Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Supporting the pre-commercialization stages of technology-based firms: The effects of small-scale venture capital

A large number of studies discuss the financing of small firms from the perspective of bank loans and different forms of venture capital. In this paper, a form of financing that is rarely touched upon in studies is discussed, namely, small-scale capital up to 500 KSEK (1 US$=7.9 SEK) that is provided in the form of soft loans or grants in the very early stages of a firm's development. Drawing upon a sample of 48 firms located in Swedish Science Parks, the authors mapped what the firms used their subsidies for (e.g. development of a business plan or a prototype and marketing). Particular emphasis was paid to the outcome of the financial support. Two main effects were found to be significant. First, the money was spent on activities that enable the companies to establish customer contacts as part of a process of successful market introduction. Second, the mere fact of selecting companies is widely regarded as an indicator of the selected companies' integrity and high potential by private investors and business partners. Thus, the reputation and network position of the young venture is leveraged.
Corporate Performance, Corporate Governance and Top Executive Turnover in Finland

This paper empirically investigates how corporate governance forces and firm performance affect top executive turnover in Finnish listed companies. I document an increase in CEO, top management, and board turnover in response to poor stock price performance and operating losses. The sensitivity of the relation between stock price performance and CEO turnover is significantly higher in firms with a two-tier board structure (when the CEO is not the chairman), but significantly lower when the CEO or a board member is the controlling shareholder. These results suggest that both the ownership structure and the board design have implications for the disciplining of managers.
Identifikasi Ekspektasi Investor melalui Kebijakan Struktur Modal, Profitabilitas, Ukuran Perusahaan dan GCPI

The objective of the study was to analyze the causality influence among capital structure policy, firm size, profitability which was measured by ROA and the implementation of GCG which was measured by Good Corporate Perception Index (GCPI) toward the investors expectations which was measured by the company value. It was a purposive sampling study. The samples of this study were go public companies listed on the Indonesias Most Trusted Companies. The period of the study was in 2012 and 2013, and financial reports from 2012 to 2013. The total samples were 48 companies. The data were analyzed by multiple linear regressions. The result of the study showed that the capital structure policy and firm size did not give any influence, whereas the profitability and GCPI gave influence toward the investors expectations. Furthermore; capital structure policy, firm size, profitability and GCPI variables influenced simultaneously toward investors expectations.
EFFECTS OF ATORVASTATIN AND LOSARTAN ON MONOCROTALINE-INDUCED PULMONARY ARTERY REMODELING IN RATS: PP.29.138

Introduction: Structural remodeling of pulmonary artery plays an important role in the maintaining of sustained pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). The anti-remodeling effects of statins has been reported in systemic hypertension. In this study, we investigated the effects of atovastatin (Ato) and losartan (Los) on monocrotaline-induced pulmonary artery remodeling in rats. Methods: Forty SD rats were assigned into: normal control (Ctr), PAH, Los, Ato treated groups. The rats were given a dose of 40 mg/Kg monocrotaline intraperitoneally in PAH, Los and Ato treated groups and untreated rats were given 1 ml normal saline intraperitoneally as control. After 4 weeks, the rats were given 50 mg/Kg/d of Los and 5 mg/Kg/d of Ato by gavage respectively in Los and Ato treated groups for 4 weeks. 4 weeks after medication, mean of pulmonary arterial pressure(MPAP) and right ventricular hypertrophy index(RVHI) were measured, and WT% and WA% of pulmonary arterioles were evaluated. The protein analysis for 1C subunit of voltage-gated calcium channel(Cav1c), sarcoplasmic/endoplasmic reticulum calcium-ATPase(SERCA-2a), inositol 1,4,5 triphosphate receptor 1(IP3R-1) and Ryanodine receptor 3(RyR-3) in pulmonary artery was evaluated by RT-PCR and Western-Blot. Results: The MPAP was reduced by Los and Ato treatment (mmHg: Los, 29.8+/−4.8, Ato, 27.6+/−4.1, PAH, 36.1+/−4.2, P < 0.05). There was a reduction in the RVHI in Los and Ato treated groups (Los, 38.5+/−6.4%, Ato, 37.7+/−6.0%, PAH, 45.6+/−3.8%, P < 0.05). The ratio of wall/lumen thickness (WT%) and wall /lumen area (WA%) was lower in Los and Ato treated group (WT%: Los:44.9+/−5.7%, Ato:42.8+/−2.9% vs PAH:58.5+/−4.6%; WA%: Los:61.3+/−5.5%, Ato:59.3+/−3.4% vs PAH:76.8+/−7.0%; P < 0.05) than that of PAH group. The expression of 1C subunit of voltage-gated calcium channel (Cav1c) was down-regulated, while sarcoplasmic/endoplasmic reticulum calcium-ATPase(SERCA-2a) and inositol 1,4,5 triphosphate receptor 1 (IP3R-1) up-regulated both in mRNA and protein levels in pulmonary arteries after Los and Ato treatment. Conclusion: We concluded that atorvastatin and losartan may regress remodeling of pulmonary artery and calcium regulating channels in pulmonary hypertensive rats.
China's Floating Population: New Evidence from the 2000 Census

This article uses tabulations from the 2000 Population Census of China along with a micro-level data sample from the census to provide a picture of China's floating population: migrants without local household registration ("hukou"), a status resulting in significant social and economic disadvantages. By 2000, the size of China's floating population had grown to nearly 79 million, if that category is defined as migrants who moved between provinces or counties and resided at their destinations for six months or more. Intra-county floating migration is similarly large, contributing another 66 million to the size of the floating population. The article also discusses the geographic pattern of the floating population and the reasons for moving as reported by migrants. Policy implications are noted. Copyright 2004 The Population Council, Inc.
Corporatized Public Land Development Bodies in Australia: Who Are the Stakeholders and Why Are They Important?

This study examines post-corporatization activities of public sector organizations, which are expected to act according to commercial principles, but, at times, are also asked to undertake projects that are not profitable: community service obligations (CSOs). Managers of government-owned corporatized entities in land development are interviewed, and a focus group at a state Treasury department conducted. We determine, when undertaking CSOs, who are the stakeholders, as perceived by management, and why they are considered important. The stakeholders are government, community, treasury (as separate from government) and the relevant private sector. Values, in addition to power, urgency and legitimacy, influence stakeholder prioritization.
Frequent Emergency Department Utilization and Behavioral Health Diagnoses

BackgroundThere are 12 million emergency department (ED) visits each year related to behavioral health diagnoses. Frequent ED utilization among subpopulations, such as those with behavioral health diagnoses, flags the need for more accessible and effective healthcare delivery systems. Reducing frequent ED use is essential to controlling healthcare cost and poor outcomes of ED overcrowding. ObjectivesThe purpose of this study is to stratify individuals by overall health complexity and examine the relationship of behavioral health diagnoses (psychiatric and substance abuse) as well as frequent treat-and-release ED utilization in a cohort of Medicaid recipients. MethodsThis study was a retrospective analysis of 2009 Medicaid claims from two Western New York State counties. The claims represented 56,491 individuals (18–64 years old). Individuals were stratified into four separate cohorts for analysis based on underlying disease complexity. Data were analyzed using logistic regression models. ResultsThe following factors significantly increased the odds of frequent treat-and-release ED use in all the four complexity cohorts: psychiatric diagnosis (ORs = 1.4–2.3), substance abuse (ORs = 2.4–3.8), and smoking (ORs = 1.7–4.0). Medicaid patients with behavioral health diagnoses show high risk of frequent treat-and-release ED use. DiscussionThe results of this study show that psychiatric diagnosis, substance abuse, and smoking are associated with increased odds of frequent treat-and-release ED utilization for Medicaid recipients in all categories of underlying disease complexity. Our findings support associations reported in the literature.
The effects of property and landowner characteristics on profit efficiency in salmon angling tourism in Norway

This paper analyzes how different property and landowner characteristics and other factors affect landowners’ profit efficiency from salmon angling tourism. The paper helps correct a lack of studies on the economic aspects of the triple bottom line approach to sustainability and suggests new areas of rural tourism research. A stochastic profit frontier function with an inefficiency module was estimated based on survey responses from 203 landowners along four Mid-Norway rivers. Profit efficiency decreased as the revenues from off-property and on-property activities increased relative to angling tourism. Factors increasing efficiency were long-term renting of fishing instead of permit sale or selling fishing packages with additional services and common property ownership instead of simple fee ownership. Cooperation, by merging several fishing rights into one unit rather than fishing on a single property basis, decreased efficiency. This study did not distinguish between different forms of cooperation; mandatory cooperation in the form of common property and voluntary cooperation between private properties are issues for further research. If sustainable economic efficiency is a public goal, policies should ensure a predictable economic environment for landowners specializing in salmon angling tourism and promote long-term renting, with a 10-year minimum period for the lease of fishing rights.
Kanban, MRP, and Shaping the Manufacturing Environment

There has been a great deal of interest recently in the Japanese approach to manufacturing, growing out of a concern for finding ways to reduce inventories and increase productivity. At this project's inception, its objective was to assess whether the kanban system could perform well in the manufacturing environments found in this country. Based on observations from managers visiting Japan, the project was enlarged to also assess which factors in a production environment have the biggest impact on performance-regardless of the system in use. Guided by a panel of production and inventory managers from diverse plant environments, a comprehensive list of factors thought most important to manufacturing effectiveness was constructed. The panel established low and high values for each one. These settings were considered representative of the range experienced in U.S. plant environments. The factor settings allowed a variety of representative plants to be tested with a large scale simulator. Results show that kanban, when implemented in certain environmental settings, does indeed perform exceptionally well. However, so do the more traditional systems used in the United States. Conversely, there are other plant environments in which all systems perform much worse. This suggests that the factors themselves are the keys to major improvement. Simultaneously reducing setup times and lot sizes is found to be the single most effective way to cut inventory levels and improve customer service. Shop factors of particular importance are yield rates and worker flexibility. Degree of product standardization and the product structure are also high impact factors. Less crucial than earlier believed, at least over the factor settings simulated, are inventory record inaccuracy, equipment failures, and vendor reliability. Such results suggest that the selection of a production/inventory system can be of less importance than the improvement of the manufacturing environment itself.
Benefits of an accident and emergency short stay ward in the staged hospital care of elderly patients.

OBJECTIVE: To study the potential of a short stay ward attached to an accident and emergency (A&E) department to improve care and reduce admissions to hospital by enabling elderly patients to be monitored closely for up to 24 h before being formally admitted to hospital or discharged home. Patients admitted to the short stay ward were those who appeared to need only a brief period of assessment or treatment. METHODS: The medical records of all patients aged 65 years and above admitted to the short stay ward over a nine month period (April to December 1993, inclusive) were reviewed. RESULTS: 13% of all the patients over 65 attending A&E were admitted to the A&E ward. Of patients over 65 who were admitted to hospital, 20% were first admitted to the A&E ward. There were 502 admissions to the short stay ward of patients aged 65 years and above, who constituted 38% of the total admissions to that ward. Admitting these selected patients to the short stay ward allowed 71% to be discharged home, usually within 24 h, rather than being formally admitted to hospital. CONCLUSIONS: The addition of a short stay ward can shorten the hospital stay for selected elderly patients and reduce the demand for inpatient hospital beds. This ward also improves the quality of care to elderly patients attending the A&E department.
In Vitro Susceptibility of Adefovir-Associated Hepatitis B Virus Polymerase Mutations to other Antiviral Agents

Background Adefovir dipivoxil is a nucleotide prodrug approved for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B. During clinical trials, ADV-associated mutations were observed in 0, 3, 11, 18 and 29% of patients after 48, 96, 144, 192 and 240 weeks of therapy, respectively. Hepatitis B virus (HBV) polymerase mutations associated with virological breakthrough to ADV include rtA181V and rtN236T, which occur alone or in combination. The rtA181T mutation has also been observed at low frequency, alone or in combination with rtN236T. Methods To investigate the in vitro activity of adefovir and other anti-HBV agents against these mutants, we generated five stable cell lines that each expressed one of the following HBV mutants: rtN236T, rtA181V, rtA181V+rtN236T, rtA181T+rtN236T and rtA181T. Using these cell lines, we quantified in vitro changes in drug susceptibility for eight nucleotide/nucleoside analogues. Results The rtN236T mutant had 7-fold resistance to adefovir but remained sensitive to entecavir, telbivudine and torcitabine (≤3.2-fold reduced susceptibility). The A181V mutant had 4.3-fold resistance to adefovir and had reduced susceptibility to multiple other agents ranging from 3.2-fold (tenofovir) to >191-fold (clevudine). The A181V+rtN236T double mutant was the most highly resistant showing 18-fold resistance to adefovir and higher levels of resistance to other tested drugs with the exception of tenofovir (10-fold reduced susceptibility). Our results and preliminary clinical data suggest that patients with rtN236T or rtA181V remain susceptible to tenofovir, entecavir and lamivudine. Further clinical data are necessary to precisely define in vitro cutoffs indicative of clinically-relevant resistance, particularly for drugs in development such as emtricitabine, telbivudine, torcitabine and clevudine.
Tracing the effects of employee involvement and participation on trust in managers: an analysis of covariance structures

Using data from the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey of Employees, this article employs structural equation modelling in order to trace the effects of employee involvement and participation on the extent to which British workers trust reciprocally in management. The results point to a series of organizational benefits of participation, including increased job influence, a greater sense of job satisfaction and improved levels of commitment and trust in managers. However, increased job influence was paradoxically linked to lower levels of organizational commitment and trust. The findings generally confirm that employee voice is ‘good’ in principle for building trust, but that the effects of employee voice may work against trust development.
Market- vs. Bank-Based Financial Systems: Do Rights and Regulations Really Matter?

Why are common-law countries market-dominated and civil-law countries bank-dominated? This paper provides an explanation tied to legal traditions. Civil-law courts have been less effective in resolving conflicts than common-law courts because civil-law judges traditionally refrain from interpreting the codes and creating new rules. Therefore, they are not very effective in extending their reach to matters that are not defined in the laws of the country. In a civil-law environment, where potential conflicts between borrowers and individual lenders inhibit the development of markets because the courts are unable to penalize defrauding borrowers, I show that banks can induce borrowers to honor their obligations by threatening to withhold services that only banks can provide. In other words, banks emerge as the primary contract enforcers in economies where courts are imperfect. Therefore, one would expect the civil-law countries to be bank-dominated. The empirical evidence presented in this paper supports this argument. Legal scholars argue that courts, acting as contract enforcers, need the guidance of laws to settle disputes. However, if there are alternative institutions in an economy, such as banks as described in this paper, that can enforce contracts without court intervention, I conjecture that there is relatively little need for investor rights compared to countries where the courts are the primary contract enforcers. In support of this argument, I show that creditor rights play no role in bank-development in civil-law countries but they promote banking growth in common-law countries where courts are more efficient. This paper also reveals that some of the earlier analyses that used a pooled sample of common-law and civil-law countries to test the effect of investor rights on bank development are misspecified. Therefore, in this analysis, common-law and civil-law countries are analyzed separately. I also show that prevailing economic conditions and legal traditions jointly determine the financial structure of a country. Therefore, although a country's legal tradition is permanent, the organization of its financial system may fluctuate over time between a bank-dominated structure and a market-dominated structure. These results agree with the findings of Rajan and Zingales (2000) who showed that France and Germany were more market-friendly than U.S. and U.K. at the turn of the 20th century.
Public R&D subsidies, outside private support, and employment growth

In the aftermath of the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the employment effects of public subsidies have been scrutinized because of new emphasis on public accountability and transparency. In this paper, we investigate conditions in which public subsidies of research and development (R&D) in small firms stimulate employment growth. We find, based on an empirical analysis of employment growth induced by US Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Research program awards, that the stimulated employment growth is greater under two conditions: one, the presence of outside investors providing additional funding for the R&D and, two, when an exceptional amount of intellectual property is created by the publicly subsidized R&D. In addition to outside investors, other firms that make commercial agreements with the subsidized firm appear important for the employment growth of the subsidized firm. Cooperation between the small business doing the R&D and other firms is an important determinant of the commercial success of the technologies created with the support of public funds.
Fishing for Pleiotropic QTLs in a Polygenic Sea

The application of factor analysis to human genetics has the potential to discover the coordinated control of multiple traits by common environment, common polygenes, or a single major gene. Classical factor analysis explains the covariation among the components of a random vector by approximating the vector by a linear transformation of a small number of uncorrelated factors. In the current paper we show how factor analysis dovetails with the classical variance decompositions of biometrical genetics. To explore the relationships between related quantitative variables, and avoid complicated positive definiteness constraints, we employ Cholesky and factor analytic decompositions. We derive an ECM algorithm and a competing quasi‐Newton algorithm for estimating parameters by maximum likelihood and propose tactics for selecting initial parameter values. We also show how parameter asymptotic standard errors under these parameterizations propagate to asymptotic standard errors of the underlying variance components. Our genetic analysis program Mendel, which now incorporates the program Fisher, has performed well on a variety of data sets. We illustrate our methods, algorithms, and models on two data sets: a bivariate quantitative genetic example using total finger ridge count data and a multivariate linkage example using insulin resistance data.
Optimizing fixed and variable compensation costs for employee productivity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework to determine the optimal balance between fixed and variable compensation costs incurred by a firm.Design/methodology/approach – In 2004 Burke and Terry used an economic framework to demonstrate how variable pay can reduce operating leverage and hence increase a firm's value. Their theme is extended to develop a conceptual framework for ascertaining the optimal balance between fixed and variable pay components.Findings – As demonstrated with an example, the choice between fixed and variable pay affects the firm's employee productivity, operating leverage, market risk, cost of capital, and cash flows. The ultimate choice of the variable and fix compensation “mix” should meet the goal of management – maximizing the firm value, and hence the shareholders' wealth.Practical implications – Evidence suggests there is a growing use of variable pay schemes in firms to increase employee motivation and productivity.Originality/value – The framew.
Designing the future of electronic journals with lessons learned from the past: economic and use patterns of scientific journals

Studies of thousands of both university and non-university scientists demonstrate the importance of scholarly journals to their work. Amount of reading has remained high and scientists who read more, are more successful. Readings have shifted from personal subscriptions to more readings from library provided journals. Personal subscriptions have gone down from 5.8 subscriptions per scientist in 1977 to about 2.9 subscriptions. The drop is due to the rising prices of subscriptions, prices that have increased beyond inflation rates. Processing costs decrease some with electronic journals, but the high fixed costs associated with creating scholarly journals are the same for print or for electronic. The costs associated with some value added features of electronic journals are high.