Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Discounting, Morality, and Gaming

24 December 1996EMF-RFF Conferenceon DiscountingDISCOUNTING, MORALITY, AND GAMING Kenneth J. Arrow1. IntroductionI take the problem of discounting for projects with payoffs inthe far future (climate change, nuclear waste disposal) to belargely ethical (Schelling 1995). There is an apparent conflict inour moral intuitions, already apparent in Ramsey's work (1928). On the one hand, moral considerations are based onuniversalizability, in which case we should treat future generationsas we would ourselves, so that the pure rate of pure timepreference should be zero. But with zero time preference and along horizon, the savings rates become inordinately high, possiblyapproaching one as the horizon goes to infinity (Koopmans 1960). A reconciliation must be based on the notion that individuals arenot morally required to subscribe fully to morality at any cost tothemselves. There are both empirical evidence and theoreticalarguments that individuals recognize moral arguments for the farfuture but treat themselves and the near future better (Cropper,Aydede, and Portney 1994; Chichilnisky 1996). This approachleads to a non-cooperative game, in which each generation issomewhat selfish (compared with perfect morality) and recognizesthat future generations will be similarly selfish. I thus come back
Different Working Capital Polices and the Profitability of a Firm

This study examines if there is a difference between the Profitability of Jordanian industrial companies which have a low cash conversion cycle and the Profitability of those which have a high cash conversion cycle. Moreover, eight indexes have been developed to help the investor and the manager of the company in Jordan in to make their decisions. To achieve the objectives of the study, a sample of 45 Jordanian industrial companies listed at Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) was studied. The study covered the period from 2000 to 2007. T-Tests and Mann-Whitney-U Tests were used to test the four hypotheses of the study. It was concluded that there was a statistically significant difference among the companies that have a high cash conversion cycle and those which have a low cash conversion cycle. Eight indexes of performance differed between companies with high cash conversion cycles and companies with low cash conversion cycles.
Periodic steady-state solutions of nonlinear circuits based on a differentiation matrix

A discrete time-domain method suitable to compute stable, periodic steady-state solutions of nonlinear systems is presented in this paper. This approach applies a discrete-time representation of the differentiation operator, which estimates the exact derivative of a trigonometric polynomial. The set of ordinary differential equations that represents the dynamic behavior of the nonlinear problem is transformed into a nonlinear algebraic formulation and solved with a Newton algorithm. Furthermore, a direct method for solving sparse systems is incorporated in the Newton method to improve its efficiency in both storage and time. Two test cases based on the Duffing circuit and a power supply illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of this method to determine periodic steady-state solutions. Comparative results are reported with the proposal presented in this work and the well-known finite-difference method.
Rehabilitating rivers and enhancing ecosystem services in a water-scarcity context: the Yarqon River

After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the increase in urban and agricultural water demand and the increased flow of poorly treated sewage had a severe impact in one of the most ecologically important rivers in Israel, the Yarqon. The attempt to reverse this situation began with the creation of the Yarqon River Authority in 1988. In the last 20 years, the authority has implemented or collaborated in several projects that have significantly contributed to enhancing the provision of ecological services. This article aims to analyze the case of the pollution and subsequent rehabilitation of aquatic ecosystem services in the Israeli water-scarcity context.
CORPORATE CONTROL IN COMMERCIAL BANKS

Unique factors in commercial banks' legal and regulatory environment may influence their mechanisms of corporate control. I investigate this issue in a sample of U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) by analyzing how many underwent a change in corporate control by hostile takeover, friendly merger, management turnover by the board, or intervention by regulators I compare the relative importance of these methods with those in nonfinancial firms. I relate the use of these methods to BHC board and ownership structure and performance. I find that the most important corporate control mechanism in banks is regulatory intervention, and that the primary market-based corporate control mechanism is action by the board of directors. Overall, however, BHC boards are much less assertive than their counterparts at nonfinancial firms. I examine reasons for this.
OPTIMAL POLICY CONFIGURATIONS UNDER ALTERNATIVE COMMUNITY GROUP PREFERENCES

SUMMARY The article focusses on a methodology for revealing policy preference functions pertaining to the subjective trade-off between unemployment and price stability. Community group indifference maps are constructed by a method of policy pairwise comparison. An empirical application is envisaged in a Canadian context with reference to the preference functions of business and tradeunion groups. Optimal group policy configurations are derived by maximizing the preference functions subject to the relations of the ‘trade-off zone’. The effects on unemployment and inflation are analysed in terms of parametric variations of the preference function and the Phillips curve. The underlying policy implications are discussed.
The emergence of temporary work agencies

A striking feature of OECD labour markets in the 1990s has been the very rapid increase of temporary agency work. We augment the equilibrium unemployment model as developed by Pissarides and Mortensen with temporary work agencies in order to show that the improvement in the matching efficiency of agencies led to the emergence and growth of temporary agency work. We also find that temporary agency work does not necessarily crowd-out other jobs. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.
Inflation regimes and the sources of inflation uncertainty

This paper develops new time series measures of inflation uncertainty in the United States in the postwar period that account for the prospect of changing inflation regimes. The measures are constructed from estimates of a Markov switching model for inflation. Importantly, we show that rational forecasts derived from the Markov model are consistent with survey measures of inflation expectations. Our Markov model allows us to decompose uncertainty about future inflation into two components; a certainty equivalent component that ignores uncertainty about future inflation regimes, and a regime uncertainty component that reflects this uncertainty. Survey measures of inflation uncertainty, based on the dispersion of forecasts, appear more closely associated to the regime uncertainty component than the certainty equivalent component of inflation uncertainty. The regime uncertainty component also appears to have significant explanatory power in forecasting unemployment while the certainty equivalent component does not. Copyright 1993 by Ohio State University Press.
The Impact of At-Large Elections on the Representation of Blacks and Hispanics

Political scientists have long been interested in the link between election structures and the representation of interest. Here we examine one such link, that between local election structures and minority representation. Research of the middle and late 1970s revealed that at-large city council election procedures resulted in a dramatic underrepresentation of blacks and some underrepresentation of Hispanics. Now a revisionist position claims that at-large elections no longer have this detrimental effect on minority representation, if needed they ever did. In this paper we examine this controversial link by assessing the impact of at-large and district elections on the representation of blacks and Hispanics using varied methodologies and 1988 data. We find that although at-large elections represent blacks much better than a decade ago, there is still a small gap between the representation afforded by at-large and district systems. On the other hand, the impact of local election structures on Hispanic representation is less clearcut and seems to vary from region to region.
The Agent-Agents Problem: Payment by Relative Output

This paper begins an investigation into the incentive problems at a firm when the effort of the employer and the employees combines to determine final output. The major conclusion is that optimal reward functions in this circumstance will in general value the performance of a worker relative to that of his peers. The paper thus joins a growing literature associated with the work of Lazear and Rosen on rank-order tournaments.
Company technology strategy

The authors report the results of a small-scale study of the attitudes of 174 British companies to managing their technology. Their data sources were replies to a questionnaire and interviews with 18 senior managers of the respondent companies. They relate their findings to current academic thinking about technolgy strategy, of which a bibliography and critical review is presented in the paper. The results showed that the firms in the survey did not give much specific attention to technology when formulating their strategies. Some do not have a clear notion of what is meant by ‘their technology’, and others have difficulty in deciding its character. In any case a ‘firm's technology’ is usually seen as a cluster of technologies, which is enmeshed in a network of external technologies such as those practised by suppliers and customers, rather than as a single entity. After in-house R&D the most often used forms of technology acquisition are licensing-in and contract R&D. The import of technology presents difficulties, such as codifying it in usable form and making sure that there are in-house staff capable of using it. The authors conclude overall that few firms in the sample can assess their technological strengths and weaknesses or clearly conceptualize their situation. They remark that academic approaches to technology strategy are oversimplified and do not sufficiently address the main problems in this area, which are to help managers to understand the nature of their technology position and the technological network of which their firm forms a part.
Small Sample Performance of Indirect Inference on DSGE Models

Using Monte Carlo experiments, we examine the performance of indirect inference tests of DSGE models in small samples, using various models in widespread use. We compare these with tests based on direct inference (using the Likelihood Ratio). We find that both tests have power so that a substantially false model will tend to be rejected by both; but that the power of the indirect inference test is by far the greater, necessitating re-estimation to ensure that the model is tested in its fullest sense. We also find that the small-sample bias with indirect estimation is around half of that with maximum likelihood estimation.
Electronic currents and the formation of nanopores in porous anodic alumina

The formation processes of barrier anodic alumina (BAA) and porous anodic alumina (PAA) are discussed in detail. The anodizing current JT within the oxide includes ionic current jion and electronic current je during the anodizing process. The jion is used to form an oxide and the je is used to give rise to oxygen gas or sparking. The je results from the impurity centers within the oxide. For a given electrolyte, the je is dependent on the impurity centers and independent of the JT. The formation of nanopores can be ascribed to the oxygen evolution within the oxide. Oxygen gas will begin to be released at the critical thickness dc. The manner of the development of PAA is in accordance with that of BAA. The differences between PAA and BAA are the magnitude of je or the continuity of oxygen evolution. There are two competitive reactions, i.e. oxide growth () and oxygen evolution (). The former keeps the wall of the channel lengthened, the latter keeps the channel open. By controlling the release rate of oxygen gas under different pressures, the shape of the channels can be adjusted. The present results may open up some opportunities for fabricating special templates.
Do Institutions Impact Innovation

This paper contributes to the literature on institutions and economic growth by conducting an empirical examination on the links between innovation and institutions. Using cross-country data and the instrumental variable method, this study finds that institutional arrangements explain much of the variation on patent production across countries. We find evidence that control of corruption, market-friendly policies, protection of property rights and a more effective judiciary system boost an economy’s rate of innovation. Most of the previous literature on institutional and economic performance finds a positive association between institutions and levels of income and between institutions and the transitional growth rates of per capita income; however an unambiguous empirical association between institutions and the steady state growth has not yet been established. Based on the theoretical model developed by Tebaldi and Elmslie (2006), which shows that the impacts of institutions on innovation spillover to the growth rate of GDP per capita, this paper shows evidence of a growth effect through innovation, i.e., institutions have a growth effect on income because institutional quality affects an economy’s rate of innovation, the engine of economic growth. Moreover, this study finds that controlling for institutional quality; geographic-related variables are not significant in explaining patent production. This paper also finds evidence to support the idea that in the long-run human capital accumulation is an important variable in shaping institutions.
Information and Incentives: The Agency Information Problem

This paper considers the use of imperfect information for risk sharing and incentive purposes when perfect observation of actions and outcomes is impossible, making complete contracting infeasible. The incentive-insurance problem is defined to consist of two parts: the choice of an information system and the design of a sharing rule based on the information system. A generalized agency model is formulated to analyse this problem. The agency models of Ross (1973a, b), Wilson (1968), Stiglitz (1974), Mirrlees (1976), Harris and Raviv (1979), Holmstrom (1979) a.o. appear as special cases of the generalized model. The analysis focuses on the value of information in the agency information problem. The set of information systems which are valuable—i.e. improve risk sharing and incentives in a Pareto sense—is characterized. A problem-independent ranking of information systems for the agency information problem is then characterized under the assumption that the agent's preferences are additive in money and actions. The ranking may be viewed as a generalization of Blackwell's ranking of information systems for decision problems, to this particular game. When the agent's risk preferences depend on his choice of action, on the other hand, it is shown that the Blackwell ranking may be invalid. Randomized incentive schemes are shown to be efficient when the incentive effect of risk is positive and sufficiently large relative to the absolute risk aversion of the partners.
A Review of False Data Injection Attacks Against Modern Power Systems

With rapid advances in sensor, computer, and communication networks, modern power systems have become complicated cyber-physical systems. Assessing and enhancing cyber-physical system security is, therefore, of utmost importance for the future electricity grid. In a successful false data injection attack (FDIA), an attacker compromises measurements from grid sensors in such a way that undetected errors are introduced into estimates of state variables such as bus voltage angles and magnitudes. In evading detection by commonly employed residue-based bad data detection tests, FDIAs are capable of severely threatening power system security. Since the first published research on FDIAs in 2009, research into FDIA-based cyber-attacks has been extensive. This paper gives a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art in FDIAs against modern power systems. This paper first summarizes the theoretical basis of FDIAs, and then discusses both the physical and the economic impacts of a successful FDIA. This paper presents the basic defense strategies against FDIAs and discusses some potential future research directions in this field.
Evaluating the Performance and Scale Characteristics of the Australian Restaurant Industry

This article adopts a data envelopment analysis (DEA) bootstrap approach to measure the technical efficiency and scale properties of Australian restaurant operations. Four inputs and two outputs are used in the analysis, covering 105 restaurants. The results show that Australian restaurants incorporated in this study are operating at a low level of efficiency, with an average of around 46.17%. Inferences from the returns to scale are also in line with the efficiency results and indicate that most restaurants need to expand their production outputs in order to reach an optimum level of production. The article highlights and tests the important impact of factors such as restaurant size and management experience on the efficiency results. Other potential factors related to the external environment, as well as policy implications of the study, are also discussed.
The Choice between Public and Private Debt by Japanese Firms

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the choice of corporate financing between pub- lic and private debt. Focusing on the drastic change of financing pattern during the period of financial liberalization from the mid 1980s to the mid 2000s, this paper examines what factors determine the demand for public and private debt. We find that the growth opportunity and default risk of the issuing firm are the main determinants of the debt choice in this period. 1 Focusing on the drastic change in financing pattern during the period of financial liberalization from the mid 1980s to the mid 2000s, this paper examines what factors deter- mine the demand for public and private debt. First, using the Financial Statements Statistics of Corporations by Industry, we overview the corporate financing pattern of Japanese firms (excluding those in the financial sector) focusing on bond and bank borrowings. 2 Figure 1 shows the ratio of the bond outstanding to total asset for both of the large and small firms. A large firm is one with net worth more than one billion yen, and a small firm is one with net worth less than 1 billion yen. For large firms, the bond outstanding grew rapidly from 1985 to 1990. The ratio was around 5 percent in the early 1980s, but increased to around 10% in the 1990s. In 2005, it decreased again to 7%, because larger firms decreased the debt financing as a whole in this period. On the other hand, the ratio of bonds to total assets is much lower for small firms. For example, the average ratio of bonds to total assets from 1990 to 2000 was 9.8% for large firm, but only 0.2% for small firms. These numbers show that bonds have been used mainly by large firms in Japan. However, it should be noted that the bond issuing by small firms has been increasing on a relative basis after 2001: the ratio of bonds to total assets was 0.27% in the 2000, but increased to 0.80% in 2005.
Buitenzorg in 1805: The Role of Money and Credit in a Colonial Frontier Society

By an edict of 15 February 1805 the Governor-General ordered the Chinese moneylenders from the town of Buitenzorg to report to the Commissioner of Native Affairs how much money the inhabitants of the Buitenzorg Regency owed them. Non-compliance with this order would result in cancellation of the debts. The Commissioner compiled a list, based on these reports, dated 30 June 1805. In 45 pages, consisting of 672 entries, the debtors of and debts to 26 Chinese are listed. The debtors and debts are listed under their creditor, the Chinese moneylender. The entries are probably given as they were reported by the Chinese themselves, although there is no logic in the ordering of the names. An ‘ideal’ entry yields the following data: name of moneylender, name of debtor, his place of residence, year that the debt was incurred, amount of money borrowed with sawahs (wet rice fields) as collateral, number of pétak (embanked ricefield) sawah, amount borrowed with buffaloes as a collateral, number of buffaloes, amount of cash borrowed (without securities), amount of credit for merchandise, amount of annual interest, number of years paid, number of years still to be paid.
The structure of tourist expenditure in Fiji: evidence from unit root structural break tests

The central aim of this paper is to investigate whether shocks to Fiji's tourism industry have a permanent effect or a transitory effect on tourist expenditure in Fiji. To accomplish this aim the Zivot and Andrews (1992) one break test and the Lumsdaine and Papell (1997) two break tests are used. The one break and two break tests reveal 1987 – the year of the military coups in Fiji – as the year of the break. Moreover, it is possible to reject the unit root null leading to the conclusion that shocks to Fiji's tourism industry have a transitory effect on tourist expenditure in Fiji.
Pyoderma gangrenosum in a child with congenital partial deficiency of leucocyte adherence glycoproteins

Congenital deficiency of β2 integrin leucocyte adhesion molecules is a rare immunodeficiency and is often fatal. Neutrophils are unable to bind to ligands on the endothelium, and so cannot leave the circulation during inflammation or infection. When leucocyte adhesion deficiency (LAD) is caused by abnormally low expression of β2 integrins, it is termed LAD type 1. We describe a 5‐year‐old girl with a history of recurrent bacterial infections since early childhood who developed necrotic skin ulcers resembling pyoderma gangrenosum and a persistent circulating neutrophilia. Histologically, the lesions showed deep ulceration with a diffuse lymphohistiocytic infiltrate, but with a relative sparsity of neutrophils. Subsequent investigation revealed a complete absence of CD11a/CD18 β2 integrins on the surface of the patient's neutrophils, confirming the diagnosis of LAD type 1. The ulcers responded to treatment with oral prednisolone and colchicine.
Adropin: a key component and potential gatekeeper of metabolic disturbances in policystic ovarian syndrome.

PURPOSE The aim of the current study was to evaluate potential relationships between serum adropin levels and metabolic parameters in polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). MATERIALS AND METHODS Twenty women with PCOS and 20 healthy, age and body mass index (BMI) matched controls were included in the study. All subjects underwent venous blood drawing on the early follicular phase after an overnight fasting. Serum adropin levels were measured with enzyme immunosorbent assay (EIA). The relationships between serum adropin levels and metabolic parameters were also assessed. RESULTS Serum adropin levels were found to be significantly lower in women with PCOS when compared to control group (p < 0.001). Serum adropin level was correlated negatively with fasting serum insulin levels, homeostasis model of assessment - insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) and serum lipid markers including cholesterol, very low-density lipoprotein, and triglycerides (TG) in PCOS patients (p < 0.05). CONCLUSION The findings of current study suggest that women with PCOS have low serum adropin levels that may contribute to the underlying pathogenesis of metabolic disturbances in PCOS.