Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What Turns the Taxman On? The Effect of Tax Aggressiveness and Voluntary Audit on Adjustments to the Tax Returns of Private Companies

Using a large proprietary data set from the internal records of the Finnish Tax Administration for the fiscal year 2011, we examine the factors that trigger adjustments by the tax authority to the taxable income reported by around 25,000 small private companies. Using that data, we develop a new direct measure of tax aggressiveness and introduce the direct and indirect effects of external audit into the tax aggressiveness literature, whilst avoiding the classic endogeneity problem. We hypothesize and find that being tax aggressive increases the likelihood of the tax authority not accepting taxable income as reported, whereas having a voluntary audit with an unqualified audit opinion decreases it. We also find that an unqualified audit opinion moderates the positive effect of tax aggressiveness on the likelihood of the tax authority making adjustments. While these findings are statistically significant when tax aggressiveness is measured by the book-tax difference (non-taxable revenues less non-tax deductible expenses) reported in the company’s tax return, they are insignificant when measured by the conventional metric of book-tax difference based on publicly available financial statement data. The main results are insensitive to whether the full sample is used or a balanced sample based on propensity score pairing of tax-adjusted firms with their non-adjusted counterparts. The robustness tests show that our results are qualitatively unaffected by the modifications made to the variable definitions and sample composition.
Is there anything special with Intra-Arab Foreign direct investment?

The determinants of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows to Arab countries particularly vary depending on what the source country is, i.e. Arab or non-Arab countries. Estimation is conducted on a separate sample for source countries but with the same set of determinants. We found that intra-Arab FDI is much higher than what can be deduced from current empirical models. More strikingly, the determinants of Arab FDI inflows are influenced by the supplier. Human capital, quality of institutions, infrastructure and openness hardly affect intra-Arab inflows while they normally affect non-Arab inflows. Two possible explanations are proposed. One is that a large share of intra Arab FDI is provided by government or related entities which obey specific regional strategic considerations. The other is that cultural similarity allows Arab investors to use informal socio-cultural networks, and thus to be less sensitive to socalled FDI fundamental determinants than non-Arab investors. 2014-Center for Economic Integration, Sejong Institution, Sejong University, All Rights Reserved.
Reversal of DNA methylation with 5-azacytidine alters chromosome replication patterns in human lymphocyte and fibroblast cultures.

Prior studies demonstrated that developmental or induced methylation of DNA can inactivate associated gene loci. Such DNA methylation can be reversed and specific genes reactivated by treatment with 5-azacytidine (5- azaC ). The present cytogenetic studies using replication banding methods show that 5- azaC treatment also results in an increase or decrease in replication staining at one or more band locations in human lymphocyte and fibroblast chromosomes. New replication band locations are not formed. These changes in replication staining, which reflect changes in timing of replication, are different between these two tissues. However, in both tissues, the delayed onset of replication in the heterocyclic, inactive X is shortened by 5- azaC . A correlation is thus suggested between the induced temporal change to earlier DNA replication, and induced hypomethylation and gene activation. The temporal effect on chromosome replication in 5- azaC -treated cells depends on the portion of the S-period studied. Toward the beginning of S, early-replication patterns are increased in both lymphocytes and fibroblasts. Toward the end of S, late-replication patterns are increased only in lymphocytes, suggesting a differential effect of 5- azaC in: (1) early-vs. late-S, and (2) lymphocytes vs. fibroblasts. Generally, 5- azaC has its greatest effect on the inactive chromosome regions that are typically late-replicating prior to 5- azaC treatment. These observed changes in replication band staining suggest that DNA methylation may modify regional groups of genes in concert.
Export Market Participation and Other Determinants of Capital Structure: The Case of Hungarian Manufacturing Firms

The paper analyzes the determinants of capital structure choices for Hungarian manufacturing firms in the period 1992-2006. First, these firms have most likely difficulties to plan long-term investment since short-term liabilities has a dominant role in their corporate capital structure. Second, other things equal, it is crucial to be both a large firm and a large exporter to have access to external funding. Smaller firms however, even when they are large exporters, they have more trouble to obtain external funding. Third, to acquire additional long-term debt it is essential to provide collateral. Fourth, there is not evidence that when Hungarian firms become larger, they can easily access long-term funding as the trade-off theory predicts. Fifth, small firms reduce long-term liabilities when they have more free cash holdings possibly to gain reputation, while large firms and domestic firms reduce their short-term liabilities if they have more cash holdings possibly to reduce costs. Firms of foreign ownership origin leave the level of their liabilities unchanged even when more available cash.
PENGARUH KESADARAN MEREK DAN PERSESPSI KUALITAS TERHADAP LOYALITAS MEREK MELALUI KEPERCAYAAN MEREK SEBAGAI VARIABEL INTERVENING PADA PONSEL NOKIA ( Studi pada mahasiswa Fakultas Ilmu Sosial dan Ilmu Politik Universitas Diponegoro )

This study aims to determine the effect of brand awareness and perceived quality of the Nokia brand loyalty through brand trust as an intervening variable. The sample used by 100 respondents using Simple Random Sampling technique. The method of analysis used in this study is the Path analysis. the calculation results showed that the variables of brand awareness, perceived quality variables, and variable keperayaan each brand has a positive and significant effect on the variable of brand loyalty. Influence exerted by the awareness of the brand loyalty variable that is equal to 12.2%, and the variable perceived quality of the brand loyalty of 28%. Variables brand awareness, perceived quality variables, and the variables are combined brand trust has a positive and significant effect on the variable of brand loyalty at 69.1%, while the remaining 30.9% is explained by other factors, variable brand image, brand association variable, and variations in price promotions. Based on calculations Path analysis proved that the variable brand trust as an intervening variable can be a mediator reinforcing relationship between perceived quality variables with the variables of brand loyalty. Meanwhile variable became brand trust mediator variable relationship weakens brand awareness to brand loyalty variable. Suggestions of this research is to improve the quality of the product, adding features, the company maintaining long term relationships with its customers objective that consumers remain loyal to the Nokia brand phones.
Equity and Cost Methods in Reported Earnings: The Case of Thai Listed Firms

This research examines the property of earnings which are reported by Thai listed firms through the equity and cost methods. The property of earnings is examined in terms of the persistence and value-relevance of earnings information. In the persistence of earnings information, the change model is employed for the main analysis. Results show that earnings information which is prepared through the equity method is more persistent and more value-relevant than that prepared through using the cost method. The outcome of this research provides the Thai accounting authority with empirical evidence which suggests that the equity method earnings are of higher quality than the cost method earnings. Further, the findings also reveal that the latter provides opportunities to firms to manage their earnings.Keywords: Earnings Management, Earnings Persistence, IFRS, Thailand, Value RelevanceJEL Classification: M41
N-ary relation extraction for simultaneous T-Box and A-Box knowledge base augmentation

The Web has evolved into a huge mine of knowledge carved in different forms, the predominant one still being the free-text document. This motivates the need for intelligent Web-reading agents : hypothetically, they would skim through disparate Web sources corpora and generate meaningful structured assertions to fuel knowledge bases (KBs). Ultimately, comprehensive KBs, like W IKIDATA and DB PEDIA , play a fundamental role to cope with the issue of information overload. On account of such vision, this paper depicts the F ACT E XTRACTOR , a complete natural language processing (NLP) pipeline which reads an input textual corpus and produces machine-readable statements. Each statement is supplied with a conﬁdence score and undergoes a disambiguation step via entity linking, thus allowing the assignment of KB-compliant URIs. The system implements four research contributions: it (1) executes n-ary relation extraction by applying the frame semantics linguistic theory, as opposed to binary techniques; it (2) simultaneously populates both the T-Box and the A-Box of the target KB; it (3) relies on a single NLP layer, namely part-of-speech tagging; it (4) enables a completely supervised yet reasonably priced machine learning environment through a crowdsourcing strategy. We assess our approach by setting the target KB to DBpedia and by considering a use case of 52 , 000 Italian Wikipedia soccer player articles. Out of those, we yield a dataset of more than 213 , 000 triples with an estimated 81 . 27% F 1 . We corroborate the evaluation via (i) a performance comparison with a baseline system, as well as (ii) an analysis of the T-Box and A-Box augmentation capabilities. The outcomes are incorporated into the Italian DBpedia chapter, can be queried through its SPARQL endpoint, and/or downloaded as standalone data dumps. The codebase is released as free software and is publicly available in the DBpedia association repository.
Off-pump versus on-pump coronary artery bypass surgery: meta-analysis and meta-regression of 13,524 patients from randomized trials.

BACKGROUND Most recent published meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) showed that off-pump coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) reduces incidence of stroke by 30% compared with on-pump CABG, but showed no difference in other outcomes. New RCTs were published, indicating need of new meta-analysis to investigate pooled results adding these further studies. METHODS MEDLINE, EMBASE, CENTRAL/CCTR, SciELO, LILACS, Google Scholar and reference lists of relevant articles were searched for RCTs that compared outcomes (30-day mortality for all-cause, myocardial infarction or stroke) between off-pump versus on-pump CABG until May 2012. The principal summary measures were relative risk (RR) with 95% Confidence Interval (CI) and P values (considered statistically significant when <0.05). The RR's were combined across studies using DerSimonian-Laird random effects weighted model. Meta-analysis and meta-regression were completed using the software Comprehensive Meta-Analysis version 2 (Biostat Inc., Englewood, New Jersey, USA). RESULTS Forty-seven RCTs were identified and included 13,524 patients (6,758 for off-pump and 6,766 for on-pump CABG). There was no significant difference between off-pump and on-pump CABG groups in RR for 30-day mortality or myocardial infarction, but there was difference about stroke in favor to off-pump CABG (RR 0.793, 95% CI 0.660-0.920, P=0.049). It was observed no important heterogeneity of effects about any outcome, but it was observed publication bias about outcome "stroke". Meta-regression did not demonstrate influence of female gender, number of grafts or age in outcomes. CONCLUSION Off-pump CABG reduces the incidence of post-operative stroke by 20.7% and has no substantial effect on mortality or myocardial infarction in comparison to on-pump CABG. Patient gender, number of grafts performed and age do not seem to explain the effect of off-pump CABG on mortality, myocardial infarction or stroke, respectively.
Motives for recreational gambling and other recreation activities among Internet users

Motives for Recreational Gambling And Other Recreational Activities Among Internet Users by Laurie Platz Dr. Murray G. Millar, Examination Committee Chair Associate Professor of Psychology University of Nevada, Las Vegas This research examined whether there was a qualitative or quantitative difference between recreational gamblers’ motives for participating in their one favorite gambling activity and their one favorite recreational activity. The rationale is to demonstrate that gambling is comparable to other recreational activities. The sample for this study was recruited on the Internet through newsgroups with bulletin boards. After deletion of cases that did not qualify for analysis, 133 people qualified for full analysis by scoring 0 on the NODS gambling screen (classified as recreational gamblers) and by completing the Recreation Experience Preference scales for both gambling and other recreational activities. In the overall group, seven of the top ten ranked motives were common to each activity: skill development, being with friends, being with similar people, excitement.
Unconstrained parameter estimation for assessment of dynamic cerebral autoregulation

Measurement of dynamic cerebral autoregulation (CA), the transient response of cerebral blood flow (CBF) to changes in arterial blood pressure (ABP), has been performed with an index of autoregulation (ARI), related to the parameters of a second-order differential equation model, namely gain (K), damping factor (D) and time constant (T). Limitations of the ARI were addressed by increasing its numerical resolution and generalizing the parameter space. In 16 healthy subjects, recordings of ABP (Finapres) and CBF velocity (ultrasound Doppler) were performed at rest, before, during and after 5% CO2 breathing, and for six repeated thigh cuff maneuvers. The unconstrained model produced lower predictive error (p < 0.001) than the original model. Unconstrained parameters (K′–D′–T′) were significantly different from K–D–T but were still sensitive to different measurement conditions, such as the under-regulation induced by hypercapnia. The intra-subject variability of K′ was significantly lower than that of the ARI and this parameter did not show the unexpected occurrences of zero values as observed with the ARI and the classical value of K. These results suggest that K′ could be considered as a more stable and reliable index of dynamic autoregulation than ARI. Further studies are needed to validate this new index under different clinical conditions.
KIR enrichment at the effector‐target cell interface is more sensitive than signaling to the strength of ligand binding

Target cell lysis by natural killer cells is inhibited by killer cell immunoglobulin‐like receptors (KIR) that bind major histocompatibility complex class I molecules. Many lymphocyte receptors, including KIR, become enriched at the interface with ligand‐bearing cells. The contribution of the enrichment to inhibitory signaling has not been determined. We now describe a KIR variant with enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) at the N terminus that can mediate inhibitory signaling, but its enrichment is markedly reduced. This receptor is only slightly weaker at inhibiting lysis than the same KIR tagged with EGFP in the cytoplasmic tail, even though the latter enriched as extensively as wild‐type KIR. A slight defect was also detected in the ability of the receptor to reduce adhesion to target cells and for binding of a soluble counterpart to cell surface HLA‐C. Our findings suggest that the strength of the interaction required to readily detect receptor enrichment exceeds that required for signaling.
The romantic experiences of adolescents with a visible difference: Exploring concerns, protective factors and support needs

Injuries or conditions that affect appearance can increase adolescents’ risk of psychosocial and interpersonal difficulties and may also impact on romantic relationships – an important aspect of adolescent development. A mixed method online approach explored the romantic experiences of 40 adolescents with a variety of visible differences. Young people identified appearance-related romantic concerns that cause distress, and impede the development and enjoyment of romantic relations. In contrast, some shared positive experiences and evidence of attitudes and behaviours that appear to protect against these concerns. Adolescents requested online peer support specific to their appearance-related needs. These findings can inform intervention development.
Overweight and depressive symptoms among African-American women.

BACKGROUND In a national survey, a correlation between overweight and depression was explained by dieting and poor health. This study examines overweight and depressive symptoms among urban African-American women, taking into account demographic factors, health status and practices, and psychosocial constructs. METHODS Respondents are 429 participants in a pilot for a culturally tailored intervention promoting healthful eating and exercising. Anthropomorphic and self-administered questionnaire data were collected at a community health club site. RESULTS Controlling for demographic factors, overweight is associated with symptoms of depression, a relationship that is partially explained by health status, but not by dietary restraint. Using multiple regression, poor health status, alcohol intake, hostility, and low levels of ethnic identity (connectedness with the African-American community) are independent predictors of depressed mood. In this study, dietary restraint reflects healthful eating and is inversely related to depression. The overweight/depression association is stronger among women with high levels of education and high levels of ethnic identity (statistical interactions). CONCLUSION Poor health likely contributes over time to both overweight and depressed mood. Ethnic identity enhancement strategies should be studied for their effectiveness in strengthening identity and for their potential in attracting individuals especially likely to benefit from lifestyle change programs.
Use of a disclosed plaque visualization technique improved the self-performed, tooth brushing ability of primary schoolchildren.

BACKGROUND Disclosing agents have a long history of use as an aid in children's tooth brushing instruction. However, their benefit when used to improve self-performed tooth brushing ability without any tooth brushing instruction has not been investigated. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of disclosed plaque visualization on improving the self-performed, tooth brushing ability of primary school children. MATERIAL AND METHOD A cluster-randomized, crossover study was conducted in Nakhon Nayok province, Thailand. A total of 122 second-grade schoolchildren, aged 8-10 years old, from 12 schools were randomly divided into 2 groups. The first group was assigned to brush with disclosed plaque visualization, while the other group brushed without disclosed plaque visualization. One month later the groups switched procedures. Tooth brushing ability was evaluated by the subjects' reduction in patient hygiene performance (PHP) scores. The data were analyzed using repeated-measures analysis of variance, with significance set at p<0.05. RESULTS Disclosed plaque visualization had a significant effect on improving the children's self-performed, tooth brushing ability in all areas of the mouth (p<0.001), particularly for anterior teeth, mandibular teeth, buccal surfaces, and areas adjacent to the gingival margin (p<0.001). CONCLUSION Disclosed plaque visualization is a viable technique to improve children's self-performed tooth brushing ability, and could be used in school-based oral health promotion programs.
The Irreversibility of Death: Reply to Cole

Professor Cole is correct in his conclusion that the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) protocol does not violate requirements of "irreversibility" in criteria of death, but wrong about the reasons. "Irreversible" in this context is best understood not as an ontological or epistemic term, but as an ethical one. Understood that way, the patient declared dead under the protocol is "irreversibly" so, even though resuscitation by medical means is still possible. Nonetheless, the protocol revives difficult questions about our concept of death.
Lifestyle Factors and Health Outcomes in Elderly Hong Kong Chinese Aged 70 Years and Over

Background: Although increasing emphasis is being placed on strategies for successful aging, few studies have examined the relationship between lifestyle factors and mortality and other health outcomes in the old-old population. Objective: To examine the impact of physical activity, dietary habits, smoking, and alcohol consumption on 3-year mortality and other health outcomes. Methods: 2,032 Chinese subjects aged 70 years and older (mean age 80 years) were recruited territorywide by proportional random sampling and followed for 3 years. Baseline information was obtained by interview on level of physical activity, dietary habits (frequency of consumption per week of major food groups), alcohol consumption, and smoking habits. Outcome measures include mortality, self-perceived health status, frequency of hospitalization, geriatric depression score, and development of new diseases (stroke, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, fractures). Logistic regression was used to examine the effects of lifestyle factors on each health outcome, with and without adjustment for age and baseline health status. Results: The mortality risk is reduced with increasing physical activity, daily fish intake and moderate alcohol consumption, and avoidance of smoking; hospitalization is inversely associated with increasing activity; better self-perceived health is associated with moderate alcohol consumption and a non-smoking status, and there is an inverse relationship between depressive symptoms and increasing activity and moderate alcohol consumption. After adjustment for age and baseline health status, higher levels of physical activity are associated with decreased mortality and hospitalization; non-smokers have reduced mortality and a better self-perceived health, and moderate alcohol consumption is also associated with better self-perceived health. Conclusion: Lifestyle factors may influence health outcomes even in the old-old population.
Financial Incentives and Loan Officer Behavior: Multitasking and Allocation of Effort under an Incomplete Contract

We investigate the implications of providing loan officers with a nonlinear compensation structure that rewards loan volume and penalizes poor performance. Using a unique data set provided by a large international commercial bank, we examine the main activities that loan officers perform: loan prospecting, screening, and monitoring. We find that when loan officers are at risk of losing their bonuses, they increase prospecting and monitoring. We further show that loan officers adjust their behavior more toward the end of the month when bonus payments are approaching. These effects are more pronounced for loan officers with longer tenures at the bank.