Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Capital structure dynamics of US-based multinationals (MNCs) and domestic (DCs) firms

This thesis is an empirical investigation of three related capital structure dynamics of US-based multinationals and their domestic counterparts. Specifically, the thesis examined whether there are differences in capital structure adjustment speed between US-based Multinationals (hereafter, MNCs) and Domestic Corporations (hereafter, DCs), and if so, what theoretical factors contribute to the differences. At an industry level, the thesis examine whether or not industries of US-based Multinationals (MNCs) and their domestic counterparts (DCs) have different speed of capital structure adjustment toward the target level, particularly the manufacturing industry. And at the macro level, the thesis estimates the effect of macroeconomic factors (commercial paper spread, growth in aggregate capital expenditure of nonfinancial firms, and consumer price index (CPI)), and macroeconomic conditions defined by GDP, default spread, unemployment and price-output ratio on capital structure dynamics of US-based MNCs relative to DCs. Various econometric techniques were employed in the thesis to test the hypothesis that capital structure dynamics of US-based MNCs differ from DCs. Using fixed effect instrumental variables (FEIV), the empirical results shows that on average, DCs adjust to target leverage faster than MNCs. Similarly, the results support existences of capital structure differences among industries for MNCs and DCs.
The Federal Reserve's Portfolio and its Effects on Mortgage Markets

We provide an empirical analysis of the effects of the Federal Reserve's asset holdings on MBS yields and mortgage rates. We argue that understanding the particulars of the U.S. mortgage markets, particularly the linkages between the secondary and primary mortgage markets, is important. We find evidence that the Federal Reserve's portfolio holdings influence mortgage markets, through both a "portfolio balancing channel" and an "excess reserves" channel. These two channels can work in opposite directions and their magnitudes are difficult to estimate, but on net, larger Federal Reserve's portfolio holdings seem to have placed a significant downward influence on MBS yields and mortgage rates.
The radiation‐attenuated schistosome vaccine induces high levels of protective immunity in the absence of B cells

Radiation‐attenuated cercariae of Schistosoma mansoni elicit consistently high levels of protective immunity in mice. The cell‐mediated pulmonary effector mechanisms have been well characterized but the role of B cells and antibodies remains ill defined. We have compared the immune responses of B‐cell‐deficient (μMT) mice and their wild‐type (WT) counterparts following exposure to the attenuated vaccine. Both groups mounted a T helper type 1 (Th1)‐biased response in the skin‐draining lymph nodes after vaccination. Interferon‐γ was the dominant cytokine secreted by airway leucocytes after challenge in both μMT and WT mice, but there was a somewhat greater Th2 component in the former animals. The cellular infiltrates observed in the airways, and the pulmonary effector foci, were of similar composition in the two groups although some large foci were present in the μMT mice. There was a marked dichotomy in the protection induced in μMT animals by a single vaccination, with two‐thirds showing levels similar to their WT counterparts, demonstrating that cell‐mediated mechanisms alone can provide adequate protection. The remaining μMT mice had a mean worm burden identical to that of their challenge controls. A possible explanation is that a proportion of the μMT animals have a genetic defect closely associated with the μ‐heavy‐chain locus on chromosome 12, which affects their ability to mount a protective cell‐mediated response. Three vaccinations enhanced the immunity of WT animals, most likely by augmenting antibody‐mediated mechanisms. In contrast, no enhancement was seen in μMT mice, suggesting that the cell‐mediated response is not boosted by multiple exposures to attenuated larvae.
Characterization, quantification, and potential clinical value of the epidermal growth factor receptor in head and neck squamous cell carcinomas

Epidermal growth factor (EGF) stimulates the growth of several types of epithelial tissues and possesses a strong mitogenic activity that is mediated through its cell surface receptor (EGFR). The aim of this study was to characterize EGFR and measure its levels in head and neck tumors biopsies (70 patients); use of a simplified competition technique with a radiolabeled ligand allowed evaluation of functional EGFR. Five samples (4 tumors and 1 control) were used to characterize EGF binding. Graphic representation identified a single family of binding sites. Kd values revealed high affinity for EGF binding: mean Kd, 0.156/pm 0.108 nM (0.095‐0.347 nM). EGF‐binding characteristics (Kd) were similar in nontumoral tissue samples (controls) and in tumor material. In 59 of 60 cases, EGFR levels were higher in the tumor than in the corresponding controls. A significant correlation was found between EGFR levels and tumor size and stage. Controls exhibited a trend toward higher EGFR levels in elevated sizes and stages. According to a cutoff EGFR value of 100 fmol/mg protein, which separated all controls from tumors, EGFR‐positive tumors (>100 fmol/mg protein) had a greater probability of complete response to chemotherapy than EGFR‐negative tumors; other tumor characteristics, such as the degree of tumoral differentiation, tumor size, or stage, were unable to operate such a discrimination in the response to chemotherapy. EGFR may thus be an interesting biological marker for head and neck cancer.
Understanding Negative Electronic Word-of-Mouth(eWOM)： Social Ties and Key Determinants

Abstract The Internet has generated a number of online review sites where dissatisfied consumers can easily articulate their opinions and comments on products or services. Little attention, however, has been directed to investigating the relationship between negative electronic word-of-mouth (eWO M) and its critical determinants that affect consum-ers’ purchasing behaviors. This study attempts to explore the i nfluence of the key determinants of consumers’ negative eWOM behaviors, including their social relationships online. The results show that tie strength is positively associated with the proposed determinants, such as information credibility, external search efforts, and product involvement. Further, we find that perceived risk plays a mediating role in the relationship between consumers’ intention to spread eWOM and its key determinants. Keywords：eWOM, Social Ties, Credibility, Product Involvement, Perceived Risk 논문접수일：2011년 08월 12일 논문수정일：2011년 11월 03일 논문게재확정일：2011년 11월 04일* Weber State University** 전북대학교 경영학부† 교신저자
First trimester anatomy scan: pushing the limits. What can we see now?

Purpose of review The aim of this review article is to familiarize the reader with the current developments dealing with ultrasound during the first trimester of pregnancy. Recent findings The main emphasis of this article is to review the anatomy seen during the first trimester and to bring to the reader the fact that the first anatomical survey of the fetus does not have to wait until the 18th to 20th week of gestation. The fetus can be surveyed adequately as early as the 12th week of gestation and ideally between the 13th and 14th weeks. Of course, not all malformations will be detected during the first trimester, and a follow-up scan between 20 and 23 weeks is indicated. Summary The ongoing improvements in ultrasound technology allow us to see more details of the embryo or fetus at earlier gestational ages than ever before. This is resulting in a rethinking of when the first anatomical survey should be performed.
Comparative Study of Intravenous Labetalol and Oral Nifedipine for Control of Blood Pressure in Severe Preeclampsia

Objective: To compare intravenous Labetalol with oral Nifedipine in their rapidity to control hypertensive emergencies of pregnancy. Design: A hospital based prospective randomized interventional comparative study. Methods: Pregnant woman with severe gestational hypertension ≥ 160/110 mm of Hg were randomized to receive intravenous Labetalol injection (in an escalating dose regimen of 20, 40, 80, 80 and 80 mg) or Nifedipine (10mg tab orally upto 5 doses ) until the target blood pressure of 150/90mm of Hg was achieved. Crossover treatment was effected if the initial treatment regimen was unsuccessful. Results: The meantime required to achieve target blood pressure of 150/90mm of Hg were 47.2 ± 13.5 mins in the Labetalol group and 45.6 ± 14.5 mins in the Nifedipine group. (P=0.511). Most of the patients were controlled by 2 doses of each drug, 56% in the lebetalol group and 62% in the Nifedipine group. 12% and 14% in the Labetalol and Nifedipine group respectively were not controlled by 5 doses of either drug and required crossover drug therapy. Conclusion: Intravenous Labetalol and oral Nifedipine regimen are equally effective and well tolerated when used for the rapid control of the blood pressure in severe hypertension in pregnancy.
Risks and Efficiency Gains of a Tiered Structure in Large-Value Payments: A Simulation Approach

The large-value payment system in the United Kingdom (CHAPS) is highly tiered: a few settlement banks make payments on behalf of many customer banks. This paper makes use of a simulation approach to quantify by how much tiering affects, on the one hand, concentration and credit risk and, on the other, the liquidity needs of CHAPS. We do so by creating scenarios where current settlement banks become customer banks and thus we increase the degree of tiering. The results show that concentration risk would rise substantially in what is already a highly concentrated system. As for credit risk, the size of intraday exposures compared with settlement banks' capital is very small and therefore the likelihood of contagion remote. More importantly, the increase in credit risk brought to the system by settlement banks leaving CHAPS bears little relationship to the values settled by each individual bank. We find that increasing the degree of tiering in CHAPS leads to substantial liquidity savings - although the liquidity saved is only a fraction of the spare liquidity currently posted in the system. Most of the savings are due to liquidity pooling rather than to internalisation of payments. There is a strong relationship between changes in values settled and liquidity needs. This relationship can be used to forecast the impact on liquidity needs if more banks were to join CHAPS. The quantification of the trade-off between risk and efficiency in different scenarios provides policymakers with a useful analytical framework for analysing the effects of tiering.
Pulmonary arterial compliance and pulmonary hemodynamic effects of Serelaxin in a sheep model.

BACKGROUND The influence of the recombinant form of human relaxin-2 (serelaxin) on pulmonary hemodynamics under physiologic conditions have not been the subject of studies in an animal model up until now. METHODS We therefore utilised the large animal model sheep, convenient in its similar cardiovascular physiology, to investigate said influence. All animals underwent right heart catheterization, a safe and reliable invasive procedure for the assessment of pulmonary hemodynamics, and then received either 30μg/kg serelaxin (n = 11) or saline (n = 13). Systolic, diastolic and mean values of both pulmonary artery pressure (respectively, PAPs, PAPd, PAPm) and pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (respectively, PCWs, PCWd, PCWm) blood gases, heart rate (HR) and both peripheral and pulmonary arterial oxygen saturation were obtained. Cardiac output (CO), pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR), pulmonary arterial compliance (PAcompl) and systemic vascular resistance (SVR) were calculated. RESULTS The key findings of the current study are that 20 min after serelaxin injection a rapid decrease of the PAPm, PCWPm, SVR and an decrease of the PAcompl was observed (P < 0.01). CONCLUSION These findings suggest that serelaxin might be suitable to improve pulmonary hemodynamics in clinically relevant scenarios, like acute heart failure or pulmonary hypertension.
Strategic Implementation of 'Everyday Low Price' in Electronic Markets: A Study of Airline Pricing on the Internet

An Everyday Low Price (EDLP) strategy is a product-portfolio level pricing strategy by which a firm attempts to convey to consumers that prices across its product portfolio are consistently low. Empirically, the EDLP strategy is operationalized along two dimensions; the “everyday” component, which relates to the consistency in product prices over time, and the “low price” component, which implies that the prices set are on average lower than other prices available in the market. There may, however, be specific categories or markets in which even EDLP firms may prefer to eschew their consistency and low price goals. The U.S. domestic airline industry has two airlines that adopt the EDLP format while most others employ a promotional (HILO) pricing strategy, thus providing a rich context to investigate how the EDLP price-image strategy is implemented. We use a web crawler to gather information on over 270,000 ticket prices offered by the major airlines in 472 markets, and use a hierarchical linear model to analyze how these two dimensions of price vary with ticket categories and market conditions – defined in economics literature by advance purchase periods, weekend restrictions, airlines’ competitiveness, market distance, and hub operations. We find that the EDLP airlines emphasize the everyday dimension of their pricing much more than the low price dimension. Thus while their prices are systematically more consistent than their HILO competitors, their price levels show that they practice the same form of price discrimination with advance-purchase periods as their HILO competitors. Interestingly, while most airlines charge higher prices for tickets without weekend restriction, which are typically targeted towards business travelers, EDLP firms charge lower prices for these tickets. Further investigation at a category level reveals that these lower business fares are distinct features of short-haul markets where EDLP firms are known to enjoy certain cost advantages due to smaller equipment sizes of their flights. From the “everyday” point of view, we see that while there are no differences in the consistency of prices of EDLP tickets based on advance purchase periods, prices of business-focused EDLP tickets are distinctly more consistent than those of leisure-oriented tickets. Curiously, even in markets where EDLP firms are monopolists, they do not appear to be exercising their monopoly power; on the other hand, HILO firms distinctly employ discriminatory pricing in their monopoly markets. Perhaps this is a reflection of EDLP firms pursuing a limit-pricing/barrier-to-entry strategy. Our research shows that the practice of EDLP in online markets involves strategic variations in how price image is communicated.
End-to-End Message Exchange in a Deployable Marine Environment Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Network

We present a pragmatic view of different approaches used to guarantee data delivery in a deployable marine habitat monitoring system, composed of a two-tier dual frequency (2.4 GHz/900 MHz) hierarchical wireless sensor network (WSN). We cover end-to-end application layer aspects. At the lower tier, we preconfigured endpoint (EP) transceivers for automatic data acquisition and wireless transfer using their native Application Program Interface (API) framework. These endpoints communicate with a more powerful intermediate cluster-head (CLH) system. At the upper tier, we deployed a modified low level 8-bit “Lighter” version of the well-known web application protocol called JavaScript Object Notation (JSON, or in our case LJSON) for back and forth CLH to BS validated message exchange. These LJSON messages are converted by the BS to 16-bit JSON and vice versa, for remote Internet interaction. And finally, the BS software establishes Internet Protocol (IP) client socket connections with a remote custom JSON service, in charge of marine habitat sensor data reception, verification, and nonvolatile database storage.
Histogram Tests for Wideband Applications

Characterization and testing of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are important for many reasons. A histogram test is a common method to characterize the linearity features of an ADC. Two commonly used stimulus signals are sine waves and Gaussian noise. This paper presents a metrological comparison between Gaussian and sine-wave histogram tests for wideband applications, that is, we evaluate the performance of the characterization of the ADC and the usability of postcorrection. A postcorrection procedure involves the characterization of the ADC nonlinearity and then the use of this information by processing the ADC output samples to remove the distortion. The results show that the Gaussian histogram test gives reasonable accuracy in measuring nonlinearities. However, it does not result in a suitable model for postcorrection in wideband applications. A single-tone sine-wave histogram will be a better basis for postcorrection. The best result can be obtained if the lookup table is trained with several single-tone sine waves in the frequency band.
Inequality, Inequity Aversion, and the Provision of Public Goods

We investigate the effects of inequality in wealth on the incentives to contribute to a public good when agents are inequity averse and may differ in ability. We show that equality may lead to a reduction of public good provision below levels generated by purely selfish agents. But introducing inequality motivates more productive agents to exert higher efforts and help the group to coordinate on equilibria with less free-riding. As a result, less able agents may benefit from initially disadvantageous inequality. Moreover, the more inequity averse the agents, the more inequality should be imposed even by an egalitarian social planner.
PENGARUH INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL DAN PENGUNGKAPANNYA TERHADAP NILAI PERUSAHAAN (STUDI EMPIRIS PADA PERUSAHAAN FARMASI DI BEI)

Intellectual capital is an intangible asset used to improve corporate performance and corporate value creation. Disclosure of intellectual capital is a report issued by a company to give information for those who are not involved directly in the company. The purpose of this research are to examine the effect of intellectual capital and disclosure of intellectual capital on firm value in the pharmaceutical company listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (BEI). This research used independent variables of intellectual capital and disclosure of intellectual capital and the dependent variable is firm value. The sampling method used is the census since the population is the sample, which are 9 companies as the sample. This research was conducted in the period 2006-2010. Analysis of the data used is multiple linear regression with hypotheses testing of statistic F and t tests. The results of this research showed that (1) intellectual capital have a significant positive effect on firm value that suggest that intellectual capital is a power source of companies to compete in achieving competitive advantage and increase market perceptions of firm value, and (2) disclosure of intellectual capital have a significant positive effect on firm value that suggest that disclosure of intellectual capital becomes the key for value creation
How do deep convolutional neural networks learn from raw audio waveforms

Prior work on speech and audio processing has demonstrated the ability to obtain excellent performance when learning directly from raw audio waveforms using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, the exact inner workings of a CNN remain unclear, which hinders further developments and improvements into this direction. In this paper, we theoretically analyze and explain how deep CNNs learn from raw audio waveforms and identify potential limitations of existing network structures. Based on this analysis, we further propose a new network architecture (called SimpleNet), which offers a very simple but concise structure and high model interpretability.
The Manager's Job: Folklore and Fact.

When a manager is told that a factory has just burned down and then advises the caller to see whether temporary arrangements can be made to supply customers through a foreign subsidiary, is that manager planning, organizing, coordinating, or controlling? How about when he or she presents a gold watch to a retiring employee? Or attends a conference to meet people in the trade and returns with an interesting new product idea for employees to consider?
To Forbear or not to Forbear? A Behavioral Perspective of Multimarket Competition

Multimarket competition has become a substantial part of the modern economy. As such, it has drawn the attention of academics in both economics and strategy fields. Many studies have found empirical evidence of mutual forbearance in several industries, but despite its importance, its behavioral roots have not been explored. In my dissertation I integrate the reality of boundedly-rational decision makers into the mutual forbearance hypothesis. I apply an outgrowth of the behavioral theory of the firm – the shifting focus model of risk taking – to the study of competitive behavior. I propose a behavioral model of multimarket competition that focuses on corporate strategic decisions market entry and exit decisions, regardless of entry mode (e.g. acquisitions) or exit mode (e.g. divestitures). This approach provides a granular view of changes in the business scope of the firms in terms of product and geographic markets served. I test my hypotheses in the U.S. property liability insurance industry over a 12-year period (1998-2008). I argue that firms follow the mutual forbearance logic as long as their performance goals are satisfied. However, under conditions of adversity, firms shift attention to recovering from the performance shortfall and their actions deviate from the mutual forbearance predictions. This dissertation shows that underperforming firms with abundant slack take longer to forbear, and underperforming firms with limited slack start forbearing sooner, as predicted. By bridging behavioral and competitive perspectives to the study of market entry and exit decisions, I underscore the value of cross-fertilization in strategy research.
Family business succession - trust and gender issues in family and non-family succcession

Small business is the most common firm structure in the Canadian economy and accounts for the single largest share of economic activity. As the founders of these firms move to normal retirement age, they begin the transfer of the business to a family or non-family member. When the second generation assumes control of the firm, issues related to generational transfer of knowledge become important. Tacit knowledge has been identified as a key strategic resource and passing this knowledge from the founder to the successor is a key element in successful transition. This study explored the relationship of gender differences in tacit knowledge transfer in family business succession and the role of trust in the succession process. A qualitative methodology based on the analysis of multiple case studies is used for this research. Eight cases of family business succession were investigated, with data collected from public sources and interviews with founders, successors (family members and non-family members), and key observers. The role of trust in family business succession is supported by the study's findings, but the findings expand on the existing literature by differentiating between relationship trust and business competence trust and defining the two types of trust as essential. This study supports prior knowledge that female successors are often viewed as having less leadership ability than male successors. In this study, however, females experienced more business socialisation than reported in prior studies.