Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regime shifts in stock–flow I(2)–I(1) systems: the case of US fiscal sustainability

In the last two decades, fiscal sustainability has been tested through the use of non-stationary time series analysis. Two different approximations can be found in the literature: first, a univariate approach that has focused on the stochastic properties of the stock of debt and, second, a multivariate one that has focused on the long‐run properties of the flows of expenditures and revenues, i.e., in the stochastic properties of the deficit. In this paper we unify these approaches considering the stock–flow system that fiscal variables configure. Our approach involves working in an I(2) stochastic processes framework. Given the possibility of the existence of regime shifts in the sustainability of US deficit that the literature has pointed out, we develop a new statistic that can be applied to test several types of I(2) cointegration and multicointegration relationships allowing for regime shifts. To test for these kinds of changing long‐run relationships we propose the use of a residual‐based Dickey–Fuller class of statistic that accounts for one structural break. We show that consistent estimates of the break fraction can be obtained through the minimization of the sum of squared residuals when there is I(2) cointegration. The finite sample performance of the proposed statistic is investigated by Monte Carlo simulations. The econometric methodology is applied to assess whether the US fiscal deficit and debt are sustainable. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Teaching Computational Thinking Using Agile Software Engineering Methods

Computational Thinking (CT) has been recognized as one of the fundamental skills that all graduates should acquire. For this reason, motivational concerns need to be addressed at an early age of a child, and reaching students who do not consider themselves candidates for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines is important as well if the broadest audience possible is to be engaged. This article describes a framework for teaching and assessing CT in the context of K-12 education. The framework is based on Agile software engineering methods, which rely on a set of principles and practices that can be mapped to the activities of CT. The article presents as well the results of an experiment applying this framework in two sixth-grade classes, with 42 participants in total. The results show that Agile software engineering methods are effective at teaching CT in middle schools, after the addition of some tasks to allow students to explore, project, and experience the potential product before using the software tools at hand. Moreover, according to the teachers’ feedback, the students reached all the educational objectives of the topics involved in the multidisciplinary activities. This result can be taken as an indicator that it is possible to use computing as a medium for teaching other subjects, besides computer science.
Multiple roles? Nurses as managers in the NHS

Recent government proposals seek to extend the role of nurses into management at a time of (yet another) cultural transformation for the British National Health Service (NHS). This is especially the case for line managers involved in service‐delivery, ward managers and clinical nurse managers for instance, roles typically undertaken by senior nurses. This paper aims to give some insight into the role of nurses as managers in the NHS hospital service. Data presented were collected as part of a longitudinal qualitative study, 1994 to date, in a North West trust hospital. The role of ward and unit management has significantly changed since the early images of the nurse as manager and it is hardly surprising that, given the fundamental shift in the framework of values and attitudes, senior nurses have greeted the management role with mixed feelings.
Performance measurement and accountability in an Australian fire service

Purpose – New public management (NPM) techniques have been widely adopted in Australian public sector organisations. NPM stresses the concept of accountability, and the importance of reporting mechanisms. Government and semi‐government authorities provide annual reports, but the usefulness of these annual reports in assessing operational in addition to financial performance is open to question. This paper aims to ask what performance measures are important in the context of the provision of fire services.Design/methodology/approach – Using content analysis, this study analyses and evaluates publicly available annual reports of fire services to determine operational and financial performance in the Australian state of Victoria, which has three different fire service organisations.Findings – The study finds that annual reports are based on financial results, some basic performance measures and narrative describing some operational results. Stakeholders are well served by financial reports, but find difficul.
Sell-Side Information Production in Financial Markets

Abstract We study decisions to sell nonexcludable private information in the presence of a trading opportunity. Sell-side agents heighten competition among agents who buy their signals to combine with their own for proprietary trading purposes and thereby promote financial market efficiency. This result holds even when the sell-side production technology is not unique. But sell-side information is subject to underinvestment if producers do not internalize the benefits. The model suggests that fee-based compensation for corporate advisory services diminishes this problem and that market efficiency is undermined by forces steering investment-banking resources toward proprietary trading.
Perceptions of Environmental Management and Employee Job Attitudes in Hotel Firms

The trend in the tourism industry has been to focus on environmental concerns and efficient use of energy. However, there has been relatively little work that addresses the employees’ job attitudes towards environmental management practices in the hospitality industry. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between perceptions of environmental management and employee job attitudes. Survey data from 312 employees of in the hotel industry in Taiwan indicate that energy management, green procurement, organizational system/control, and external relationships positively relate to employees’ job satisfaction. Energy management, organizational system/control, and external relationships positively relate to organizational commitment. Implications of these findings as well as future research directions are subsequently discussed.
Ownership structure and corporate social responsibility disclosure: some Malaysian evidence

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to examine the influence of ownership structure on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure in Malaysian company annual reports (CARs). Design/methodology/approach – The study uses a CSR disclosure checklist to measure the extent of CSR disclosure in annual reports and a multiple regression analysis to examine the association between ownership structure and the extent of CSR disclosure in annual reports.Findings – The paper finds that, even among the larger and actively traded stocks in Malaysia, there is considerable variability in the amount of social activities disclosed in corporate annual reports. Results from multiple regression analysis show that, consistent with expectations, companies in which the directors hold a higher proportion of equity shares (owner‐managed companies) disclosed significantly less CSR information, while companies in which the government is a substantial shareholder disclosed significantly more CSR information in their annual re.
Prenatal Arsenic Exposure and Birth Outcomes among a Population Residing near a Mining-Related Superfund Site

Background: Limited epidemiologic data exist on prenatal arsenic exposure and fetal growth, particularly in the context of co-exposure to other toxic metals. Objective: We examined whether prenatal arsenic exposure predicts birth outcomes among a rural U.S. population, while adjusting for exposure to lead and manganese. Methods: We collected maternal and umbilical cord blood samples at delivery from 622 mother–infant pairs residing near a mining-related Superfund site in Northeast Oklahoma. Whole blood arsenic, lead, and manganese were measured using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. We modeled associations between arsenic concentrations and birth weight, gestational age, head circumference, and birth weight for gestational age. Results: Median (25th–75th percentile) maternal and umbilical cord blood metal concentrations, respectively, were as follows: arsenic, 1.4 (1.0–2.3) and 2.4 (1.8–3.3) μg/L; lead, 0.6 (0.4–0.9) and 0.4 (0.3–0.6) μg/dL; manganese, 22.7 (18.8–29.3) and 41.7 (32.2–50.4) μg/L. We estimated negative associations between maternal blood arsenic concentrations and birth outcomes. In multivariable regression models adjusted for lead and manganese, an interquartile range increase in maternal blood arsenic was associated with –77.5 g (95% CI: –127.8, –27.3) birth weight, –0.13 weeks (95% CI: –0.27, 0.01) gestation, –0.22 cm (95% CI: –0.42, –0.03) head circumference, and –0.14 (95% CI: –0.24, –0.04) birth weight for gestational age z-score units. Interactions between arsenic concentrations and lead or manganese were not statistically significant. Conclusions: In a population with environmental exposure levels similar to the U.S. general population, maternal blood arsenic was negatively associated with fetal growth. Given the potential for relatively common fetal and early childhood arsenic exposures, our finding that prenatal arsenic can adversely affect birth outcomes is of considerable public health importance. Citation: Claus Henn B, Ettinger AS, Hopkins MR, Jim R, Amarasiriwardena C, Christiani DC, Coull BA, Bellinger DC, Wright RO. 2016. Prenatal arsenic exposure and birth outcomes among a population residing near a mining-related Superfund site. Environ Health Perspect 124:1308–1315; http://dx.doi. org/10.1289/ehp.1510070
Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979

Andrew Mertha’s admirable book attracted considerable media attention before its release because of pre-publication publicity about its subject: China’s assistance to the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979. Although the fact of this Chinese assistance has been well known to those with a specialist interest in Cambodia (for example, Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, pp. 102–03 and passim), the issue has not been given a great deal of attention in more general discussions. Not least has this been so because of China’s own reluctance to see detailed attention given to its role in supporting a regime that has been widely recognized as tyrannical and murderous in character. It has been this shocking character of the Khmer Rouge regime that has, understandably, been the focus of both academic and journalistic writing. Misleadingly, some of the pre-publication media discussion of this book suggested that the author was claiming that Chinese aid workers in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge period had no sense of the regime’s character. As discussed below, this is not what Andrew Mertha states. The author’s first chapter sets the scene in a striking fashion. For, as Mertha points out, “China had been involved in every aspect and at each stage of the CPK [Communist Party of Kampuchea] rise to power” (p. 2). And, as Mertha mordantly records in a fashion made more striking by its colloquial tone, to the extent there has been awareness of Beijing’s involvement with the Khmer Rouge, “China embraced a sucker’s payoff in a Faustian bargain: it justifiably received international condemnation for maintaining the viability of the CPK regime while receiving precious little benefit from its Cambodian allies” (p. 3). The story that Mertha tells is fascinating in its detail and surprising in much of what that detail reveals. Perhaps most importantly is the extent to which China’s lack of leverage over the CPK regime was a persistent theme of the relationship. While China was able to persuade Pol Pot of the value of abandoning a policy of excessive secrecy, it failed to persuade him and his regime to change their radical domestic policies. Chinese officials, including Deng Xiaoping, criticized Pol Pot to his face and the latter smiled as they did so but [he] failed to give any orders that would have countermanded
Bicameralism and policy performance: The effects of cameral structure in Comparative Perspective

This article addresses the relationship between cameral structure and policy performance in the member states of the OECD for the time period from 1971 to 1996. The empirical analysis shows that bicameral structures act as a significant brake on government intervention and on the expansion of the welfare state. Furthermore, bicameralism is a powerful veto player to block reforms in economic and financial policy. With the exception of the over-representation of small and sparsely populated areas, none of the advantages that classical political theory ascribes to second chambers has actually been confirmed. Bicameral structures pose no barrier to executive dominance, nor do they promote stability within political systems or improve the quality of democracy or economic performance. On the contrary, with regard to social representation, they have a strong negative effect: in comparison to systems with a single chamber, bicameralism significantly reduces women's electoral success.
How to Prevent Cheating: A Digestive Specialization Ties Mutualistic Plant-Ants to Their Ant-Plant Partners

Mutualisms often involve reciprocal adaptations of both partners. Acacia ant-plants defended by symbiotic Pseudomyrmex ant mutualists secrete sucrose-free extrafloral nectar, which is unattractive to generalists. We aimed to investigate whether this extrafloral nectar can also exclude exploiters, that is nondefending ant species. Mutualist workers discriminated against sucrose whereas exploiters and generalists with no affinity toward Acacia myrmecophytes preferred sucrose, because mutualist workers lacked the sucrose-cleaving enzyme invertase, which is present in workers of the other two groups. Sucrose uptake induced invertase activity in workers of parasites and generalists, but not mutualists, and in larvae of all species: the mutualists loose invertase during their ontogeny. This reduced metabolic capacity ties the mutualists to their plant hosts, but it does not completely prevent the mutualism from exploitation. We therefore investigated whether the exploiters studied here are cheaters (i.e., have evolved from former mutualists) or parasites (exploiters with no mutualistic ancestor). A molecular phytogeny demonstrates that the exploiter species did not evolve from former mutualists, and no evidence for cheaters was found. We conclude that being specialized to their partner can prevent mutualists from becoming cheaters, whereas other mechanisms are required to stabilize a mutualism against the exploitation by parasites.
Farmer Education and Farm Efficiency: Reply

integrating the results of disparate studies? (b) Are the general findings we report restricted in applicability to Asia? and (c) Does the survey, or rather the studies included in the survey, underemphasize the effects of education on allocative efficiency? We address each of these questions in the following paragraphs. Meta-analytic techniques permit quantitative estimation of "treatment" effects by aggregating information across studies.2 Aggregate estimates of the mean as well as the variability of "treatment" effect sizes are preferable to simple tallies based solely on statistical significance, since the former have greater interpretability, provide an approximate order of magnitude, do not depend on arbitrarily chosen levels of significance, and are less subject to the problem of "statistically significant, meaningfully insignificant" differences found in analyses of large samples. Moreover, meta-analytic techniques distinguish between statistically insignificant effects and zero effects, which are not the same thing. In our article, we combine effect sizes (both positive and negative) across studies to estimate the mean effects of 4 years of education on farm productivity. Our estimates are reported first unadjusted for the statistical variability of the estimated effect sizes of the individual studies, and second, adjusted by their estimated standard errors. Our conclusions, however, do not appear to be sensitive to the adjustment and are-in our opinion-more interpretable and useful than the simple tally of significant effects proposed by Phillips. In any case, since the data required to produce Phillips's appendix table are clearly presented in our article, any reader who so desired could have constructed such a table.
Paclitaxel Drug-eluting Tracheal Stent Could Reduce Granulation Tissue Formation in a Canine Model

Background:Currently available silicone and metallic stents for tracheal stenosis are associated with many problems. Granulation proliferation is one of the main complications. The present study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of paclitaxel drug-eluting tracheal stent in reducing granulation tissue formation in a canine model, as well as the pharmacokinetic features and safety profiles of the coated drug. Methods:Eight beagles were randomly divided into a control group (bare-metal stent group, n = 4) and an experimental group (paclitaxel-eluting stent group, n = 4). The observation period was 5 months. One beagle in both groups was sacrificed at the end of the 1st and 3rd months, respectively. The last two beagles in both groups were sacrificed at the end of 5th month. The proliferation of granulation tissue and changes in tracheal mucosa were compared between the two groups. Blood routine and liver and kidney function were monitored to evaluate the safety of the paclitaxel-eluting stent. The elution method and high-performance liquid chromatography were used to characterize the rate of in vivo release of paclitaxel from the stent. Results:Compared with the control group, the proliferation of granulation tissue in the experimental group was significantly reduced. The drug release of paclitaxel-eluting stent was the fastest in the 1st month after implantation (up to 70.9%). Then, the release slowed down gradually. By the 5th month, the release reached up to 98.5%. During the observation period, a high concentration of the drug in the trachea (in the stented and adjacent unstented areas) and lung tissue was not noted, and the blood test showed no side effect. Conclusions:The paclitaxel-eluting stent could safely reduce the granulation tissue formation after stent implantation in vivo, suggesting that the paclitaxel-eluting tracheal stent might be considered for potential use in humans in the future.
Government failure, rent-seeking, and capture: the design of climate change policy

Climate change has been described as one of the biggest market failures. Less attention has been paid to the government failures associated with interventions, and the implications for the design of climate change policy. This paper sets out the main types of government failure, and shows how the processes of rent-seeking and capture help to explain both why the choice of targets and instruments has been so inefficient, and also why the resulting costs of carbon mitigation are likely to be considerably higher than the estimates provided by the Stern Review and other recent studies. Two examples are given: emissions trading and renewables policy. A number of generic conclusions are drawn about how taking account of government failures can help to improve policy design, and limit the impact of the climate change 'pork barrel' which existing policies have created. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.
The expectation hypothesis in emerging financial markets: the case of Malaysia

This article deals with the expectation hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates. It is argued that the rapid progress and financial market liberalization that is occurring in emerging financial markets could provide additional evidence for testing the expectation hypothesis. This article employs data from the Malaysian government securities market which represents one of the examples of an emerging financial market. Cointegration and error correction analyses show significant empirical validity for the expectation hypothesis. The long- and short-term interest rates are shown to be cointegrated and subject to a long-run equilibrium path. In addition to shedding some light on the experience of emerging financial market, this article explicitly identifies the process of adjustment towards the long run equilibrium. For the long-run, the results are in favour of the long-to-short version of expectation hypothesis with longer-term interest rates playing a greater role as equilibrium attractor. However, in the short run causal impact runs from short- to long-term interest rates. The empirical findings of the article generally support the proposition of expectation hypothesis.
A simulation analysis of factors influencing the attractiveness of group technology cellular layouts

Group Technology GT is a multi-faceted approach to batch production that includes the reconfiguration of plant equipment from a functional layout to a series of product-oriented layouts that are referred to as manufacturing cells. The cells are dedicated to process families of parts that have similar machine operations. The purported benefits of GT over traditional functional layouts range from reduced work-in-process inventory and throughput times to increased worker satisfaction and productivity. However, recent simulation studies challenge some of these claims of superior performance for cellular layouts. This research examines the influence that factors in a firm's operating environment have on the performance of cellular layouts. A simulation model using hypothetical shop data is used to compare a process layout to a cellular layout using mean throughput time and mean level of work-in-process inventory as performance measures. The operating variables analyzed are 1 the ratio of setup to process time, 2 transfer time of material between work centers, 3 demand stability, and 4 the flow of work within cells. None of the individual changes in levels of operating variables produced a clear advantage for cellular layouts. However, the results from these experiments were used to postulate an "ideal" environment for cellular layouts. This environment is characterized as having a high ratio of setup to process time, stable demand, unidirectional flow of work within a cell, and a substantial level of material movement times between process departments. When all of these conditions are present, the cellular layout outperforms the process layout on both performance measures.