Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Correcting for Hubris in Project Appraisal

Behavioral finance research stresses the prevalence of overconfidence in capital budgeting practices. To remedy this shortcoming, specifically the upward bias in cash flow forecasts, the extant literature emphasizes the reduction of such forecasts. This paper considers the conditions under which a different adjustment is warranted, namely, an upward correction in the hurdle rate employed to evaluate the project. It is argued here that if adverse events can have a long-term, versus a merely transitory, deleterious effect on the project's cash flows, the second adjustment is appropriate.
Stochastic Convenience Yield and the Pricing of Oil Contingent Claims

This paper develops and empirically tests a two-factor model for pricing financial and real assets contingent on the price of oil. The factors are the spot price of oil and the instantaneous convenience yield. The parameters of the model are estimated using weekly oil futures contract prices from January 1984 to November 1988, and the model's performance is assessed out of sample by valuing futures contracts over the period November 1988 to May 1989. Finally, the model is applied to determine the present values of one barrel of oil deliverable in one to ten years time. Copyright 1990 by American Finance Association.
DEVELOPMENT OF TRANSDERMAL NANOEMULSION FORMULATION FOR SIMULTANEOUS DELIVERY OF PROTEIN VACCINE AND ARTIN-M ADJUVANT

Objective: Vaccine used to enhance immune response is commonly administered via parenteral route. However, it shows some disadvantages. This research aimed to develop a non-invasive vehicle for administering an immunogenic protein and a lectin adjuvant via transdermal route. The hydrophilic nature of protein and lectin became the major challenge faced in this study. Methods: Bovine serum albumin (BSA) was used as protein model and artin-M isolated from cempedak (Artocarpus integrifolia) seed as adjuvant model. Nanoemulsion was formulated as oil in water type and prepared by self-nanoemulsification method. The formulation consisted of virgin coconut oil (VCO), Tween 80, and PEG 400 as oil phase, surfactant, and co-surfactant, respectively. BSA and artin-M were incorporated into the oil phase as co-lyophilized solid dispersion in PEG 20000. The nanoemulsion was characterized by BSA entrapment efficiency, hemagglutination activity of artin-M, and stability testing using freeze thaw conducted by alternating the storage at room temperature and 4 °C up to 6 cycles. Results: The addition of PEG 20000 in solid dispersion at the rasio of 1:1 to BSA markedly increased BSA entrapment efficiency in oil phase to 98.6 ± 0.15%. Artin-M incorporated using the same method was also maintained its activity as shown by hemagglutination testing. The freeze thaw testing revealed the stability of nanoemulsion stored in the fridge with no-aggregation observed. The globule diameter was maintained at the size of 42.7 ± 0.9 nm with polydispersity index of 0.321 ± 0.01. Conclusion: The nanoemulsion is potensial as simultaneous transdermal delivery of protein vaccine and lectin adjuvant.
The economics of knowledge

The knowledge revolution is likely to have a profound impact on the well-being and welfare of human kind. The recognition of knowledge as a major factor in growth and development is a recent phenomenon. The management of knowledge within an enterprise is intimately linked to the management of scientific human resources in it. The two most prominent manifestations of the knowledge revolution were in the area of gene technology and information technology.
Minimal Cost Index Tracking Under Nonlinear Transaction Costs And Minimal Transaction Unit Constraints

Index tracking is a very common and popular approach in portfolio management. When there is neither (nonconvex) transaction costs nor minimal transaction unit constraints, the problem can be formulated as a convex least square problem, so that it can be solved by standard methods. However, when the transaction cost is nonconvex and not negligible, or if there is a minimal unit constraint on the amount of transaction, the problem becomes a nonconvex minimization problem with discrete variables. In this paper, we will propose a branch and bound algorithm for solving this class of problems and show that it can solve an index tracking problem of practical size in a reasonable amount of computation time.
The Vikings Are Here! Experiencing Volunteering at a Viking Heritage Site

Abstract Co-creation in tourist experiences is well established, and tourism managers are increasingly aware of tourists' role in the creation of own experiences. Other actors are often involved in this creation, and the question is, what they experience and gain from their involvements. Heritage sites offer complex, negotiable products that depend on interaction to fully emerge and form valuable experiences, and they are therefore relevant to explore in this context. Based on theory of the heritage experience, an analysis is undertaken to explore various levels and dynamics of involvement. Co-creation literature addresses the complex processes of co-creation, which indicate that interaction is at the centre of involvement, and this exploratory research therefore zooms in on interaction in re-enactors' experiences at a heritage site. This study is based on a Danish Viking site, Fyrkat, where a volunteer Viking re-enactment group engages in activities at the site, which suggests personal outcomes and inherent values along the lines of exercising interests in history, living out heritage, and socialising with like-minded peers. The paper provides knowledge of a dimension of co-created experiences that has been paid little attention, and thus contributes to a new understanding of co-creation in the experience of tourism.
Discussion of Risk Exposures and International Diversification: Evidence from Ishares

In their paper Zhong and Yang (2005) examine the risk exposure of iShares. These funds, which are traded on the major exchanges in the US, are designed to track a wide variety of indices. The iShares studied in this paper are those which track the MSCI indices of a foreign country, and are therefore of interest to US investors seeking international diversification. The main question addressed by the authors is whether the iShare price, quoted on the US exchange, closely mimics the corresponding MSCI country index, or whether significant deviations exist. The underlying concern is whether iShares provide US investors with 100 percent exposure to a foreign country index or whether these exchange traded funds contain a substantial component of US-specific risk. The price movements of iShares on the US market may differ from the MSCI index for two main reasons. Firstly, the underlying assets of the fund are close but not exactly equal to the constituent assets of the MSCI index. Pennathur, Delcoure and Anderson (2002) report that approximately 95% of the assets of iShare funds correspond to the underlying benchmark MSCI index. Although the authors do not explicitly address this issue the results from Section 3 (ii) suggest that deviations resulting from this effect
Structural instability in the pricing-to-market and exchange rate pass-through

This thesis examines potential time variance of the Pricing-to-market (PTM) and Exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We argue that the response of the export and import prices to the exchange rate is time dependent. We develop three models that justify the inconstancy of the PTM and ERPT. The first model represents a partial equilibrium theoretic framework where the existence of the cost of switching between substitutes generates structural breaks in the ERPT parameters. This model is subsequently tested by applying the threshold regression framework of Hansen (1999) to data on the US imports from selected European economies. The second model is a partial equilibrium model of export pricing where consumers dislike price volatility. Through solving the firm’s profit maximization problem we show that the volatility of the exchange rate undermines the stability of the response of the export price to currency movements. This model is tested using data on the UK exports to the EU and four out-of-sample forecasting tests, namely fixed, rolling, recursive and random walk coefficient time varying parameter regressions. The third model represents a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with subsistence points in consumption and investment. It features two countries and two types of firm – local currency pricing and producer currency pricing. Through maximizing the household’s utility and firms’ profits we show that the extent of the PTM and ERPT is time varying and depends on the unstable response of the mark-up of price over the marginal cost to currency movements. In order to illustrate the inconstancy of the mark-up for both firm types, we compute the impulse responses of the mark-ups to positive shocks to consumer preferences and production technology. Our findings on the time variance of the PTM and ERPT have important policy implications. Since the degree of the PTM and ERPT into import prices affects the extent of the rise of the domestic price level following the devaluation of the domestic currency, monetary policy should consider potential time evolution of the PTM and ERPT in order to control inflation.
Micro-simulating child poverty in 2010 and 2020

The 2008 Pre-Budget Report (PBR) said that 'the Government will take stock of progress towards its 2010 and 2020 child poverty target in the [2009] Budget'. As background to that exercise, this paper updates our previous analysis of the prospects for child poverty in the UK in 2010-11 and 2020-21.
Prevalence of heartworm infection in cats with signs of cardiorespiratory abnormalities.

OBJECTIVE To determine prevalence of heartworm infection in a population of pet cats with cardiorespiratory abnormalities and to determine relative usefulness of clinical signs and tests in diagnosis of heartworm disease. DESIGN Prospective case series. ANIMALS 100 client-owned cats with clinical signs of cardiorespiratory abnormalities. PROCEDURE Cats were evaluated using CBC, modified Knott test, ELISA for serologic detection of heartworm antigen and antibodies to heartworms, thoracic radiography, and echocardiography. Cats were considered infected if they had circulating microfilaria, heartworm antigens in serum, or if heartworms were detected by echocardiography or on necropsy. Cats were considered suspicious for infection if they had 2 of the following: serum antibodies to heartworms, eosinophilia or basophilia, or indicative radiographic findings. RESULTS 9 cats were infected with heartworms, resulting in a prevalence of 9%; 26 cats had evidence of heartworm exposure (i.e., serum antibodies to heartworms). Twenty cats were considered suspicious for heartworm infection. Some outdoor exposure was reported twice as often in heartworm-infected cats, compared with noninfected and suspicious cats. However, a third of infected cats were reportedly housed totally indoors. Cough and dyspnea were strong indicators of heartworm disease. Eight of 9 infected cats had serum antibodies to heartworms and heartworm antigen in serum. Thoracic radiography and echocardiography indicated heartworm infection in 6 and 7 of the 9 cats, respectively. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS Cough or dyspnea may indicate heartworm disease in cats; serologic tests, echocardiography, and radiography are most useful diagnostic procedures. Although living indoors is protective, it may not preclude heartworm infection in cats.
The Information Role of Conservatism

In this paper we argue that information asymmetry between firm insiders and outside equity investors generates conservatism in financial statements. Conservatism reduces the manager's incentives and ability to manipulate accounting numbers and so reduces information asymmetry and the deadweight losses that information asymmetry generates. This increases firm and equity values. Our empirical tests are consistent with our proposition that information asymmetry is significantly positively related to conservatism after controlling for other demands for conservatism. Further, our tests are more consistent with our prediction that changes in information asymmetry between equity investors lead to changes in conservatism than the FASB's proposition that conservatism produces information asymmetry among equity investors. An important implication is that, if the FASB was successful in meeting its stated goal of eliminating conservatism, then it would increase information asymmetry between investors, not reduce it.
EraseReLU: A Simple Way to Ease the Training of Deep Convolution Neural Networks

For most state-of-the-art architectures, Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) becomes a standard component accompanied with each layer. Although ReLU can ease the network training to an extent, the character of blocking negative values may suppress the propagation of useful information and leads to the difficulty of optimizing very deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Moreover, stacking layers with nonlinear activations is hard to approximate the intrinsic linear transformations between feature representations. In this paper, we investigate the effect of erasing ReLUs of certain layers and apply it to various representative architectures following deterministic rules. It can ease the optimization and improve the generalization performance for very deep CNN models. We find two key factors being essential to the performance improvement: 1) the location where ReLU should be erased inside the basic module; 2) the proportion of basic modules to erase ReLU; We show that erasing the last ReLU layer of all basic modules in a network usually yields improved performance. In experiments, our approach successfully improves the performance of various representative architectures, and we report the improved results on SVHN, CIFAR-10/100, and ImageNet. Moreover, we achieve competitive single-model performance on CIFAR-100 with 16.53% error rate compared to state-of-the-art.
The size effect reversal in the USA

The paper examines the size effect reversal in the USA over the period 1970–1999, using data for the ten size deciles in the CRSP tapes during this 40-year period. Betas for small-firm portfolios increase as the return interval analysed increases, and are lower than large-firm portfolios for daily data but higher for monthly and quarterly data. Differences between small- and large-firm portfolio returns are associated with higher betas as return intervals increase, with lower betas for daily data, and higher for quarterly data. Before 1981 when the small-firm effect was published, smaller firms’ relative risk coefficients were biased downwards compared to aggregated coefficients, while larger firms’ were biased upwards, as expected. But after 1981, a partial reversal occurred with larger firms’ relative risk coefficients also biased downwards and by more than the smaller firms. In the post-period, relative risk measures generated higher abnormal returns for large firms than for small firms, effectively a large-firm effect, because large firms’ risks were more understated, possibly due to their relatively less frequent trading. However, these abnormal returns were reduced for large (and small) firms when using more appropriate aggregated risk coefficients.
Airway Smooth Muscle Changes in the Nitrofen-Induced Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Rat Model

In the fetal rat, nitrofen induces congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) and pulmonary vascular remodeling similar to what is observed in the human condition. Airway hyperactivity is common in infants with CDH and attributed to the ventilator-induced airway damage. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that airway smooth muscle mechanical properties are altered in the nitrofen-induced CDH rat model. Lungs from nitrofen-exposed fetuses with hernias (CDH) or intact diaphragm (nitrofen) and untreated fetuses (control) were studied on gestation d 21. The left intrapulmonary artery and bronchi were removed and mounted on a wire myograph, and lung expression, content, and immunolocalization of cyclooxygenases COX-1 and COX-2 were evaluated. Pulmonary artery muscle in the CDH group had significantly (p < 0.01) lower force generation compared with control and nitrofen groups. In contrast, the same generation bronchial smooth muscle of the CDH and nitrofen groups developed higher force compared with control. Whereas no differences were found in endothelium-dependent pulmonary vascular muscle tone, the epithelium-dependent airway muscle relaxation was significantly decreased (p < 0.01) in the CDH and nitrofen groups. The lung mRNA levels of COX-1 and COX-2 were increased in the CDH and nitrofen groups. COX-1 vascular and airway immunostaining, as well as COX-1 and COX-2 lung protein content, were increased in the CDH group. This is the first report of airway smooth muscle abnormalities in the nitrofen-induced fetal rat model of CDH. We speculate that congenital airway muscle changes may be present in the human form of this disease.
The Effects of Employer and Client Identification on Internal and External Auditors' Evaluations of Internal Control Deficiencies

SUMMARY: The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's (PCAOB) Auditing Standard No. 5 (AS5) encourages external auditors to rely on internal auditors to increase the efficiency of lower-risk internal control evaluations (PCAOB 2007). We use post-SOX experimental data to compare the levels and effects of employer (client) identification on the control evaluations of internal (external) auditors. First, we find that internal auditors perceive a greater level of identification with the evaluated firm than do external auditors. We also find some evidence that, ceteris paribus, internal auditors are less lenient than external auditors when evaluating internal control deficiencies (i.e., tend to support management's preferred position to a lesser extent). Further, while we support Bamber and Iyer's (2007) results by finding that higher levels of external auditor client identification are associated with more lenient control evaluations, we demonstrate an opposite effect for internal auditors—higher levels of.
The Optimal Inflation Rate in New Keynesian Models: Should Central Banks Raise Their Inflation Targets in Light of the Zero Lower Bound?

We study the effects of positive steady-state inflation in New Keynesian models subject to the zero bound on interest rates. We derive the utility-based welfare loss function taking into account the effects of positive steady-state inflation and solve for the optimal level of inflation in the model. For plausible calibrations with costly but infrequent episodes at the zero-lower bound, the optimal inflation rate is low, typically less than two percent, even after considering a variety of extensions, including optimal stabilization policy, price indexation, endogenous and state- dependent price stickiness, capital formation, model-uncertainty, and downward nominal wage rigidities. On the normative side, price level targeting delivers large welfare gains and a very low optimal inflation rate consistent with price stability. These results suggest that raising the inflation target is too blunt an instrument to efficiently reduce the severe costs of zero-bound episodes.
Young Galaxy Candidates in the Hubble Frontier Fields. IV. MACS J1149.5+2223

We search for high-redshift dropout galaxies behind the Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223, a powerful cosmic lens that has revealed a number of unique objects in its field. Using the deep images from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, we find 11 galaxies at z > 7 in the MACS J1149.5+2223 cluster field, and 11 in its parallel field. The high-redshift nature of the bright z ≃ 9.6 galaxy MACS1149-JD, previously reported by Zheng et al., is further supported by non-detection in the extremely deep optical images from the HFF campaign. With the new photometry, the best photometric redshift solution for MACS1149-JD reduces slightly to z = 9.44 ± 0.12. The young galaxy has an estimated stellar mass of ( 7 ± 2 ) × 10 8 M ⊙ , and was formed at z = 13.2 − 1.6 + 1.9 when the universe was ≈300 Myr old. Data available for the first four HFF clusters have already enabled us to find faint galaxies to an intrinsic magnitude of M UV ≃ − 15.5 , approximately a factor of 10 deeper than the parallel fields.
The evolution of law under communism and post-communism: a system-theory analysis in the spirit of Luhmann

The paper suggests that Luhmannâ€™s theory of social systems and evolution offers a powerful approach for analyzing law and the economy. It considers Yugoslavia and some Central European countries before and after 1990. Luhmannâ€™s concept of evolution stands in stark contrast to mainstream economic theory. It enables us to clarify the concept of transformation. A transformation became necessary because communism was an evolutionary dead end. According to this view, in postcommunism the primacy of functional differentiation needs to be reestablished because it was partially reversed under communist rule. In these circumstances, the popular call for â€œsufficientâ€ public control over the market is asking for the impossible. Post-communist law is bound to fall behind the evolution of markets. This causes economic problems and retards financial deepening.
Endogenous Monetary Policy Credibility in a Small Macro Model of Israel

This paper extends a small linear model of the Israeli economy to allow for nonlinearities in the inflation-output process that arise from convexity in the Phillips curve and endogenous monetary policy credibility. We find that the dynamic responses to shocks in the extended model more closely resemble features in the data from the period 2001-03. In particular, the extended model does a much better job in accounting for the deterioration in monetary policy credibility and the output costs of regaining monetary policy credibility once it has been lost.
Geometric models of matter

Inspired by soliton models, we propose a description of static particles in terms of Riemannian 4-manifolds with self-dual Weyl tensor. For electrically charged particles, the 4-manifolds are non-compact and asymptotically fibred by circles over physical 3-space. This is akin to the Kaluza–Klein description of electromagnetism, except that we exchange the roles of magnetic and electric fields, and only assume the bundle structure asymptotically, away from the core of the particle in question. We identify the Chern class of the circle bundle at infinity with minus the electric charge and, at least provisionally, the signature of the 4-manifold with the baryon number. Electrically neutral particles are described by compact 4-manifolds. We illustrate our approach by studying the Taub–Newman, Unti, Tamburino (Taub–NUT) manifold as a model for the electron, the Atiyah–Hitchin manifold as a model for the proton, with the Fubini–Study metric as a model for the neutron and S4 with its standard metric as a model for the neutrino.
Evidence-based medicine and clinical trials

Optimal treatment of disease processes requires an objective assessment of clinical trial data in addition to careful patient monitoring. For multiple sclerosis (MS), the available treatments have been sufficiently evaluated in relapsing–remitting MS (RRMS), and physicians should treat MS patients to the standard of care recommended by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and/or the American Academy of Neurology. In some cases, recommendations must be made in the absence of definitive clinical trial data. Physicians should understand the limitations of recommendations of this type and still apply a combination of careful clinical evaluation, assessment of patient and disease factors, and an objective evaluation of whatever clinical trial data are available when treatment decisions are made.