Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is there new evidence to show that product and international diversification influence SMEs' performance?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the joint effect of product and international diversification strategies on the performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Spain.Design/methodology/approach – The authors rely on a panel data of small and medium Spanish manufacturing enterprises over the period 1993‐2006, collected from the Spanish Survey of Business Strategies.Findings – The evidence reveals the existence of a negative relationship between geographic expansion and profitability. Likewise, the adoption of both product and international diversification is not associated with higher performance.Research limitations/implications – A promising avenue for future research is the analysis of firms located in different countries (for example, emerging economies), or the study of this issue considering factors such as the ownership structure (family firms, the role of the state and banks, etc.). Practical implications – The authors' analysis underlines the fact that the distinctive partic.
Gut regulatory peptides in young cattle and sheep.

This review summarizes recent advances on blood plasma patterns, receptors, secondary messengers and metabolism of gut regulatory peptides (i.e. gastrin, secretin, somatostatin, cholecystokinin, vasoactive intestinal polypeptide, pancreatic polypeptide, gastric inhibitory polypeptide, motilin), in young ruminants during fetal and perinatal stages, during the preruminant stage and at weaning. It also deals with their role in the digestive tract function and postabsorptive changes. Some pathological situations in young ruminants are considered. Recent molecular aspects of digestive enzyme synthesis are also reported.
Religion: Productive or Unproductive?

In this paper we investigate the relationships between informal institutions – proxied for by measures of religiosity – and levels of entrepreneurial activity, both productive and unproductive, using cross-section U.S. state level data. In doing so, we evaluate Baumol’s (1990) conjectures on the role of institutions in determining whether entrepreneurs will channel their efforts towards wealth-generating activities or towards zero- or negative-sum rent-seeking. We distinguish between measures of both the belief (e.g., the frequency of prayer) and belonging (e.g., church attendance) that has been stressed by authors such as Barro and McCleary (2003). We find that several religious variables significantly and negatively correlate with a state’s productive entrepreneurship score. Alternatively, most religious variables in our data do not correlate significantly with unproductive entrepreneurship. We also find that the percent of individuals reporting as atheist/agnostic is positively associated with productive entrepreneurship.
Design and Performance Evaluation of a Transport Protocol for Ad hoc Networks

Providing efficient transport services over multi-hop ad hoc networks is a fundamental building block for this wireless technology. The typical approach is modifying transmission control protocol (TCP) to fix one (or a few of) its inefficiency while preserving compatibility with the original protocol. However, a complete solution should include a significant number of modifications, such that the original TCP design is deeply modified. In this paper we explore a different approach. We include the desired modifications to TCP in the design of a new transport protocol [transport protocol for ad-hoc (TPA)]. In this way we are able to blend together these features in a unique design framework, and better control interactions among the different (modified) components. We then compare TCP and TPA through field tests, in terms of throughput and total number of transmitted segments. We consider several possible configurations of the protocol parameters, different routing protocols and various networking scenarios. In all the cases taken into consideration, TPA significantly outperforms TCP. To achieve a more thorough understanding of the TPA behaviour, we compare TPA and TCP also in terms of fairness and scalability (both in static and mobile configurations) over a wide range of representative topologies. To this end, we adopt a simulation approach, which is more suitable to this kind of analysis. Simulation results confirm field tests, and show that TPA is able to outperform TCP with respect to all analysed performance figures.
Detection of Crohn disease lesions of the small and large bowel in pediatric patients: diagnostic value of MR enterography versus reference examinations.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this article is to prospectively determine the accuracy of MR enterography in detecting Crohn disease lesions from the jejunum to the anorectal region in pediatric patients, in comparison with main reference investigations. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Fifty consecutive children with known Crohn disease underwent MR enterography with oral contrast agent and gadolinium-chelate intravenous injection. Two radiologists detected and localized lesions by dividing the bowel into nine segments (450 analyzed segments in 50 patients). Ileocolonoscopy, barium studies, intestinal ultrasound, and capsule endoscopy were considered as first- and second-level reference examinations and were performed within 15 days of MR enterography. RESULTS MR enterography detected lesions in 164 of 450 segments, with 155 true-positive and nine false-positive findings; overall sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values for small- and large-bowel lesions were 94.5%, 97%, 94.5%, and 97%, respectively (ĸ = 0.93; 95% CI, 0.89-0.97). Sensitivity and specificity values were 88% and 97%, respectively, for the jejunum, 100% and 97% for the proximal-to-mid ileum, 100% and 100% for the distal ileum, 93% and 100% for the cecum, 70% and 97% for the ascending colon, 80% and 100% for the transverse colon, 100% and 92% for the descending colon, 96% and 90% for the sigmoid colon, and 96% and 88% for the rectum. From jejunum to rectum, the AUC value ranged between 0.916 (jejunum) and 1.00 (distal ileum). Perianal fistulas were diagnosed in 15 patients, and other complications were found in 13 patients. CONCLUSION MR enterography showed an accuracy comparable to that of reference investigations, for both small- and large-bowel lesions. Because MR enterography is safer and more comprehensive than the reference examinations, it should be considered the primary examination for detecting Crohn disease lesions in children.
The Effectiveness of Price Limits and Stock Characteristics: Evidence from the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges

We examine the effectiveness of price limits on Chinese A shares and investigate the characteristics of those stocks that hit their price limits more frequently. We find that the effect of price limits is asymmetric for the A shares in upward and downward price movements and different for bullish and bearish sample periods. During a bullish period price limits effectively reduce stock volatility for downward price movements, but not for upward price movements; while during a bearish period price limits effectively reduce stock volatility for upward price movements, but not for downward price movements. Second, price limits delay efficient price discovery for upward price movements, but not for downward price movements. However, we do not find evidence to suggest that price limits harmfully interfere with the stock trading processes in the Chinese A share markets. Finally, we find that actively traded stocks hit their price limits more often and tend to hit the lower limit more frequently when overall market conditions are bearish. Stocks with high book-to-market values of equity hit their upper price limits more frequently, while stocks with a high ratio of tradable shares tend to hit their price limits less frequently.
Sustainable Food Activities Among Consumers: A Community Study

Consumers engage in many types of sustainable activities. A mail survey of 663 adults in one community examined the practice of sustainable food activities. Respondents participated in an average of 3 of 13 types of sustainable food activities, with women, older, and more educated consumers participating more frequently. Sustainable food activity participation was associated with few health conditions, except that food allergies were associated with more involvement in farmer's markets, choosing organic foods, being vegetarian, and composting. These findings suggest that particular demographic categories of individuals and health problems may lead to greater involvement in sustainable food activities.
Information Effects Associated with Debt-for-Equity and Equity-for-Debt Exchange Offers

This study investigates the information effect caused by a firm's change in capital structure via debt-for-equity and equity-for-debt exchange offers. The evidence suggests that the former transactions lead to abnormal stock price increases, while the latter lead to abnormal stock price decreases. In addition, findings based on analysis of bond returns and cross-sectional regressions do not lend support to the wealth transfer and tax effect hypotheses, but they are consistent with the information effect hypothesis. Copyright 1989 by American Finance Association.
Alignment of Strategy with Structure Using Management Control Systems

Considerable experimentation in organizational form has focused executive attention on the design and use of management control systems (MCS) to align environmental context and corporate strategy with a variety of organizational structures. The paper explores how two multibusiness health care firms with a similar corporate strategy–but with different structures, centralized versus decentralized–deand use MCS. Strategy based contingency model is applied to examine the interrelationshifive constructs–envir onment, corporate strategy, organizational structure, MCS and performance. Results demonstrate the design and use of MCS are contingent on the extent of centralization between the corporate office and business units. In the decentralized firm, MCS consist of different mission statements, one discount rate, reports/measure to monitor and to set standards and a broad array of non-financial measures to improve competitive positioning of the different business units. In contrast, in the centralized firm MCS consists of one common mission statement, different discount rates and reports/measures to support efficient operations and to share overhead resources and capabilities across business units. Findings also suggest the role of structure and MCS are gaining increasing importance as business models of diversified health care firms are getting more complex by combining for-profit and nonprofit businesses. Acknowledgement The author is grateful for the financial support from Harvard Business School. This paper benefited from the insights and comments of Professor Robert Kaplan, Professor Marlene Turner, anonymous reviewers and attendees of numerous conferences including the Academy of Management. The author would like to thank the interviewees of the two participating health care organizations.
Market Concentration and Competition in Eastern Europe

A key feature of Soviet-type economies is the excessive concentration of production and the skewed size distribution of enterprises. This is the root cause of the `soft budget constraint' and a natural outcome of the political economy of these countries. Given entrenched political support for a system which favours producers relative to consumers, it will be hard to pursue an active competition policy, though it is essential for successful reform. We examine a hypothetical restructuring of Polish state enterprises and argue that this should be undertaken before they are privatized. Hungary appears to have started such a process already.
Crisis Prevention and Management: Any New Lessons from Argentina and Turkey? 1

A. Introduction It was Sir Walter Raleigh who said that those who follow too close on the heels of history risk getting kicked in the teeth. No doubt he would have warned that it is still too early to draw definitive lessons from the most recent round of crises in Turkey and Argentina. That said, some of the implications for policy are already obvious. Many of these relate to dilemmas for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that have come in for extensive discussion in conjunction with efforts to strengthen the international financial architecture, but on which disappointingly little progress has been made.
Robustness of banking networks to idiosyncratic and systemic shocks: a network-based approach

We propose a network-based structural model of credit risk to demonstrate how idiosyncratic and systemic shocks propagate across the banking system and evaluate the costs. The banking system is built as a network of heterogeneous banks which are connected with one another. In such a system, single credit events propagate through the interbank market from debtors to creditors and across the system. The shock is imposed as an unexpected event. We demonstrate that while idiosyncratic shocks cannot substantially disturb the banking system, a systemic shock of even a moderate magnitude can be highly detrimental. Such shock includes a huge contagious potential. We demonstrate that the costs of the shock are largely determined by the extent of contagion and range from negligible to catastrophic. The results imply that a severe crisis has to be initiated by a systemic shock of at least moderate magnitude. Capital ratio and the bank size are two additional factors of the banking system stability. Finally, credit risk analysis is sensitive to the network topology and exhibits a profound nonlinear characteristic.
EC Accounting Harmonisation: An Empirical Study of Measurement Practices in France, Germany and the UK

Abstract This research attempts to assess the extent to which accounting measurement practices in France, Germany and the UK are currently harmonised in the context of the major effort that has been made to promote EC accounting harmonisation. The statistical tests show that there are significant differences between France, Germany and the UK in respect of all the practices evaluated. Furthermore, the I-indices used to measure the overall level of international accounting harmony across the three countries indicate a wide and relatively low range of values.
Sim2 Mutants Have Developmental Defects Not Overlapping with Those of Sim1 Mutants

ABSTRACT The mouse genome contains two Sim genes, Sim1 and Sim2. They are presumed to be important for central nervous system (CNS) development because they are homologous to the Drosophila single-minded (sim) gene, mutations in which cause a complete loss of CNS midline cells. In the mammalian CNS, Sim2 and Sim1 are coexpressed in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN). While Sim1 is essential for the development of the PVN (J. L. Michaud, T. Rosenquist, N. R. May, and C.-M. Fan, Genes Dev. 12:3264-3275, 1998), we report here that Sim2 mutant has a normal PVN. Analyses of the Sim1 and Sim2 compound mutants did not reveal obvious genetic interaction between them in PVN histogenesis. However, Sim2 mutant mice die within 3 days of birth due to lung atelectasis and breathing failure. We attribute the diminished efficacy of lung inflation to the compromised structural components surrounding the pleural cavity, which include rib protrusions, abnormal intercostal muscle attachments, diaphragm hypoplasia, and pleural mesothelium tearing. Although each of these structures is minimally affected, we propose that their combined effects lead to the mechanical failure of lung inflation and death. Sim2 mutants also develop congenital scoliosis, reflected by the unequal sizes of the left and right vertebrae and ribs. The temporal and spatial expression patterns of Sim2 in these skeletal elements suggest that Sim2 regulates their growth and/or integrity.
A Comparison of Centralized and Fragmented Markets with Costly Search

How does quotation transparency affect financial market performance? Biais's irrelevance proposition in 1993 shows that centralized markets yield the same expected bid-ask spreads as fragmented markets, other things equal. However, de Frutos and Manzano demonstrated in 2002 that expected spreads in fragmented markets are smaller and market participants prefer to trade in fragmented markets. This paper introduces liquidity traders' costs of searching for a better quote into the Biais model and derives opposite conclusions to these previous studies: expected spreads in centralized markets are smaller and liquidity traders prefer centralized markets, while market makers prefer fragmented markets. Copyright 2005 by The American Finance Association.
Earnings Management? The Shapes of the Frequency Distributions of Earnings Metrics are Not Evidence Ipso Facto

We provide evidence that the shapes (particularly around zero) of the frequency distributions of earnings metrics examined in the extant earnings management literature are affected by (1) deflation (using, for example, price or market capitalization), (2) sample selection criteria that lead to differential inclusion/exclusion of observations to the left of zero versus observations to the right of zero (implicit in studies focusing on firms followed by I/B/E/S and explicit in studies partitioning on a variable differing between loss observations and profit observations), (3) differences between the characteristics of observations to the left of zero and observations to the right of zero (such as market pricing and analyst optimism/pessimism), or (4) a combination of these factors. Since the shapes of the frequency distributions of earnings metrics at zero are likely due to one of the above effects, we conclude that the shapes cannot be used as ipso facto evidence of earnings management.
Labour Conflicts: A Cross-national Analysis of Economic and Institutional Determinants, 1971–2002

Research in labour conflicts crosscuts disciplines. Economists assign the incidence of labour conflicts to the economic development. The institutionalist camp is divided upon whether the power of organized labour or the industrial relations system is the main determinant of conflicts. All these approaches have run into difficulties when it comes to explaining the conflict patterns since 1970. Although empirical studies have combined economic and institutional explanations, important problems remain: A conceptual framework which links economic to institutional factors is lacking; the focus on labour power ignores the relational character of power; endogeneity problems are neglected; quantitative studies covering a larger number of institutional variables are merely cross-sectional, whereas TSCS analyses examine only a few of them. This paper tries to overcome these shortcomings. Its theoretical approach interprets labour conflicts as a problem of union choice which is embedded in a specific economic and institutional context. The hypotheses on these contextual factors are tested, using time-series data for 19 countries. The findings show that the trend towards social peace primarily follows from changes in the economic context, along with a weakening of the unions relative to employers. Cross-national differences in the incidence of conflicts persist mainly due to 'sticky' corporatist institutions.
Identification of HCV Core Mimotopes: Improved Methods for the Selection and Use of Disease-Related Phage-Displayed Peptides

Disease-specific epitope discovery from random peptide libraries displayed on phage using sera from patients involves a number of screening steps with many immune and non-immune sera. To rapidly identify mimotopes of the human hepatitis C virus (HCV) core protein, we have used an anti-core human monoclonal antibody (mAb; B12.F8) as a probe in screening phage that were affinity-selected using a serum from an HCV infected patient. Three different positive phage were isolated displaying low or no homology with the natural antigen, but which still efficiently bound to the antigen binding site of the B12.F8 antibody. Testing the reactivity of these phage with forty-five sera from HCV infected patients showed that antibodies recognizing them are present in more than 80% of this population. These antibodies showed distinct fine specificity, as they bound the selected phage in a mutually exclusive fashion. Co-expression of two mimotopes in the same cells led to chimeric particles which were recognized by antibodies of different specificity. These data provide novel information on the potential use of the phage display technology for the characterization of antibody specificity as well as disease diagnosis and prevention.
Testing the export-led growth hypothesis: empirical evidence from Turkey

In this paper the Turkish export-led growth hypothesis is examined from the trade liberalisation process initiated in 1980. The paper has employed Toda and Yamamoto (1995) procedure for testing for Granger non-causality in the augmented vector autoregressive (VAR) methodology to analyze the dynamic relationship between export growth and economic growth in Turkey using quarterly data from 1989 to 2006. The empirical results support the export-led growth hypothesis for Turkey and that Granger causal flow is unidirectional from real exports to real GDP.
Agency Theory and Financial Planning Practice

type="main" xml:lang="en"> We extend an influential contribution to the literature on agency theory and then use this extension, along with other theoretical contributions, to shed light on agency problems affecting funds management and financial planning in Australia. The case for pure fee-for-service in actively managed funds and plans turns out to be weak. The amount of money exposed to risk by an active manager should be less than the entire investible wealth of the client, especially in the case of investors on the cusp of retirement. Asset-based fees on actively managed funds should include a fulcrum component.
Privatisation in the EU Energy Sector: The Never‐Ending Story

Following the wave of privatisation that started in Britain's energy sectors in the early 1980s, much progress has been made but the results still fall short of the potential benefits. In this paper both the theoretical arguments and the existing empirical evidence on privatisation in the energy sector are examined, with particular reference to European experience. The paper also presents some additional empirical analysis on the effect of privatisation on competition in the electricity market. Although not fully satisfactory, the analysis seems to be consistent with theoretical arguments. In particular, ‘mostly privatised’ industries tend to be associated with incumbents having lower market shares.