Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Learning Curve and Pricing in the Chemical Processing Industries

Data on 37 chemical products are used to test a number of hypotheses about the learning curve and industrial price behavior. The results document a strong and consistent learning effect. Learning is found to be a function of cumulated industry output and cumulated investment rather than calendar time. Standard economies of scale appear significant but small in magnitude relative to the learning effect. Variations in the slope of the learning curve are linked to differences in R&D expenditures and capital intensity. Market concentration is found to be a strong influence on price flexibility and the timing of learning-related price changes.
A study of women administrators in campus recreation in the USA

The number of women working in campus recreation organizations in the United States of America (USA) has steadily increased due to dynamic changes in recreation departments within colleges and universities across the USA since 1990. This paper is descriptive in nature and its purpose is to examine how women, currently working as campus recreation administrators, are positioned in the industry. Data were collected utilizing an online survey, based on a modified version of the Female Sport Manager Career Survey. Findings offer a descriptive “snap shot” of women in campus recreation such as age, level of education, sector of employment, employment patterns, and use of networking and mentoring to advance their careers. Additionally, results provide some valuable information on work history, continuing education and career advancement, affiliation with professional associations, as well as issues related to networking and mentoring. This paper sets the stage for further inquiries with practical and theoretical implications.
Guadalajara’s water crisis and the fate of Lake Chapala: a reflection of poor water management in Mexico:

This paper describes the water crisis faced by the city of Guadalajara with the drying up of its main source of water, Lake Chapala. This drying up of Mexico’s largest lake will cause far-reaching economic and ecological consequences for the extended region. The paper also examines the underlying causes, which are centred on the inadequate and unsustainable management of the Lerma- Chapala river basin (that extends over five states). It looks at the innovative, although as yet insufficient, institutional response towards integrated sustainable water management in Mexico, which centres on a shift from centralized water management at the federal level to a multi-stakeholder and participative system based in river basins, and reflects on the current challenges posed.
Critical citizens : global support for democratic government

Foreword by Joseph Nye, Jr. 1. Introduction: The Growth of Critical Citizens SECTION ONE: CROSS-NATIONAL TRENDS IN CONFIDENCE IN GOVERNANCE 2. Mapping Political Support in the 1990s: A Global Analysis 3. Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies 4. Five Years after the Fall: Trajectories of Support for Democracy in Post-Communist Europe SECTION TWO: TESTING THEORIES WITH CASE-STUDIES 5. Down and Down We Go: Political Trust in Sweden 6. The Democratic Culture of Unified Germany 7. Tensions Between the Democratic Ideal and Reality: South Korea SECTION THREE: EXPLANATIONS OF TRENDS 8. Social and Political Trust in Establishes Democracies 9. The Economic Performance of Governments 10. Political performance and Institutional Trust 11. Institutional Explanations of Political Support 12. Postmodernization, Authority, and Democracy 13. Conclusions: The Growth of Critical Citizens and its Consequences Bibliography
Effects of prematurity, intrauterine growth status, and early dexamethasone treatment on postnatal bone mineralisation

AIM To examine the hypothesis that, apart from prematurity, intrauterine growth status (expressed as gestational age specific birth weight standard deviation scores), neonatal factors, and duration of dexamethasone treatment influence bone mineralisation in early infancy. METHODS In this prospective study, groups consisted of 15 preterm small for gestational age infants (SGA group) and 43 preterm appropriate for gestational age infants (AGA group). A reference group contained 17 term infants. Body size is known to affect bone mineral content (BMC), therefore postnatal bone mineralisation was measured when the study infants and controls had attained a similar body size. Bone mineral density (BMD) and BMC were determined by dual energy x ray absorptiometer of the lumbar spine (L2–L4). RESULTS Both preterm groups had significantly lower BMC and BMD than the weight matched term reference group, but no difference was found in BMC and BMD between preterm SGA and AGA infants. In stepwise regression analysis, bone area, duration of dexamethasone treatment, weight at examination, and weight gain per week were the most significant factors, explaining 54% of the variance of the BMC values. CONCLUSION In particular, weight at examination, prematurity, and possibly dexamethasone treatment, but not intrauterine growth status, affect postnatal bone mineralisation. Key messages Prematurely born SGA and AGA infants have significantly lower BMC than weight matched term AGA infants The degree of prematurity and postnatal dexamethasone treatment affect bone mineralisation, which is not affected by intrauterine growth retardation
The process of regenerating, repositioning and re-branding Oldham: challenges and prospects for the future

This paper profiles how the Oldham borough has been repositioned since the events of 2001 when the city projected itself as a disaster area embroiled in social turmoil, economic and infrastructural degradation. To this day the core activity has shifted from the textile mills to services. The mills have mostly been converted into business offices. In the main, the paper concludes that with the right planning and sustained effort a place or a destination can be as good a brand as a successful product. The prospects for Oldham's future look bright and this has been made possible by the cooperation of the various stakeholders and a strategic vision epitomised in the strategic document codenamed 'Oldham Beyond'. While acknowledging the phenomenal transition of Oldham the paper points out that successful branding is hard work, sustained investment and requires a strategic approach. Furthermore if Oldham continues on its current path of development there is a bright future ahead which could attract more investment and thereby more development.
Economic Impact Of Climate Change OnNigerian Maize Sector: A Ricardian Analysis

This paper evaluates the economic impact of climate change on Nigeria’s maize sector using a Ricardian approach. Data was collected on temperature, precipitation, soil, maize revenue, socioeconomic characteristics and adaptation strategies to varying climate factors. The study reveals that net maize revenue per hectare is sensitive to climate change. The impact of predicted climate scenarios from three models (CGM2, HADCM3 and PCM) indicated that there would be an increasing reduction in maize net revenue per hectare over the forecast period unless appropriate mitigation responses are adopted. Further, impact of climate change is not uniformly distributed across the different agroecological zones.
Polysensory properties of neurons in the anterior bank of the caudal superior temporal sulcus of the macaque monkey.

1. We examined the sensory properties of cells in the anterior bank of the caudal part of the superior temporal sulcus (caudal STS) in anesthetized, paralyzed monkeys to visual, auditory, and somesthetic stimuli. 2. In the anterior bank of the caudal STS, there were three regions distinguishable from each other and also from the middle temporal area (MT) in the floor of the STS and area Tpt in the superior temporal gyrus. The three regions were located approximately in the respective inner, middle, and outer thirds of the anterior bank of the caudal STS. These three regions are referred to, from the inner to the outer, as the medial superior temporal region (MST), the mostly unresponsive region, and the caudal STS polysensory region (cSTP), respectively. 3. The extent of MST and its response properties agreed with previous studies. Cells in MST responded exclusively to visual stimuli, had large visual receptive fields (RFs), and nearly all (91%) showed directional selectivity. 4. In the mostly unresponsive region, three quarters of cells were unresponsive to any stimulus used in this study. A quarter of the cells responded to only visual stimuli and most did not show directional selectivity for moving stimuli. Several directionally selective cells responded to movements of three-dimensional objects, but not of projected stimuli. 5. The response properties of cells in the superficial cortex of the caudal superior temporal gyrus, a part of area Tpt, external to cSTP were different from those of cells in the three regions in the anterior bank of the STS. Cells in Tpt were exclusively auditory, and had much larger auditory RFs (mean = 271 degrees) than those of acoustically-driven cSTP cells (mean = 138 degrees). 6. The cSTP contained unimodal visual, auditory, and somesthetic cells as well as multimodal cells of two or all three modalities. The sensory properties of cSTP cells were as follows. 1) Out of 200 cells recorded, 102 (51%) cells were unimodal (59 visual, 33 auditory, and 10 somesthetic), 36 (18%) cells were bimodal (21 visual+auditory, 7 visual+somesthetic, and 8 auditory+somesthetic), and four (2%) cells were trimodal. Visual and auditory responses were more frequent than somesthetic responses: the ratio of the population of cells driven by visual: auditory: somesthetic stimuli was 3:2:1. 2) Visual RFs were large (mean diameter, 59 degrees), but two-thirds were limited to the contralateral visual hemifield. About half the cells showed directional selectivity for moving visual stimuli. None showed selectivity for particular visual shapes. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Is sex ratio at birth changing in Italy ? Spatial and temporal trends ’ analysis

In societies where no prenatal sex selection have been observed, male to female ratio at birth (secondary sex ratio) is commonly assumed to be relatively stable and it averages between 105 and 106 boys per 100 girls. Notwithstanding, some recent studies showed that in the last decades there has been a slightly but significant change in this ratio both considering Countries as whole and regions or small areas. According to Davis and colleagues (1998), a declining trend can be observed in Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada and US, whereas a comparative research carried out in 29 Countries reveals mixed results (Parazzini et al, 1998): between 1950 and 1994 the sex ratio shifted downwards in 16 countries, whereas it increased in 6 and remained roughly stable in the other 7. South Europe (including Italy) is one of the areas where the rise of sex ratio has been observed. Moreover, Astolfi and Zonta (1999) reported that during 1970-1997 the proportion of male births has significantly declined in the four most populated Italian provinces, while the opposite trend can be noted in the rest of the country. This means that aggregate national trend can obscured important variations in sex ratio across regions and, in general, across sub-national areas.
The skill premium and the ‘Great Divergence’

This article analyses the long-term development of the skill premium in western Europe in a global perspective, on the basis of data on wages of skilled and unskilled construction workers in more than a dozen European countries and regions, and in a number of non-European countries such as India, China, Japan, Russia, Korea and Indonesia. It shows that already in the late medieval period the skill premium in western Europe had fallen sharply and became, from the fifteenth century onwards, much lower than in most other parts of the world economy. Only in southern China, and perhaps also in nineteenth-century Japan, did the skill premium fall to an equally low level. The explanation for these global patterns focuses on factor proportions, the quality of institutions and demand-related factors. Moreover, it is argued that the skill premium measured in this way is also a predictor of long-term economic performance.
Apoptosis and autoimmunity

Apoptotic cell antigens have been identified increasingly as the targets of autoantibodies in autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus. This review examines evidence supporting the hypothesis that apoptotic cells are a primary source of immunogen in lupus, as well as potential mechanisms by which tolerance to apoptotic cells may break down.
Regulating Sex Work: Heterogeneity in Legal Strategies

In this article, we examine various legal strategies used to regulate the sale and purchase of sexual services. We use three broad categories to structure our discussion: full criminalization, partial decriminalization, and full decriminalization. In each section, we discuss laws directed toward the control of sellers, buyers, and third parties. We focus on legislation and practices at the highest level of aggregation (i.e., the national, state, or provincial level), and due to limited data, we concentrate on high-income countries. We present a critical assessment of each legal approach and conclude with a call for future research on the consequences of different legal strategies for sellers, buyers, and third parties.
Legal Liability, Government Intervention, and Auditor Behavior: Evidence from Structural Reform of Audit Firms in China

Abstract This paper investigates how legal liability influences audit quality and audit fees, particularly in the presence of government intervention. Since 2010, all Chinese audit firms were required to transform from a structure of limited liability company (LLC) to limited liability partnership (LLP), which removes the cap on the liability exposure of negligent auditors. By adopting this natural experiment, we document the following findings: first, after audit firms reorganize as LLPs, auditors are more likely to (1) issue modified audit opinions and going-concern opinions, (2) constrain clients’ earnings management, and (3) charge a premium in audit fees, which suggest that exerting unlimited legal liability on negligent auditors improves both audit quality and audit fees. Second, the effect of the LLP adoption is more pronounced when auditors are from local audit firms, and clients are controlled by local governments. Further analyses suggest that the stock prices of clients positively react to the reform event, which indicates that LLP adoption improves the overall value of audits. In summary, our empirical findings are consistent with the argument that legal liability is able to effectively shape auditor behavior in emerging markets where the other institutional mechanisms are relatively weaker and government intervention is heavy.
Franchised Degree Teaching What Can Educators Learn From Business

Abstract In order to achieve rapid growth in student numbers, a number of Higher Education Institutions have borrowed some of the concepts of franchising from the private service sector. A franchise involves one party — the franchisor — developing a service and monitoring standards, whilst a second party — the franchisee, delivers the service in return for a share of the reward. This article draws comparisons between private sector and higher education franchising and analyses the franchise strategies open to the HE sector. It concludes that if managed correctly, franchising will bring benefits to the higher education sector, colleges of further education and students alike. The uncertain start to higher education franchising mirrors the early days of private sector franchising, but like the latter, it has potential subsequently to achieve rapid mutually beneficial growth.
The Interaction between Internal R&D and Different Types of External Knowledge Sourcing: An Empirical Study of Chinese Innovative Firms

This paper investigates to what extent internal RD horizontal connections; value chain partners, and technology service providers. We find that both internal R&D activities and external knowledge sourcing have a positive effect on firms' innovation performance. Strong internal R&D capabilities also increase the effect of sourcing from value chain partners and horizontal connections, but we do not find support for complementarity between internal R&D and collaborations with universities and research labs. These findings jointly suggest that the mixture of different types of external knowledge partners in combination with internal R&D capabilities is crucial in understanding the role of open innovation in emerging economies.
Development of the Job Diagnostic Survey

The properties and uses of the Job Diagnostic Survey (JDS) are described. The JDS is intended (a) to diagnose existing jobs to determine if (and how) they might be redesigned to improve employee motivation and productivity, and (b) to evaluate the effects of job changes on employees. The instrument is based on a specific theory of how job design affects work motivation, and provides measures of (a) objective job dimensions, (b) individual psychological states resulting from these dimensions, (c) affective reactions of employees to the job and work setting, and (d) individual growth need strength (interpreted as the readiness of individuals to respond to "enriched" jobs). Reliability and validity data are summarized for 6S& employees on 62 different jobs in 7 organizations who have responded to a revised version of the instrument.
How Large is Average Economic Growth?

This paper puts forward a method to estimate average economic growth, and its associated confidence bounds, which does not require a formal decision on potential unit root properties. The method is based on the analysis of either difference-stationary or trend-stationary time series models, implementing the robust bootstrapping procedure advocated in Romano and Wolf (2001). Simulation evidence indicates the practical relevance of the method. It is illustrated on quarterly post-war US industrial production.
Looking Inside the Black Box: The Effect of Corporate Governance on Corporate Social Responsibility

Manuscript Type Review Research Question/Issue This study provides a systematic multi-level review of recent literature to evaluate the impact of corporate governance mechanisms (CG) at the institutional, firm, group, and individual levels on firm level corporate social responsibility (CSR) outcomes. We offer critical reflections on the current state of this literature and provide concrete suggestions to guide future research. Research Findings/Insights Focusing on peer-reviewed articles from 2000 to 2015, the review compiles the evidence on offer pertaining to the most relevant CG mechanisms and their influence on CSR outcomes. At the institutional level, we focus on formal and informal institutional mechanisms, and at the firm level, we analyze the different types of firm owners. At the group level, we segregate our analysis into board structures, director social capital and resource networks, and directors' demographic diversity. At the individual level, our review covers CEOs' demography and socio-psychological characteristics. We map the effect of these mechanisms on firms' CSR outcomes. Theoretical/Academic Implications We recommend that greater scholarly attention needs to be accorded to disaggregating variables and yet comprehending how multiple configurations of CG mechanisms interact and combine to impact firms' CSR behavior. We suggest that CG-CSR research should employ a multi-theoretical lens and apply sophisticated qualitative and quantitative methods to enable a deeper and finer-grained analysis of the CG systems and their influence on CSR. Finally, we call for cross-cultural research to capture the context sensitivities typical of both CG and CSR constructs. Practitioner/Policy Implications Our review suggests that for structural changes and reforms within firms to be successful, they need to be complemented by changes to the institutional makeup of the context in which firms function to encourage/induce substantive changes in corporate responsible behaviors.
Chinese Investments in Africa

China’s increasing presence in Africa has been the topic of many studies and publications in recent years. How Chinese businesses and investments on the continent impact African labor movements has, however, received little attention. Drawing on the findings of a ten-country study carried out by the African Labour Research Network (ALRN) in 2008-2009, 1 this article provides a general overview of the labor conditions at Chinese firms in Africa, focusing on some common trends that exist despite country-specific differences. Those trends indicate that—despite some notable differences between the nature of Chinese economic involvement and that of Western foreign direct investment (FDI) on the continent—Chinese business mostly adheres to a familiar, neocolonial pattern of resource extraction, labor exploitation, and infrastructure projects that fail to emphasize the development of local capacity.
Private Equity, HRM, and Employment

We analyze the employment, wages, human resource management, and industrial relations impact of private equity, drawing on empirical evidence from various countries and institutional contexts. We identify different types of private equity-backed buyouts and highlight the impact of creating value through long- and short-term ownership and strategies emphasizing increased efficiency or growth. We show that the effects may vary between buyout types and that it is inappropriate to regard most private equity leveraged buyouts as a zero-sum game with value transferred to shareholders at workers' expense. We conclude that regulating private equity in favor of the organizational model of managerial capitalism is unlikely to necessarily further workers' interests.
Aggregate Real Wages: Macro Fluctuations and Micro Drivers

Using data from the Current Population Survey from 1980 through 2010 we examine what drives variation and cyclicality in the growth rate of real wages over time. We employ a novel decomposition technique that allows us to divide the time series for median weekly earnings growth into the part associated with the wage growth of persons employed at the beginning and end of the period (the wage growth effect) and the part associated with changes in the composition of earners (the composition effect). The relative importance of these two effects varies widely over the business cycle. When the labor market is tight job switchers get high wage increases, making them account for half of the variation in median weekly earnings growth over our sample. Their wage growth, as well as that of job-stayers, is procyclical. During labor market downturns, this procyclicality is largely offset by the change in the composition of the workforce, leading aggregate real wages to be almost noncyclical. Most of this composition effect works through the part-time employment margin. Remarkably, the unemployment margin neither accounts for much of the variation nor for much of the cyclicality of median weekly earnings growth.
Improved Price Indexes for Real Estate: Measuring the Course of Swedish Housing Prices☆

This paper presents an improved methodology for estimating asset prices for real estate and other durables. The method is used to analyze house price dynamics by exploiting an unusually rich and detailed body of data}extensive descriptive and financial information on every house sale in Sweden during a 12-year period. The results confirm the importance of many aspects of quality in affecting the course of housing prices, as well as the role of individual-specific and idiosyncratic aspects of housing. The results are compared with the price trends produced by more primitive methods and published by official sources. Q 1998 Academic Press