Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
STOCHASTIC MORTALITY MODELLING

For life insurance and annuity products whose payoffs depend on the future mortality rates, there is a risk that realized mortality rates will be different from the anticipated rates accounted for in their pricing and reserving calculations. This is termed as mortality risk. Since mortality risk is difficult to diversify and has significant financial impacts on insurance policies and pension plans, it is now a well-accepted fact that stochastic approaches shall be adopted to model the mortality risk and to evaluate the mortality-linked securities. The objective of this thesis is to propose the use of a time-changed Markov process to describe stochastic mortality dynamics for pricing and risk management purposes. Analytical and empirical properties of this dynamics have been investigated using a matrix-analytic methodology. Applications of the proposed model in the evaluation of fair values for mortality linked securities have also been explored. To be more specific, we consider a finite-state Markov process with one absorbing state. This Markov process is related to an underlying aging mechanism and the survival ii time is viewed as the time until absorption. The resulting distribution for the survival time is a so-called phase-type distribution. This approach is different from the traditional curve fitting mortality models in the sense that the survival probabilities are now linked with an underlying Markov aging process. Markov mathematical and phase-type distribution theories therefore provide us a flexible and tractable framework to model the mortality dynamics. And the time-changed Markov process allows us to incorporate the uncertainties embedded in the future mortality evolution. The proposed model has been applied to price the EIB/BNP Longevity Bonds and other mortality derivatives under the independent assumption of interest rate and mortality rate. A calibrating method for the model is suggested so that it can utilize both the market price information involving the relevant mortality risk and the latest mortality projection. The proposed model has also been fitted to various type of population mortality data for empirical study. The fitting results show that our model can interpret the stylized mortality patterns very well. iii
CAMA Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis Animal Spirits , Risk Premia and Monetary Policy at the Zero Lower Bound CAMA Working Paper 73 / 2019 September 2019

In this paper we investigate the risk-related effects of monetary policy in normal times, as well as in periods where the zero lower bound (ZLB) binds, in a stylized macroeconomic model with boundedly rational beliefs. In our model, financial market participants use heuristics to assess the risk premium over the policy rate in accordance to an “implicit Taylor rule” that measures the stance of conventional monetary policy and which serves as an informative instrument during times when the funds rate is constrained by the ZLB. In such a case, conventional monetary policy is exhausted so that the central bank is forced to use unconventional types of policy. We propose alternative monetary policy measures to help the economy out of the liquidity trap which take into account this assumed form of bounded rationality.
The Healthcare Sustainable Supply Chain 4.0: The Circular Economy Transition Conceptual Framework with the Corporate Social Responsibility Mirror

Concern regarding the circular economy and Industry 4.0 is starting to increase in the emerging countries. This research study aims to analyze the healthcare sustainable supply chain 4.0 by proposing the circular economy transition conceptual framework with the corporate social responsibility mirror. The authors developed an observation guideline to collect empirical data from a private healthcare institution located in Rio de Janeiro, which has been promoting investment in new technologies within its operations. The research observation is between January and April 2017. The results show the glass structure can be a channel that provides the lightning resources, the solar energy with the photovoltaic panels, and the water management. The corporate social responsibility links the social role in healthcare institutions with sustainable practices and it improves smart technologies. The applicability of the internet of things and the internet of services adds value to sustainable practices. The circular economy transition conceptual framework integrates the result analyses. The research concludes that the union among the triple bottom line, Industry 4.0, and the corporate social responsibility allows the transition from the linear model to the circular model and can improve the sustainable healthcare supply chain 4.0.
An Intelligent Ecosystem to Support the Development of Communication Skills in Children with Autism: An Experience Based on Ontologies, Multi-Sensory Stimulation Rooms, and Robotic Assistants

The term Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) covers conditions such as autism, childhood disintegrative disorder and Asperger syndrome. In this line, the World Health Organization (WHO) points that core symptoms of ASD are: a mixture of impaired capacity for reciprocal socio-communicative interaction and a restricted, stereotyped repetitive repertoire of interests and activities. Therefore, it is fundamental for a person with ASD to develop skills to communicate with his/her peers, share ideas
Earnings Management in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy

We study the impact of earnings management prior to bankruptcy filing on the passage of firms through Chapter 11. Using data on public US firms, we construct three measures of earnings management: a real activities manipulation measure (abnormal operating cash flows) and two accounting manipulation measures (discretionary accruals and abnormal working capital accruals). We find that, controlling for the impact of factors known to influence earnings management and firm survival in bankruptcy, earnings management prior to bankruptcy significantly reduces the likelihood of Chapter 11 plan confirmation and emergence from Chapter 11. The results are driven primarily by extreme values of earnings management, characterized by one or two standard deviations above or below the mean. The findings are consistent with creditors reacting positively to unduly conservative earnings reports and negatively to overly optimistic earnings reports. We also find that the presence of a Big 4 auditor is associated with a higher incidence of confirmation and switching to a Big 4 auditor before filing increases the incidence of emergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
IFRS adoption by UK unlisted firms: subsidiary- versus group-level incentives

ABSTRACT We examine both subsidiary- and group-level determinants of IFRS adoption by unlisted UK firms. Many unlisted firms are part of large conglomerate groups. For these firms, decisions about reporting practices are expected to be made at the group-level. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that subsidiaries adopt IFRS as part of their group’s strategy to improve within group monitoring and raise external debt capital. The probability of a subsidiary adopting IFRS increases further when the parent firm is applying IFRS itself, when the within group information asymmetry is greater, and when the subsidiary is less autonomous. ROC curve analysis indicates that these incentives are more important than traditional subsidiary-level incentives studied previously. In additional analyses, we find that adopting subsidiaries benefit from better accounting quality and higher investment efficiency.
Jurg Niehans and the Cashless Economy

Information technology has the potential to decrease substantially, if not completely, the demand for base money. This poses a problem for central banks as it seemingly eliminates a role for monetary policy, at least in the traditional sense. Recently, it has become commonplace to consider the role of monetary policy and the determination of the price level without any reference to money. The two predominant methods of analysis in this regard are the New Keynesian framework articulated by Woodford (2003) and the fiscal theory of the price level as described in Cochrane (2005). Lost in the literature on "cashless" economies is the work of Jurg Niehans (1982) who, driven by the perplexities of the Eurodollar market, considered the role of monetary policy and price level determination in the context of a neoclassical macroeconomic model. This paper contrasts the framework and conclusions of Niehans with the contemporary approaches. It is argued that Niehans successfully anticipated the conclusions of the fiscal theory of the price level.
Capacity Building of Community-based Ecotourism in Developing Nations: A Case of Mei Zhou, China

Tourism has become the most rapidly growing industry worldwide and ecotourism is considered as the fastest growing tourism segment. Ecotourism is a method to conserve the environment while stimulating local economy. However, it ignores one key element of sustainable development, the local community. Community-based ecotourism (CBET) is a kind of ecotourism that pays more attention on community’s benefits, community participation and empower communities. However, the lack of community capacity is the major barrier to effective and sustainable tourism development. Capacity building (CB) is defined based on the concept of six capitals: intrinsic, political, financial, physical, human and social capital. This study illustrates the current situation of CB and CBET in less developed areas and discusses whether CBET development is reality or rhetoric in these sites based on a case study conducted in Qiaoxi Village of Meizhou, China. It finds that financial capital, infrastructure, particularly interpretation system, as well as skills and education of labors are limited. In addition, local community has restricted access to decision-making due to the government-dominated development model. There is a gap between theoretical and practical community-based ecotourism in this place.
Contextual Constraints: An Examination of Implicit Followership Theories

This study was designed to assess follower prototypes as dynamic structures. Connectionist theory is a good framework to understand the process by which followership perceptions are altered by contextual factors. Organizational culture, change in immediate leader and follower prototypes were measured in an applied setting across time to assess the dynamism of the cognitive networks of implicit followership theories. Change in culture and immediate leader was measured at three time points, across six months, during the acquisition of one organization by a second. Change scores were created by computing difference scores from surveys completed at the first time point to the second time point, three months later, to the third and final time point, three months later. There were no significant effects of change in culture on reported follower networks. There was, however, a significant effect of leader change at time points two and three when regressed on individual’s follower networks. The overall findings of this study suggest that IFT’s like leadership prototypes remain fairly stable across time (Epitropaki, 2004), but are subject to organizational change.
Students’ Social Origins and Targeted Grading

Abstract We study an economy where a school can target grades according to students’social groups, and privileged students are more likely to obtain a high academic achievement. In this context, we analyse the welfare effects of introducing alternative policies. Banning targeted grading generally maximises welfare, through an increase in the wage of privileged students. This result does not hold though when the proportion of high achievers is large, and labour demand is high. In this case, banning wage discrimination among social groups maximises welfare, through an increase in the wages of underprivileged students.
Deliberate firesetting: hotspot schools as arenas and preventive actors

ABSTRACT Firesetting is one of the crime acts most representative of youth crime, and schools are among the buildings most often targeted, causing significant social, material and economic damage. This study examines schools as arenas with particular exposure to deliberate firesetting and as actors interpreting and utilizing their organizational scope to prevent school fires. The focus on school organizations is unique and urgently needed in research on juvenile firesetting, given their pivotal but under-researched role in crime prevention. The study is based on an in-depth analysis of data (interviews, documents and official registry data) related to 20 fire-exposed lower secondary schools in two major Swedish cities. These schools mobilized a broad repertoire of social, situational and structural measures. Interviewed school personnel perceived and responded to firesetting in relation to the institutional school setting, group dynamics, individual characteristics and local context. The schools were generally located in socio-economically disadvantaged areas and faced comprehensive educational and social challenges. The firesetting problem – and paradoxically some well-intentioned preventive efforts – risk adding further dimensions to school segregation and inequality, potentially increasing stigmatization and marginalization.
Drivers of ratification rates in global biodiversity governance: local environmentalism, orientation toward global governance, and peer pressure

ABSTRACT Drawing on literature on world society and polity, we investigate the factors that drive the formation of global biodiversity governance. Using an event history analysis, we examine local and trans-local factors that influence how long it takes for countries to ratify the United Nation Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Three factors are positively correlated with CBD ratification rates: local environmentalism, the local orientation toward global governance, and trans-local peer pressure. The effects of peer pressure vary. Regional peers appear to influence countries to ratify the CBD more quickly, whereas global peers do not. The robust effect of regional peers is unique to biodiversity, contrary to what is known for other areas like climate change. We contribute to the literature of global environmental governance by providing an issue-area-specific model for biodiversity, and provide a reference point for future research on global biodiversity governance, including two protocols after the CBD.
Empirical studies on word representations

One of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing is representing words with mathematical objects (such as vectors). The word representations, which are most often estimated from data, allow capturing the meaning of words. They enable comparing words according to their semantic similarity, and have been shown to work extremely well when included in complex real-world applications. A large part of our work deals with ways of estimating word representations directly from large quantities of text. Our methods exploit the idea that words which occur in similar contexts have a similar meaning. How we define the context is an important focus of our thesis. The context can consist of a number of words to the left and to the right of the word in question, but, as we show, obtaining context words via syntactic links (such as the link between the verb and its subject) often works better. We furthermore investigate word representations that accurately capture multiple meanings of a single word. We show that translation of a word in context contains information that can be used to disambiguate the meaning of that word.
Demonstratives in English

L'A. presente une etude descriptive des pronoms demonstratifs (this, that, these et those) de l'anglais a partir d'un large corpus de donnees. Cette analyse est guidee par differentes questions recurrentes dans la problematique de recherche des anaphores demonstratives : 1. le fonctionnement anaphorique des demonstratifs, 2. le rapport entre type de discours et l'emploi des demonstratifs, 3. l'opposition entre demonstratifs anaphoriques et demonstratifs deictiques, 4. la delimitation entre anaphore, deixis, exophore.
Radical or not? The role of clusters in the emergence of radical innovations

ABSTRACT Recently, radical innovations have received increasing attention in order to achieve long-term economic success. Regional clusters, being frequently used as an innovation policy instrument, have been shown to have the potential to support innovations in general. However, it remains unclear whether clusters are really a beneficial environment for the generation of radical innovations. This study aims to shed light on the specific role clusters can play in radical innovation processes. In order to do this, we apply a quantitative approach on the firm-level and combine several data sources (e.g. AMADEUS, PATSTAT, German subsidy catalogue). Our results show that clusters indeed provide a suitable environment for radical innovations. Furthermore, we find that radical innovations rather occur in the periphery of the cluster, where actors tend to be more open to the exchange of external knowledge. This happens in general through linkages with other actors, which we also find to be beneficial for the emergence of radical innovations up to a certain degree. Our findings implicate that policy makers should continue to support clusters and further develop funding schemes. Moreover, managers should be open to collaborations with other actors for the cross-fertilization of knowledge to promote radical innovations.
Foreign Financing and the International Sources of Property Rights

abstract:How do firms protect themselves against infringements of their property rights by their own government? The authors develop a theory based on international law and joint asset ownership with foreign firms. Investment agreements protect the assets of foreign firms but are not available to domestic firms. This segmentation of the property rights environment creates a rationale for international financial relationships between firms. By forming financial relationships with foreign firms, domestic firms gain indirect coverage from the property rights available to foreign firms under investment agreements. If a government is less likely to violate the property rights of covered foreign firms, it is also less likely to violate property rights for assets held jointly by domestic and foreign firms. This article presents systematic evidence from data on the activities of firms in countries that have investment agreements with the United States. International financial relationships between firms, through mergers and acquisitions as well as through bond and equity issues, are more common where property rights are weak. The theory suggests a political logic to the fragmentation of firm-ownership stakes across jurisdictions, offers an institutional explanation of international financial flows, and identifies new distributional consequences of international law.
The levee effect along the Jamuna River in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT The levee effect refers to the paradox that the construction of a levee to protect from flooding might induce property owners to invest more in their property, increasing the potential damages should the levee breach. Thus, paradoxically, the levee might increase flood risk. The levee effect was observed for high-income countries. We analyze whether it can also be observed in a low-income country, Bangladesh. In the Jamuna floodplain different levels of flood protection have existed alongside each other since the 1960s, so their effects can be compared.
Empirical examination of the stability of expectations – Augmented Phillips Curve for developing and developed countries

The empirical literature provides mixed results on the relationship between inflation and unemployment; therefore, there is no consensus on validity and stability of the Phillips Curve. It also seems to be closely related with country-specific factors and the examination time periods. Considering the importance of this trade-off for policy-makers, this study aims to examine validity and stability of expectations-augmented Phillips Curve across 41 countries focusing on three different time periods between 1980 and 2016. The study documents several findings both in country-specific and in panel estimation analysis. First, we find that forward-looking characteristic of inflation picks up weight after 1990’s which indicates that inflation became more sensitive to the expected prices. Second, we observe that inflation in developed markets is more forward-looking comparing to emerging and frontier markets. This indicates that developed markets dear forward-looking price expectations more than other markets. Third, we find that that both forward- and backward-looking Phillips Curve fails to work in Brazil, Greece, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Romania, and Turkey. We address it to their long history of high and volatile inflation.
Neuromorphic computing using non-volatile memory

Abstract Dense crossbar arrays of non-volatile memory (NVM) devices represent one possible path for implementing massively-parallel and highly energy-efficient neuromorphic computing systems. We first review recent advances in the application of NVM devices to three computing paradigms: spiking neural networks (SNNs), deep neural networks (DNNs), and ‘Memcomputing’. In SNNs, NVM synaptic connections are updated by a local learning rule such as spike-timing-dependent-plasticity, a computational approach directly inspired by biology. For DNNs, NVM arrays can represent matrices of synaptic weights, implementing the matrix–vector multiplication needed for algorithms such as backpropagation in an analog yet massively-parallel fashion. This approach could provide significant improvements in power and speed compared to GPU-based DNN training, for applications of commercial significance. We then survey recent research in which different types of NVM devices – including phase change memory, conductive-bridging RAM, filamentary and non-filamentary RRAM, and other NVMs – have been proposed, either as a synapse or as a neuron, for use within a neuromorphic computing application. The relevant virtues and limitations of these devices are assessed, in terms of properties such as conductance dynamic range, (non)linearity and (a)symmetry of conductance response, retention, endurance, required switching power, and device variability. Graphical Abstract