Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Non-linearity of FDI and human capital development in Africa

Abstract In this paper, we model the non-linear effect of FDI on disaggregated levels of human capital development in selected African countries. Our sample is based on a panel data consisting of nine African countries from 2000 to 2017. To ensure robustness in our analysis, we employed a GMM instrumental variable estimation technique with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors to control for endogeneity, sectional and temporal dependency. The result indicates that different level of human capital reported mixed findings. The effect of FDI on primary education is characterised by an inverted U-shaped relationship, whereas tertiary education exhibits a U-shaped pattern. Conversely, the relationship between FDI and secondary education is insignificant. The non-linear term of FDI indicates that there is a turning point before/after which the human capital-augmenting hypothesis is supported. Policy implications drawn from this study suggest FDI can be used as a catalyst to augment primary and tertiary education enrolment rates, skills enhancement and human capital development. However, not all levels of FDI will result in positive gains. The optimal effect of FDI depends on the quantity of FDI before/after the turning point.
Civil War and Citizens' Demand for the State: An Empirical Test of Hobbesian Theory

Abstract How does violence during civil war shape citizens' demand for state-provided security, especially in settings where non-state actors compete with the state for citizens' loyalties? This article draws on Hobbesian theory to argue that in post-conflict countries, citizens who were more severely victimized by wartime violence should substitute away from localized authorities and towards centralized ones, especially the state. The author tests the theory by combining two original surveys with existing media and non-governmental organization data on wartime violence in Liberia. The study shows that citizens who were more severely affected by violence during the Liberian civil war are more likely to demand state-provided security, both in absolute terms and relative to non-state alternatives. More sporadic collective violence in the post-conflict period does not reverse this substitution effect. Also consistent with Hobbesian theory, citizens who were more severely victimized are more fearful of threats to peace almost a decade later.
Examining the overarching factors of clients’ loyalty based on the mobile insurance typology

Background: The mobile insurance industry plays a crucial role in the insurance ecosystem of developing countries, yet the overarching factors that impinge on and shape clients’ behavioural intentions towards service providers have not been given the necessary attention they deserve.Objectives: This study explores the role of corporate identity, clients’ satisfaction, Service Quality (SERQUAL) and institutional-based trust in shaping clients’ loyalty (CL) towards mobile insurance (M-insurance) service providers.Method: Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to analyse a total of 334 questionnaires obtained from clients of selected M-insurance service points in Accra, Ghana.Results: Our results indicate that SERQUAL, institutional-based trust, satisfaction and corporate identity, corroboratively, impact positively on CL within the M-insurance ecosystem, albeit in varied proportions. The results also demonstrate a high degree of causality among SERQUAL, institutional-based trust and corporate identity.Conclusion: SERQUAL has both direct and indirect significant positive relationships with CL. Thus, in order for M-insurance service providers to attract and retain clients, the former must pay a great deal of attention to SERQUAL owing to its striking halo effects.
A coupled-line balun for ultra-wideband single-balanced diode mixer

A multi-section coupled-line balun design for an ultra-wideband diode mixer is presented in this paper. The multi-section coupled-line balun was used to interface with the diode mixer in which it can deliver a good impedance matching between the diode mixer and input/output ports. The mixer design operates with a Local Oscillator (LO) power level of 10 dBm, Radio Frequency (RF) power level of -20 dBm and Intermediate Frequency (IF) of 100 MHz with the balun characteristic of 180° phase shift over UWB frequency (3.1 to 10.6 GHz), the mixer design demonstrated a good conversion loss of -8 to -16 dB over the frequency range from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz. Therefore, the proposed multi-section coupled-line balun for application of UWB mixer showed a good isolation between the mixer’s ports.
Working mechanism and utility of pulse oximeter

Oximetry is a medical diagnostic procedure, deals with the study of blood oxygen level of patients and to identify the need of medical assistance. The pulse oximeter measures the oxygen saturation in the blood. Understanding the working method of oximeter is helpful for the easy and conventional utility of oximetry in critically ill conditions to interpret the pathology. In recent days there are different types of oximeter available used in various conditions. For the enhanced study of oximeter, it requires a thorough knowledge of physics and basic electronics. Oximeter can be used by healthy sports professionals as well as many pathologic conditions like critical care units of health centers.
Formation and occurrence of nitrosamines in food.

: Nitrosamines are formed by reaction of secondary or tertiary amines with a nitrosating agent. In foods, the nitrosating agent is usually nitrous anhydride, formed from nitrite in acidic, aqueous solution. Food constituents and the physical make-up of the food can effect nitrosamine formation. Ascorbic acid and sulfur dioxide are used to inhibit nitrosamine formation in foods. Nitrosodimethylamine has been shown to be formed in certain foods as a result of the direct-fire drying process. In this case, oxides of nitrogen in the drying air nitrosate amines in the food being dried. The volatile nitrosamine which occurs most commonly in food is nitrosodimethylamine, and nitrosopyrrolidine occurs to a lesser extent. Due to limitations in analytical methodology, very little information is available on the levels of nonvolatile nitrosamines and other N-nitroso compounds in foods. Foods which have been shown to contain volatile nitrosamines include cured meats, primarily cooked bacon; beer; some cheeses; nonfat dry milk; and sometimes fish. It should be emphasized that not all samples analyzed contain detectable amounts of nitrosamines. When present, the volatile nitrosamines usually occur in the lower microgram/kg range. Estimates by several investigators suggest that the average daily intake of volatile nitrosamines from foods is approximately 1 microgram/person.
The Income Tax Compliance Costs of Private Households: Empirical Evidence from Germany

Using a survey of more than 18,000 taxpayers in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany), we estimate the income tax compliance costs of German households and study the determinants of these costs. We find that taxpayers need between 9.13 and 10.23 hours and spend €106 to meet their income tax obligations. The average total burden is between €228 (lower bound estimate) and €321 (upper bound estimate). The aggregate cost burden ranges between 2.03 percent and 2.92 percent of the German income tax revenues of tax year 2015. Although these costs have decreased significantly over recent years (mainly for self-preparers without self-employment income), international comparisons illustrate that the German burden is still located in the upper middle. The five most important cost drivers that increase individual costs are the use of tax advice, the appeal procedure, income, return complexity, and education. We cannot confirm that e-filing reduces taxpayers’ compliance costs.
Loss & damage from climate change: from concept to remedy?

ABSTRACT In this article we examine legal perspectives on remedies for harm caused by climate related loss and damage. We start by discussing the meaning of loss and damage, and its relationship to climate mitigation and adaptation. We then consider, at a conceptual level, how those harmed by loss and damage from human-induced climate change may pursue remedies against those who have contributed to the harm suffered. Key policy insights Loss and damage is an issue that requires the attention of law and policy makers at domestic and international levels While existing legal systems are unlikely to be adequately equipped in their present form to respond adequately to claims for remedy to harm caused by loss and damage, they will be challenged to evolve over time to respond more effectively Legal systems will be challenged to identify appropriate claimants, appropriate respondents, appropriate remedies and actionable wrongs Different legal systems will make different choices on these critical issues.
Forest Transition,Agricultural Land Marginalization and Ecological Restoration

China ushered in the transition of its national land use morphology in the 1980s.Such a transition indicates that the space of nature represented by forest area down to a trough reversed upward,while the intensively-used space represented by cropland,from expansion to contraction.It is one of the most direct causes of the change in ecological state of the country from the overall deterioration to the overall improvement.Forest transition corresponds to the evolution stage of national economic and social development process.Its direct reason is that agriculture loses out in the competition with forestry for land resources in the ecotone between forest and cropland.The rising labor costs with industrialization and urbanization and the increasing demand for forest products with the improved living standards enhance the competitiveness of forestry to agriculture,while pre-transition ecological degradation caused by agricultural expansion triggers the implementation of the governmental policies favored forestry.Governmental policies played a key role in the early stages of China's forest transition.With the accelerated development of urbanization and aged society,China ushered in the continuously rising stage of labor wages.Slopeland cropping would tend to be "marginalized" because it is not easy in mechanization compared to the agriculture in plain area.This gives room for the further expansion of forest area or natural space.
Trade Liberalization and Labor Market Adjustments: Does Rent Sharing Matter?

ABSTRACT Using a firm-level dataset, this article investigates the impact of trade liberalization on employment and wages in Vietnamese manufacturing during 2003–2008. Different from the previous researches, we consider indirect effects of trade liberalization via real output for the employment and via rent sharing for the wage adjustments. Overall, we find empirical evidence that trade liberalization has a negative, statistically significant, but minor in magnitude effect on employment and wage. The rent-sharing approach allows a further investigation of heterogeneity in bargaining power across firms by gender and skill composition for the wage response. There exist differences in gender and skill earnings gaps but trade liberalization can moderate these gaps.
Optimal Priority Structure, Capital Structure, and Investment

We study the interaction between financing and investment decisions in a dynamic model, where the firm has multiple debt issues and equityholders choose the timing of investment. Jointly optimal capital and priority structures can virtually eliminate investment distortions because debt priority serves as a dynamically optimal contract. Examining the relative efficiency of priority rules observed in practice, we develop several predictions about how firms adjust their priority structure in response to changes in leverage, credit conditions, and firm fundamentals. Notably, financially unconstrained firms with few growth opportunities prefer senior debt, while financially constrained firms, with or without growth opportunities, prefer junior debt. Moreover, lower-rated firms are predicted to spread priority across debt classes. Finally, our analysis has a number of important implications for empirical capital structure research, including the relations between market leverage, book leverage, and credit spreads and Tobin's Q, the influence of firm fundamentals on the agency cost of debt, and the conservative debt policy puzzle. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. , Oxford University Press.
Responsible Tourism—Integrating Families with Disabled Children in Tourist Destinations

This article addresses issues regarding the intention of responsible tourism to increase the accessibility of tourist destinations for children with disabilities and their families. The main objective of this research is to identify the barriers that families with disabled children confront during their touristic experiences and to find ways to diminish these barriers. In this respect, qualitative marketing research based on the focus group method was conducted. The research results revealed that the most important barriers faced by such families are attitude barriers, followed by physical barriers and a lack of information. Starting from these results, we proposed the higher involvement of national authorities and other stakeholders in strategies meant to decrease or remove the barriers faced by people with disabilities and their attendants in order to develop responsible tourism. Such strategies could firstly involve the development of a primary school curriculum by including educational programs that are meant to avoid attitude barriers. Secondly, other stakeholders could use new emerging technologies, such as virtual reality, to offer tourists the opportunity to experience some tourism products and places before they travel.
The impact of volatile economic conditions on corporate capital structure adjustment towards dynamic target in Pakistan

This paper aims to empirically investigate the impact of macroeconomic conditions such as banking sector performance, economic growth, inflation rate, interest rates and market capitalization on the adjustment speed towards dynamic capital structure targets in Pakistan for the period 1999 to 2013. The study also assesses the effect of adjustment speed on the financial performance of the firm. The annual adjustment speed of five industrial sectors was estimated separately by using a modified partial adjustment approach. The direction of causality between financial performance and annual capital structure adjustment speed was examined through the Granger causality test. The empirical results favor the presence of dynamic capital structure targets in Pakistan for all five industrial groups. We found that the capital structure adjustment speed significantly varies across industrial sectors and over time. The firms in Pakistan adjust their capital structure toward dynamic targets ranging from 23% to 46% annually depending on the country’s macroeconomic conditions such as banking sector performance, economic growth, and interest rates. The deviation from the target capital structure also plays an important role in the capital structure adjustment speed. However, the empirical results fail to validate the effect of the inflation and market capitalization on the capital structure adjustment speed. The Granger causality test results show that a unidirectional causality runs from the capital structure adjustment speed to financial performance. The research finding may assist the non-financial corporate sector of Pakistan to structure an optimal mix of debt and equity capital to finance their operations and growth opportunities cost effectively. The study also provides insights that how to make adjustments in capital structure in response to changing economic conditions in order to reduce the financial cost of business. Scope of this study is limited to non-financial corporate sector of Pakistan.
FUTURE INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES AND THE VALUE OF THE CALL PROVISION ON A BOND

THE AUTHOR OF THE preceding "Comment" argues that any incentive problem created by future investment opportunities must ultimately be caused by some impediment to negotiation between shareholders and bondholders. While we do not disagree with this point, we do disagree with the assertion that it is nowhere hinted at in our paper. In the first place, the reader of our paper will search in vain for the statement that our model assumes away transactions costs. The term "transaction costs" has come to have a rather imprecise catch-all connotation, but at least two separate categories might be distinguished. The first category might be termed "trading" costs and would encompass the costs of trading relatively homogeneous commodities on organized exchanges. Brokerage fees or bid-ask spreads, for example, would reflect trading costs. The second category might be called "negotiating" costs and would include any costs incurred by two parties in making and enforcing a contractual bargain, particularly in the case of non-standardized goods or services. That we had such negotiating costs in mind when we wrote our paper should be clear from the statement in the "Discussion" section that "the call privilege provides a relatively simple and inexpensive way to alleviate the perverse incentives created by debtor-creditor relationships" [1, p. 1199]. If we did not explicitly assume away all transaction costs, is there anything about the structure of our model that implicitly requires them to equal zero? We would argue that there is not. It is true that we have not defined any bid-ask spreads around our expressions for the market values of the firm's securities, so it might be fairly stated that we have implicitly assumed away trading costs. It is also true that our model yields the Modigliani-Miller [3] financial irrelevance result for the case of no growth opportunities. One might be tempted to infer from this that all negotiating costs arising between bondholders and shareholders have also been assumed away, but that would be unwarranted. The ModilgianiMiller Theorem might indeed fail if the debtor-creditor relationship created incentive problems that could not be handled at negligible cost. Recall, however, that within our simplified framework the scope of the firm's discretionary activity is severely limited. If new investment at t = 1 is ruled out, and if current investment is already fixed, shareholders will be unable to alter the risk characteristics of the assets to the bondholders' detriment. Moreover, the firm has no cash flow at t = 1, so it could only harm the bondholders through dividend payments if it sells existing assets or issues new debt to finance these dividends. But these are precisely the kinds of actions that can be dealt with inexpensively through restrictive covenants. The bondholders need only prohibit sale of assets
Differences in Tourist Behaviors across the Seasons: The Case of Northern Indiana

Seasonality is an essential factor influencing tourism demand and traveler behavior at the destination. As such, seasonality (i.e., the influx of tourists) needs to be managed by destination marketing organizations. Most tourism studies have focused mainly on the forecasting methods/metrics and the effect of seasonality at the aggregate level rather than understanding seasonal differences in the nature of the traveler and travel experience. The purpose of this study is to understand seasonality at both the aggregate market level and individual traveler level. As such, this study first utilizes the concept of the gravity model to understand seasonality in the number of inquiries through an official website. This study, then, uses seemingly unrelated regressions to estimate simultaneously the effect of various trip-related factors on overall trip expenditures and the length of the trip. The results show that the impact of seasonality on aggregated demand is surprisingly consistent across the seasons; however, individual-level analyses indicate that traveler behavior and travelers’ responses to advertising differ significantly across seasons. Thus, destination marketers need to understand the nature of seasonality of their specific markets more accurately to provide appropriate tourism products/services to their current and potential travelers.
A gravity approach of agricultural trade: The nexus of the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries

The European Union (EU) is one of the biggest traders of agricultural products. In 2017, extra-EU agricultural trade accounted for 7.4% of the total EU international trade. Furthermore, Europe is the main destination for agricultural goods arriving from African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) trading partners. The paper analyses the effect of geographical proximity, cultural similarity, free trade agreements on bilateral agricultural trade as well as intra-industry trade between EU member states and its trading partners (intra and extra EU trade), employing gravity model for a period of 1996–2017. Regression results suggest that EU countries export more agricultural products to their common markets. In addition, the export costs of agricultural products are lower if the EU and its external trading partners are culturally similar; have the same religion or both have regional trade agreements. We found a moderate intra-industry trade between the EU and ACP countries at 18%. The results indicate rather inter-industry trade between EU and non-EU members, with a lower index level for ACP countries. A higher positive impact is revealed on the agricultural import between ACP-EU countries than export.
Measuring sustainable development - the creative economy perspective

ABSTRACT World literature presents a variety of approaches to measuring the creative economy at global, national and regional levels, but so far not enough attention has been paid to the issue of sustainability of creative economies. Creative economies do not rely heavily on natural resources which means that their negative impact on the climate is relatively weaker than in the case of other industries. The measurement of sustainable development is an important contribution to the overall efforts in fighting the climate change. Statistical figures show that the share of the creative economy in GDP of the most developed countries is steadily increasing. Therefore, it is legitimate to analyse the sustainable development issues not only through the lenses of utilization of natural resources and environmental issues but also to look at the sustainability challenge for the creative economies. The growth of creative industries may be hindered by scarcity and improper utilization of resouces, but the main threat to the sustainability is the scarcity of intangible resources and goods such as ideas, freedom of thought, leadership, tolerance, quality of education, etc. Based on a literature review, we endeavoured to investigate the sustainability issues which are relevant specifically for the creative economy. In particular, we were interested in the role of local government in supporting the growth of creative economies. This study contributes to the literature in the sense that it provides understanding on how to assess the impact of local government on the sustainability of creative economy.