Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect of Long Memory in Volatility on Stock Market Fluctuations

Recent empirical evidence demonstrates the presence of an important long-memory component in realized asset return volatility. We specify and estimate multivariate models for the joint dynamics of stock returns and volatility that allow for long memory in volatility without imposing this property on returns. Asset pricing theory imposes testable cross-equation restrictions on the system that are not rejected in our preferred specifications, which include a strong financial leverage effect. We show that the impact of volatility shocks on stock prices is small and short lived, in spite of a positive risk-return tradeoff and long memory in volatility.
Capitalization of Charter Schools into Residential Property Values

Although prior research has found clear impacts of schools and school quality on property values, little is known about whether charter schools have similar effects. Using sale price data for residential properties in Los Angeles County from 2008 to 2011 we estimate the neighborhood level impact of charter schools on housing prices. Using an identification strategy that relies on census-block fixed effects and variation in charter penetration over time, we find little evidence that the availability of a charter school affects housing prices on average. We do find, however, that when restricting to districts other than Los Angeles Unified and counting only charter schools located in the same school district as the household, housing prices fall in response to an increase in nearby charter penetration.
Business Environment, Exports, Ownership, and Firm Performance

Abstract We use two large samples of firms to assess the effects of business environment constraints, competition, export orientation, and ownership on firm performance. We deal with omitted variables, errors in variables, and endogeneity, and find that few business constraints affect performance. Replicating the analysis with Doing Business and Heritage Foundation indicators of the business environment yields similar results. In fact, country fixed effects, reflecting time-invariant differences in the business environment as well as other factors such as health care and education, matter more for firm performance than differences in the business environment across firms within countries.
Slowdowns and Meltdowns: Postwar Growth Evidence From 74 Countries

This paper proposes an explicit test for determining the significance and the timing of slowdowns in economic growth. We examine a large sample of countries and find that a majoritythough not allexhibit a significant structural break in their postwar growth rates. We find that (a) most industrialized countries experienced postwar growth slowdowns in the early 1970s, though (b) the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom did not, and (c) developing countries (and in particular, Latin American countries) tended to experience much more severe slowdowns which, in contrast with the more developed countries, began nearly a decade later.
Deductible Contracts Against Fraudulent Claims: Evidence from Automobile Insurance

Insurance fraud is now recognized as a significant resource-allocation problem in many markets. The object of this study is to verify how straight deductible contracts may affect the equilibrium level of falsification in automobile insurance. This type of contract is observed in many markets, even if it is not optimal under costly state falsification. A higher deductible may create incentives to fraud or cheat, particularly when the insured anticipates that the claim has a small probability of being audited. To verify this proposition, we estimate a loss equation for which one of the determinants is the amount of the deductible, using a data set of claims filed for damages following an automobile accident with twenty insurance companies in Quebec in 1992. Because we have access only to reported losses, a higher deductible also implies a lower probability of reporting small losses. To isolate the fraud effect related to the presence of a deductible in the contract, we jointly estimate a loss equation and a threshold equation. The threshold is the amount over which an insured decides to report a given loss. It can be interpreted as a personal deductible, and it is not observable. Our results indicate, among other things, that with an appropriate correction for selectivity the amount of the deductible is a significant determinant of the reported loss, at least when no other vehicle is involved in the accident; in other words, when the presence of witnesses is less likely.
Test Score Measurement and the Black-White Test Score Gap

Abstract Research as to the size of the black-white test score gap often comes to contradictory conclusions. Recent literature has affirmed that the source of these contradictions and other controversies in education economics may be due to the fact that test scores contain only ordinal information. In this paper, I propose a normalization of test scores that is invariant to monotonic transformations. Under fairly weak assumptions, this metric has interval properties and thus solves the ordinality problem. The measure can serve as a valuable robustness check to ensure that any results are not simply statistical artifacts from the choice of scale.
The Review of Economics and Statistics

We find using laboratory experiments that primes that make religion salient cause subjects to identify more with their religion and affect their economic choices. The effect on choices varies by religion. For example, priming causes Protestants to increase contributions to public goods, whereas Catholics decrease contributions to public goods, expect others to contribute less to public goods, and become less risk averse. A simple model implies that priming effects reveal the sign of the marginal impact of religious norms on preferences. We find no evidence of religious priming effects on disutility of work effort, discount rates, or dictator game generosity.
Transition Models with Measurement Errors

In this paper, we estimate a transition model that allows for measurement errors in the data. The measurement errors arise because the survey design is partly retrospective, so that individuals sometimes forget or misclassify their past labor market transitions. The observed data are adjusted for errors via a measurement-error mechanism. The parameters of the distribution of the true data, and those of the measurement-error mechanism are estimated by a two-stage method. The results, based on the 1990-1992 French labor force survey, show that neglecting measurement errors leads to an underestimation of the average durations spent in labor market states. The estimates of some important transition probabilities between states are also biased by the measurement errors.
Global Inflation

This paper shows that inflation in industrialized countries is largely a global phenomenon. First, inflations of 22 OECD countries have a common factor that accounts for nearly 70% of their variance. This comovement is due not only to the trend components of inflation (up from 1960 to 1980 and down thereafter) but also to fluctuations at business cycle frequencies. Second, there is a robust error correction mechanism that brings national inflation rates back to global inflation. A simple model that accounts for this feature consistently beats standard benchmarks in forecasting inflation four to eight quarters ahead across samples and countries.
Some People Think There Is Neg Raising, and Some Don’t: Neg Raising Meets Ellipsis

The interaction of Neg raising (NR) with VP-ellipsis (VPE) shows that if NR is a rule of grammar, then the conditions on VPE must be exact syntactic identity and must be insensitive to major semantic differences between the so-called antecedent and the meaning understood at the ellipsis site. In particular, the conditions on ellipsis must be so blind to the semantics that they allow a polarity reversal between the antecedent and the understanding at the ellipsis site. But the behavior of indexicals shows quite clearly that meaning is what counts for the understanding of VPE, not form. This in turn provides new evidence against a syntactic process of NR.
Intervention and Repair

Recently, Merchant (1999, 2001), Lasnik (2001b, in press), and Fox and Lasnik (2003), using ellipsis data, and Boeckx (2001, 2003), Aoun, Choueiri, and Hornstein (2001), and McCloskey (2002), using resumption data, have revived Ross’s concerns (and some of his insights) and have drawn consequences for islands and chains. In particular, Merchant, Lasnik, and Boeckx have argued that extraction out of islands per se is not impossible, if appropriate repair strategies are used to save the otherwise illicit outputs at the interfaces. In this squib, we would like to highlight the potential theoretical relevance of repair strategies for a distinction first made by Chomsky (2000) between standard (relativized) minimality effects and defective intervention effects.
Environmental Regulation and Innovation: A Panel Data Study

In a 1991 essay in Scientific American, Michael Porter suggested that environmental regulation may have a positive effect on the performance of domestic firms relative to their foreign competitors by stimulating domestic innovation. We examine the stylized facts regarding environmental expenditures and innovation in a panel of manufacturing industries. We find that lagged environmental compliance expenditures have a significant positive effect on R&D expenditures when we control for unobserved industry-specific effects. We find little evidence, however, that industries' inventive output (as measured by successful patent applications) is related to compliance costs.
The Effect of Medicare Advantage on Hospital Admissions and Mortality

Medicare currently allows beneficiaries to choose between traditional Medicare and privately run plans in the Medicare Advantage (MA) program. Because enrollment in MA is optional, conventional observational estimates of the program's impact are potentially subject to selection bias. To address this issue, we use a discontinuity in the rules governing MA payments to health plans that gives greater payments to plans operating in counties in metropolitan statistical areas with populations of 250,000 or more. The sharp difference in payment rates at this population cutoff creates a greater incentive for plans to increase the generosity of benefits and therefore enroll more beneficiaries in MA in counties just above versus just below the cutoff. We find that the expansion of MA on this margin reduces beneficiaries’ hospital use and mortality.
The Environmental Kuznets Curve: Real Progress or Misspecified Models?

We explore the importance of modeling strategies when estimating the emissions-income relationship. Using U.S. state-level panel data on nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions, we estimate several environmental Kuznets curves using the standard parametric framework as well as a more flexible semiparametric alternative. Formal statistical comparisons of the results overwhelmingly reject the parametric approach. Moreover, the differences, particularly for sulfur dioxide, are economically significant.
The Future of U.S.-China Relations: Is Conflict Inevitable?

What is likely to be the future character of the relationship between the United States and the People's Republic of China? Will it be marked by convergence toward deepening cooperation, stability, and peace or by deterioration that leads to increasingly open competition and perhaps even war? The answers to these questions are of enormous importance. They are also, at this point, unknown. Most analysts who write on U.S.-China relations deploy arguments derived from the three main camps in contemporary international relations theorizing: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. Those whose basic analytical premises place them in one of these three schools, however, do not necessarily have similar views regarding the speciac question of the future of U.S.-China relations. It is possible to identify realists who believe that the relationship will basically be stable and peaceful, liberals who expect confrontation and confict, and constructivists who think that things could go either way. The six basic positions in this debate all rest on claims about the importance of particular causal mechanisms or sets of similarly aligned causal forces. In reality, one set of forces may turn out to be so powerful as to overwhelm the rest. But it is also conceivable that the future will be shaped by a confuence of different forces, some mutually reinforcing and others opposed.
Volatility Spillovers in East Asian Financial Markets: A Mem-Based Approach

Abstract We model the interrelations of equity market volatility in eight East Asian countries before, during, and after the Asian currency crisis. Using a new class of asymmetric volatility multiplicative error models based on the daily range, we find that dynamic propagation of volatility shocks occurs through a network of interdependencies, and shocks originating in Hong Kong may be amplified in their transmission throughout the system, posing greater risks to the region than shocks originating elsewhere. Although this partly explains the severity of the currency crisis, we also find evidence that parameters shifted, making the system more unstable during the crisis.
Status Seekers: Chinese and Russian Responses to U.S. Primacy

The United States needs support from other states to carry out global governance, particularly from rising powers such as China and Russia. Securing cooperation from China and Russia poses special problems, however, because neither state is part of the liberal Western community, ruling out appeals to common values and norms. Nevertheless, an alternative approach that is rooted in appreciation of China's and Russia's heightened status concerns may be viable. Since the end of the Cold War, Chinese and Russian foreign policy has been shaped by the goal of restoring both countries' great power status, which received major blows after China's Tiananmen Square repression and the Soviet Union's breakup and loss of empire. This desire for status can be explained by social identity theory, which argues that social groups strive for a distinctive, positive identity. Social identity theory provides a typology of strategies that states may use to enhance their relative status and suggests appropriate responses to status concerns of rising powers. Redirecting scholarly attention to status considerations and incentives could contribute to a diplomatic strategy for engaging rising powers.
“May I tell you something?”: When questions do not anticipate responses

Abstract This conversation analytic paper reports on the interactional functions of the Greek subjunctive polar interrogative clause na (su) po (káti)? ‘may I tell you something? ’ in informal Greek conversation (Corpus of Spoken Greek). It is shown that the clause is a practice for securing a multi-unit turn and prefacing big packages in interaction, such as arguments and tellings. It is argued that the interrogative clause is used as a discourse marker when it occupies the initial slot of an extended turn. By employing an interactional approach to grammar, this study brings sequential context, social action and practice into the analysis of the clause na (su) po (káti)? , and sheds light on the vehicular structure of social action and the emergence of linguistic devices that project multi-unit turns.
Cardiolipotoxicity, Inflammation, and Arrhythmias: Role for Interleukin-6 Molecular Mechanisms

Fatty acid infiltration of the myocardium, acquired in metabolic disorders (obesity, type-2 diabetes, insulin resistance, and hyperglycemia) is critically associated with the development of lipotoxic cardiomyopathy. According to a recent Presidential Advisory from the American Heart Association published in 2017, the current average dietary intake of saturated free-fatty acid (SFFA) in the US is 11–12%, which is significantly above the recommended <10%. Increased levels of circulating SFFAs (or lipotoxicity) may represent an unappreciated link that underlies increased vulnerability to cardiac dysfunction. Thus, an important objective is to identify novel targets that will inform pharmacological and genetic interventions for cardiomyopathies acquired through excessive consumption of diets rich in SFFAs. However, the molecular mechanisms involved are poorly understood. The increasing epidemic of metabolic disorders strongly implies an undeniable and critical need to further investigate SFFA mechanisms. A rapidly emerging and promising target for modulation by lipotoxicity is cytokine secretion and activation of pro-inflammatory signaling pathways. This objective can be advanced through fundamental mechanisms of cardiac electrical remodeling. In this review, we discuss cardiac ion channel modulation by SFFAs. We further highlight the contribution of downstream signaling pathways involving toll-like receptors and pathological increases in pro-inflammatory cytokines. Our expectation is that if we understand pathological remodeling of major cardiac ion channels from a perspective of lipotoxicity and inflammation, we may be able to develop safer and more effective therapies that will be beneficial to patients.
Intention Attribution and the Development of Moral Evaluation

Research with infants and toddlers suggests that even early in development, humans evaluate others by considering the outcome of an action in relation to the intention underlying it. When someone tries but fails to do a good deed, for example, it seems that it is “the thought that counts. ” However, research with slightly older children in the preschool years has produced mixed results: in some cases, children are solely considering the positive or negative outcome of an action when evaluating others, while in others, intention attributions are integrated. Such contradictory findings have prompted debate about the development of moral reasoning. Here, we examine extant research on early moral evaluation and propose that differences in the way that task procedures present intention and outcome information can (1) support or preclude young children’s intention attribution and (2) alter the relative saliency or predominance of each kind of information. In turn, these differences would influence the frequency and degree to which young children generate intention-oriented moral evaluations.
Better Together: Reliable Application of the Post-9/11 and Post-Iraq US Intelligence Tradecraft Standards Requires Collective Analysis

Background: The events of 9/11 and the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction precipitated fundamental changes within the United States Intelligence Community. As part of the reform, analytic tradecraft standards were revised and codified into a policy document – Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 203 – and an analytic ombudsman was appointed in the newly created Office for the Director of National Intelligence to ensure compliance across the intelligence community. In this paper we investigate the untested assumption that the ICD203 criteria can facilitate reliable evaluations of analytic products. Methods: Fifteen independent raters used a rubric based on the ICD203 criteria to assess the quality of reasoning of 64 analytical reports generated in response to hypothetical intelligence problems. We calculated the intra-class correlation coefficients for single and group-aggregated assessments. Results: Despite general training and rater calibration, the reliability of individual assessments was poor. However, aggregate ratings showed good to excellent reliability. Conclusion: Given that real problems will be more difficult and complex than our hypothetical case studies, we advise that groups of at least three raters are required to obtain reliable quality control procedures for intelligence products. Our study sets limits on assessment reliability and provides a basis for further evaluation of the predictive validity of intelligence reports generated in compliance with the tradecraft standards.
Colistin Resistant A. baumannii: Genomic and Transcriptomic Traits Acquired Under Colistin Therapy

Even though colistin-based treatment represents the antimicrobial-regimen backbone for the management of multidrug-resistant Gram-negative infections, colistin resistance is still rare, at least as a full resistance, in Acinetobacter baumannii (Ab). We investigated the genomics and transcriptomics of two clinical Extensively Drug Resistance (XDR) colistin-susceptible/resistant (COL-S/R) Ab strain-pairs in which COL-resistance was developed after exposure to colistin therapy. The molecular characterization of the strains showed that all strains belonged to PFGE-A, ST-281, OXA-23 producers, Global Clone-II, and were resistant to imipenem, meropenem, ampicillin/sulbactam, ciprofloxacin, gentamicin, amikacin, trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole, and susceptible to tigecycline, in agreement with NGS-acquired resistome. COL-R vs. COL-S Ab comparative genomics, mapping on Ab ATCC 17978 and Ab ACICU Reference Genomes, revealed a closely related genomic phylogeny, especially between strain-pair isolates, and distinctive common genomic non-synonymous SNPs (nsSNPs) in COL-R Ab strains. Furthermore, pmrB and pmrC nsSNPs were found. Notably we recovered, for the first time, lpxC and lpxD nsSNPs previously described only in “in-vitro” mutants and associated with colistin resistance in a clinical COL-R Ab. COL-R vs. COL-S Ab comparative transcriptomics evidenced a strain-dependent response to the colistin resistance onset highly variable among the single COL-R strains vs. their COL-S parents and merely seven common over-expressed transcripts, i.e. the PgaB lipoprotein for biofilm-matrix production, the diacylglycerol kinase for the lipid recycling in the membrane-derived oligosaccharide cycle, a membrane non-ribosomal peptide synthetase, the Lipid A phosphoethanol aminotransferase PmrC, and three hypothetical proteins. The transcript analysis of the “COL-R related genes” and the RNA-seq data confirmed pmrCAB over-expression responsible for a greater positive net cell-charge, and lpxACD under-expression in COL-R causing a decreased LPS production, as main mechanisms of colistin resistance. Our study reports the COL-R Ab genomic and transcriptomic signatures reflecting the interplay between several direct and indirect potential adaptations to antimicrobial pressure, including the occurrence of SNP accumulation hotspot loci in genes related to intrinsic or adaptive colistin resistance, surface adhesion proteins and porins, and over-expressed genes involved in different pathways, i.e. biofilm production, oxidative stress response, extensive drug and COL resistance.