Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Global Aging and Economic Convergence: A Real Option or Still a Case of Science Fiction?

How does global aging affect the convergence in global economic development? Both the developing and developed world will be characterized for the coming decades by aging populations. Changes in the age distribution of a population are an important determinant of economic performance as they affect wealth accumulation and dependency burdens, yielding a demographic dividend of extra growth. During the twenty years from 1975 to 2005 Europe and the US have benefited from a strong demographic dividend. However, in the decades to come this effect will be reversed and the driving force behind the wealth of nations has to be sought elsewhere. Africa and, to some extent, India might benefit from the demographic dividend. However, this potential growth phase may well disappear if supporting conditions for growth are absent. Large-scale migration is not expected to be a sustainable solution to unbalanced global economic developments. Remittances, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Official Development Assistance (ODA) will remain necessary capital flows for the developing world in the near future. Remittances offer no structural solution to reduction of poverty as these funds flow to a selective group of families and are allocated generally to consumption rather than to investment purposes. Migration of a temporary nature in conjunction with offshore outsourcing of services and production may offer a solution for the dilemmas of population and development, which OECD donors face in offering development assistance and designing immigration policy.
Positive mathematical programming with multiple data points : a cross- sectional estimation procedure

This paper introduces an approach to the specification of non-linear cost functions in regional programming models. It can be characterised as an application of positive mathematical programming (PMP) to multiple observations. The application of PMP in policy relevant agricultural supply models as a mean for calibration has significantly increased during the last ten years. However, many modellers have not reflected the arbitrary and potentially implausible response behaviour of the resulting models implied by standard applications of the approach. Paris and Howitt (1998) interpret PMP as the estimation of a non-linear cost function and generalize the specification by employing a « Maximum Entropy (ME) » procedure. However, their approach still lacks a sufficient empirical base and involves a parameterisation to enforce correct curvature of the cost function, which induces significant problems in applications. The suggested methodology is designed to exploit information contained in a cross sectional sample to specify — regionally specific — quadratic cost functions with cross effects for crop activities. It also provides a solution to the curvature problem. The approach is applied to regional programming models for 22 regions in France. An ex-post simulation across the 1992 CAP-reform shows plausible results with respect to the simulation behaviour of the resulting models. Paths for extensions and improvements of this methodology are identified.
Antinociceptive effect of the ethanolic extract of Amburana cearensis (Allemão) A.C. Sm., Fabaceae, in rodents

The ethanolic extract of the trunk bark of Amburana cearensis (EEA) was examined for its oral (p.o.) analgesic activity at the doses of 100, 200 and 400 mg/kg body weight. In the acetic acid-induced writhing test, the EEA (200 and 400 mg/kg, p.o.) reduced the number of writhing by 33.4% and 40.7%, respectively. Additionally, EEA (100, 200 and 400 mg/kg, p.o.) decreased by 77.5%, 79.7 and 91.3%, respectively, the paw liking time in the second phase of the formalin test. Therefore, EEA showed a dose-dependent analgesic effect in formalin test and was effective in reducing writhing in mice.
Direct and Indirect Effects of Insecticide Applications on Growth and Survival of Nestling Passerines

We conducted an experiment in 1989 and 1990 to determine the effects of malathion ultra-low volume (ULV) aerial spray on reproduction of passerine birds in shrub- steppe habitat of southern Idaho. The experiment consisted of reducing the insect food base with malathion, a broad-spectrum insecticide, while monitoring nestling growth variables and daily nest survivorship. Relative arthropod abundance and biomass were reduced on the treatment plot in 1989 and 1990 (F. P. Howe et al., unpublished manuscript). Wing and tarsus lengths of nestling Sage Thrashers (Oreoscoptes montanus) were shorter on the treatment than on the control plot after malathion application in 1989 but not in 1990. Nestling Brewer's Sparrow (Spizella breweri) wing length and mass were lower on the treatment plot in 1990 but not in 1989. Primary length and foot length were unaffected for either species in either year. Multivariate ANOVA indicated that nestling Brewer's Sparrow ";size" (a combination of five growth variables) was smaller on the treatment than on the control site after the 1990 treatment, but similar between sites after the 1989 malathion application. Sage Thrasher nestling "size" was smaller on the posttreatment malathion plot in 1989, but similar between plots in 1990. The percentage of eggs hatched and percentage of nestlings fledged were unaffected for either species. No differences were detected in Mayfield estimates of nest survivorship for either species in either year. The mean number of Sage Thrashers fledged per nest attempt was lower on the treatment than on the control plot in 1989, but not in 1990. The mean number of Brewer's Sparrows fledged per nest attempt was not affected on the treatment plot. No adult mortality for either species was observed, and nestling mortalities could not be attributed to malathion. Thus, few differences were detected in nestling growth variables and nest survivorship between the control and treatment plots, and these differences were not consistent across years. Under the conditions of this study, malathion had no observable direct effects, and only marginal indirect effects, through food-base reduction, on Brewer's Sparrow and Sage Thrasher nestling growth and survival.
Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) residue levels in marketed Silver Fish (Rastreneobola argentea) caught from major water bodies in Uganda

Silver fish (Rastreneobola argentea) samples from Lake Victoria and Lake Kyoga were analyzed for dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) and metabolites using a Gas Chromatograph equipped with an Electron Capture Detector. Confirmation of results was by Gas Chromatography equipped with Mass Spectrophotometer (GC-MS). DDT and metabolites were detected in 90% of the total samples (63 out of 70). pp’ DDT was the most frequently detected residues in the samples whereas op’ DDE was detected in none of the samples. The mean ΣDDT concentrations in fish from Lake Victoria varied from 0.147 to 0.396 µg/kg while that in Lake Kyoga varied from 0.207 to 0.506 µg/kg dry wt of fish sample. The concentration of total DDT in the fish samples ranged from 0.147 to 0.506 µg/kg dry wt. This was far below the recommended FAO limit of 5000 µg/kg for fish (edible portion), implying that the fish are safe for human consumption. Key words: Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) and metabolites, Rastreneobola argentea, Uganda water bodies.
Stock Market Predictability and Industrial Metal Returns

Price movements in industrial metals such as copper and aluminum predict stock returns. Increasing industrial metal prices are good news for equity markets in recessions and bad news in expansions. A one-standard-deviation increase in industrial metal returns predicts a price drop of one and a half percent in monthly stock market returns in expansions and an increase of around a half percent during recessions. The predictability is distinct to and compares favorably with that from more established predictors. This paper was accepted by Lauren Cohen, finance.
Bargaining power and project risk in Venture Capital investments

This paper examines the link between Venture Capitalist competition and investment risk as a possible explanation of the differences in the Venture Capital activity among countries. In a double-sided moral hazard framework we model the effect of bargaining between risk neutral Venture Capitalists and risk averse entrepreneurs on the risk profile of the investees. The entrepreneurs’ bargaining power is assumed to be directly determined by the number of Venture Capitalist financiers in the market and the implicit competition among them. We show that as the entrepreneurs’ bargaining power increases, they enjoy higher rents which allow the Venture Capitalists to finance risky projects that they would otherwise avoid. The theoretical findings are then tested empirically using a European dataset of 22 countries for 2007-2012 where we find a positive effect of the number of investors on the magnitude of risky early stage Venture Capital investments.
ShakeMap implementation in Italy

Italy is a seismically active country and has been the site of several large and extremely damaging earthquakes since historical times. Tragic examples of these earthquakes in the past century include the M 6.8 1905 Calabria, the M 7.0 1908 Messina-Reggio Calabria, the M 7.0 1915 Marsica, the M 6.7 1930 Irpinia, the M 6.5 1968 Belice, the M 6.5 1976 Friuli, and the M 6.9 1980 Irpinia (Boschi et al. 2000). All these earthquakes caused extensive damage and hundreds to tens of thousands of casualties. In recent years, the Dipartimento per la Protezione Civile (Italian Civil Protection Department [DPC], which answers directly to the prime minister) has supported several projects in the field of seismology aimed toward a better understanding of the occurrence of earthquakes on Italian territory and their associated ground shaking. In this context, project DPC-S4 2004–2006 was directed specifically at the quick assessment of ground-motion shaking in Italy (see http://www.ingv.it/progettiSV/Progetti/Sismologici/sismologici\_con\_frame.htm, in Italian). The DPC in Italy, and civil defense agencies in general, are indeed in great need of rapid and accurate information on where earthquake damage is located, so they can properly direct rescue teams and organize an emergency response. For these reasons, the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) has implemented the software package ShakeMap, developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earthquake Hazards Program (Wald et al. 2006) and specifically designed to generate maps of the peak ground-motion (PGM) parameters and the instrumentally derived intensities. ShakeMap is capable of generating maps of ground shaking of various PGM including peak ground acceleration (PGA), ground velocity (PGV), and spectral acceleration response (PSA) at 0.3, 1.0 and 3.0 s, and instrumentally derived intensities. At its core, ShakeMap is a seismologically based interpolation algorithm that exploits the available data of the observed ground motions and the …
Topological maps by STDP for input space with discrete and continuous features

Position-and-scale-free representations of shapes are acquired by neurons in the inferior temporal (IT) cortex. So each neuron receives information from the whole visual field. Familiar shapes are extremely limited from all the possible shapes on the whole visual field. So they must be clustered in the shape space to have mixed structure of continuity and discreteness. We demonstrate that multiple representation can be acquired in a spike- based model for topological maps based on the spike- timing-dependent synaptic plasticity (STDP), subjected to a set of inputs on two rings, which is a simple example of mixed structure. In this representation, the position on each ring is represented by a center of active neurons and the dif- ference of rings is represented by a detail pattern of active neurons. Neurons in the same region exhibit high activi- ties for an input on the other ring. The result is consistent with the fact observed in IT cortex that neighboring neu- rons exhibit different preferences while the region of active neurons is continuously shifted for continuous changes of object.
Conflicts of Interest, Information Provision and Competition in Banking

In some markets, such as the market for drugs or for financial services, sellers have better information than buyers regarding the matching between the buyer's needs and the good's actual characteristics. Depending on the market structure, this may lead to conflicts of interest and/or the under-provision of information by the seller. This paper studies this issue in the market for financial services. The analysis presents a new model of competition between banks, as banks' price competition influences the ensuing incentives for truthful information revelation. We compare two different firm structures, specialized banking, where financial institutions provide a unique financial product, and one-stop banking, where a financial institution is able to provide several financial products which are horizontally differentiated. We show first that, although conflicts of interest may prevent information disclosure under monopoly, competition forces full information provision for sufficiently high reputation costs. Second, in the presence of market power, one-stop banks will use information strategically to increase product differentiation and therefore will always provide reliable information and charge higher prices than specialized banks, thus providing a new reason for the creation of one-stop banks. Finally, we show that, if independent financial advisers are able to provide reliable information, this increases product differentiation and therefore market power, so that it is in the interest of financial intermediaries to promote external independent financial advice.
The galaxy cross-correlation function as a probe of the spatial distribution of galactic satellites

The spatial distribution of satellite galaxies around host galaxies can illuminate the relationship between satellites and dark matter subhalos and aid in developing and testing galaxy formation models. Previous efforts to constrain the distribution attempted to eliminate interlopers from the measured projected number density of satellites and found that the distribution is generally consistent with the expected dark matter halo profile of the parent hosts, with a best-fit power-law slope of ≈ -1.7 between projected separations of ~$30\,h^{-1}$ kpc and $0.5\, h^{-1}$ Mpc. Here, I use the projected cross-correlation of bright and faint galaxies to analyze contributions from satellites and interlopers together, using a halo occupation distribution (HOD) analytic model for galaxy clustering. This approach is tested on mock catalogs constructed from simulations. I find that analysis of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data gives results generally consistent with interloper subtraction methods between the projected separations of $10\,h^{-1}$ kpc and $6.3\,h^{-1}$ Mpc, although the errors on the parameters that constrain the radial profile are large, and larger samples of data are required.
R&D Spillovers:A Non-Spatial and a Spatial Examination

In recent years there were many debates and different opinions whether R&D spillover effects exist or not. In 1995 Coe and Helpman published a study about this phenomenon, based on a panel dataset, that supports the position that such R&D spillover effects are existent. However, this survey was criticized and many different suggestions for improvement came from the scientific community. Some of them were selected and analysed and finally led to a new model. And even though this new model is well compatible with the data, it leads to different conclusions, namely that there does not exist an R&D spillover effect. These different results were the motivation to run a spatial analysis, which can be done by considering the countries as regions and using an adequate spatial link matrix. The used methods from the field of spatial econometrics are described briefly and quite general, and finally the results from the spatial models (the ones which correspond to the non-spatial ones) are compared with the results from the non-spatial analysis. The preferred model supports the position that R&D spillover effects exist.
Dependence structures in Chinese and US financial markets: a time-varying conditional copula approach

In this article, we use a time-varying conditional copula approach to model Chinese and US stock markets’ dependence structures with other financial markets. The Autoregressive-Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic-t (AR-GARCH-t) model is used to examine the marginal distributions, while Normal and Generalized Joe-Clayton (GJC) copula models are employed to analyse the joint distributions. In this pairwise analysis, both constant and time-varying conditional dependence parameters are estimated by a two-step maximum likelihood method. A comparative analysis of dependence structures in Chinese versus US stock markets is also provided. There are three main findings: first, the time-varying-dependence model does not always perform better than constant-dependence model. This result has not previously been reported in the literature. Second, we find that the upper tail dependence is much higher than the lower tail dependence in some short periods, which has not been documented in previous literature. Third, Chinese financial market is relatively separate from other international financial markets in contrast to the US market. The tail dependence with other financial markets is much lower in China than in the United States. Dependence, on average, rises significantly over sub-periods.
Implications of a non-universal IMF from C, N, and O abundances in very metal-poor Galactic stars and damped Lyα absorbers

Recently revealed C, N, and O abundances inthe most metal-poor damped Lyα(DLA) absorbers are compared withthose of extremely metal-poor stars in the Galactic halo, as well as extragalactic H II regions, to decipher nucleosynthesis and chemical enrichment in the early Universe. These comparisons surprisingly identify a relatively high C/O ratio and a low N/O ratio in DLA systems, which is hard to explain theoretically. We propose that if these features are confirmed by future studies, this effect occurs because the initial mass function in metal-poor DLA systems has a cut-off at the upper mass end at around 20‐25 M� , thus lacks the massive stars that provide the nucleosynthesis products leading to the low C/O and high N/O ratios. This finding is a reasonable explanation of the nature of DLA systems in which a sufficient amount of cold H I gas remains intact because of the suppression of ionization by massive stars. In addition, our claim strongly supports a high production rate of N in very massive stars, which might be acceptable in light of the recent nucleosynthesis calculations with fast rotation models. The updates of both abundance data and nucleosynthesis results will strengthen our novel proposition that the C/ Oa nd N/O abundances are a powerful tool for inferring the form of the initial mass function.
Monetary Policy Rules and Inflation Process in Open Emerging Economies: Evidence for 12 New EU Members

This paper has three objectives. First, it aims at revealing the logic of interest rate setting pursued by monetary authorities of 12 new EU members. Using estimation of an augmented Taylor rule, we find that this setting was not always consistent with the official monetary policy. Second, we seek to shed light on the inflation process of these countries. To this end, we carry out an estimation of an open economy Philips curve (PC). Our main finding is that inflation rates were not only driven by backward persistency but also held a forward-looking component. Finally, we assess the viability of existing monetary arrangements for price stability. The analysis of the conditional inflation variance obtained from GARCH estimation of PC is used for this purpose. We conclude that inflation targeting is preferable to an exchange rate peg because it allowed decreasing the inflation rate and anchored its volatility.
Efficacy of an IgM preparation in the treatment of patients with sepsis: a double-blind randomized clinical trial in a pediatric intensive care unit

Aim: Additional treatments for sepsis to be administered alongside the standard therapy recommended by the Surviving Sepsis Campaign have recently undergone evaluation. Due to its anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory properties, intravenous polyvalent immunoglobulin M (IgM)–enriched immunoglobulins (IgM preparation) has been investigated as one of these potentially valid adjunctive therapies. The aim of this trial was to assess the efficacy of an IgM preparation as adjuvant therapy in the treatment of pediatric patients with sepsis. Methods: In our study, 78 septic patients admitted to a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at the University Hospital Center “Mother Teresa” in Tirana, Albania, were randomized into two groups (intervention and control). All patients were treated according to standard PICU sepsis guidelines. Additionally, patients in the intervention group received the IgM preparation Pentaglobin® while patients in the control group received standard sepsis therapy, but no immunoglobulin administration. Results: The survival rate was higher in the intervention group (87%, N=34) than in the control group (64%, N=25), and this difference was statistically significant (P=0.03). Length of stay (LOS) was also significantly shorter in the intervention group. Conclusion: In this study conducted in Albania, use of an IgM preparation, in addition to standard sepsis therapy, led to a significant increase in the survival rate as well as a significant reduction in LOS compared with placebo, when administered in PICU patients with sepsis.
"BACK-END SENTENCING" AND REIMPRISONMENT: INDIVIDUAL, ORGANIZATIONAL, AND COMMUNITY PREDICTORS OF PAROLE SANCTIONING DECISIONS*

An understudied contributor to the massive growth of American incarceration is an increase in the practice of reimprisoning parolees through parole board revocations—now referred to as “back-end sentencing. ” To conduct the analyses outlined in this article, we use data from the California Parole Study to analyze the effects of three clusters of factors (parolees' characteristics, organizational pressures, and community conditions) on these sentences. Our analyses are informed by theories that have been used to explain “front-end” (court) sentences, which center on the focal concerns of social-control agents, labeling, and racial threat. Our results indicate that status characteristics—race/ethnicity and gender—affect the likelihood that criminal parole violators are reimprisoned. Moreover, certain “pivotal categories” of parolees—registered sex offenders and those who have committed “serious” or “violent” offenses—are much more likely to be returned to prison than others. Organizational pressure (prison crowding) also affects the likelihood of reimprisonment. Communities' political punitiveness affects the likelihood that technical violators are reimprisoned and that serious or violent offenders are reimprisoned for criminal violations. In this article, we use these findings to consider ways that mass incarceration is driven by both top-down policies as well as bottom-up organizational and community forces.