporary welfare expansion strictly depends on high oil and gas prices, and that this oil-led social policy makes the future of the 'Russian Miracle' highly volatile. The main conclusion is that the Russian welfare state will be able to function properly and to ensure social integration and solidarity only under conditions of sustained oil-led growth. This article also identifies a variety of different, but equally important, endogenous, as well as an exogenous, factors that have influenced the social policy developments in the Russian Federation since 1989. These correspond to the existence of few veto points present in the political arena, the lack of a well structured system of interest representation, the presence of informality in the welfare state organization, but also to the presence of national economic vulnerabilities and/or strengths in the now open global economy, as well as to non contingent decisions taken in strategic sectors of the state, such as those related to the energy or defense sector.
Cosine similarity based dictionary learning and source recovery for classification of diverse audio sources

A dictionary learning based audio source classification algorithm is proposed. Cosine similarity measure is used to select the atoms during dictionary learning. Three proposed objective measures, namely, signal to distortion ratio (SDR), the number of non-zero weights and the sum of weights have been used for classification. A frame-wise source classification accuracy of 98.86% is obtained for twelve different sources using SDR measure and a secondary support vector machine classifier. 100% accuracy has been obtained using moving SDR accumulated over 14 successive frames. For ten of the audio sources tested, 100% accuracy requires accumulation of only 6 frames of a signal.
Union recognition : organising and bargaining outcomes

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acronyms Foreword 1. Introduction 2. Working With Dinosaurs? 3. Union Organising Under Certification Law in Britain 4. Organising and Diversity in Banking and Insurance 5. As a Phoenix Arisen? 6. The Nature of Collective Bargaining Achieved Through the Statutory Procedure 7. The National Union of Journalists and the Provincial Newspaper Industry 8. Union Recognition in Asian Workplaces 9. Two Strategies, Two Divides 10. The Transition from Organising to Representation 11. Does the Organising Means Determine the Bargaining Ends? 12. Collective Bargaining Performance of Newly Certified Unions in Canada 13. Recognition, Bargaining and Unions in Australia 14. Conclusion References
Assessment of intra and interregional genetic variation in the Eastern Red-backed Salamander, Plethodon cinereus, via analysis of novel microsatellite markers

The red-backed salamander (Plethodon cinereus) has long-served as a model system in ecology, evolution, and behavior, and studies surveying molecular variation in this species have become increasingly common over the past decade. However, difficulties are commonly encountered when extending microsatellite markers to populations that are unstudied from a genetic perspective due to high levels of genetic differentiation across this species’ range. To ameliorate this issue, we used 454 pyrosequencing to identify hundreds of microsatellite loci. We then screened 40 of our top candidate loci in populations in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—including an isolated island population ~ 4.5 km off the shore of Lake Erie (South Bass Island). We identified 25 loci that are polymorphic in a well-studied region of Virginia and 11 of these loci were polymorphic in populations located in the genetically unstudied regions of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Use of these loci to examine patterns of variation within populations revealed that South Bass Island has low diversity in comparison to other sites. However, neither South Bass Island nor isolated populations around Cleveland are inbred. Assessment of variation between populations revealed three well defined genetic clusters corresponding to Virginia, mainland Ohio/Pennsylvania, and South Bass Island. Comparisons of our results to those of others working in various parts of the range are consistent with the idea that differentiation is lower in regions that were once glaciated. However, these comparisons also suggest that well differentiated isolated populations in the formerly glaciated portion of the range are not uncommon. This work provides novel genetic resources that will facilitate population genetic studies in a part of the red-backed salamander’s range that has not previously been studied in this manner. Moreover, this work refines our understanding of how neutral variation is distributed in this ecologically important organism.
A maximum price tariff

The Department of Health (DH) has indicated that from 2011/12 the tariff will become an uppermaximum rather than the unique price for each healthcare resource group (HRG) (DH, 2009). The need for such cost containment measures needs no discussion. However, notwithstanding over 15 years of development, the tariff still contains a long list of fundamental flaws (Jones, 2009).