Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Home bias in currency carry trade

This thesis documents home bias in currency carry trade: i.e. carry trade activity from the main funding countries is biased towards investment countries that are located in the same region and thus more familiar to investors. My research provides new insight to the forward premium puzzle and arising currency carry trade excess returns stressing the importance of Switzerland, Japan and U.S. as the main funding countries in their own region during the sample period from January 1999 to January 2014. Utilizing spot and forward exchange rates of 28 currencies from EMEA, Asia Pacific and Americas, I form carry portfolios by sorting sample currencies based on their forward discount and examine the risk-return relationship between the main funding countries’ funding liquidity measures and carry trade returns in these three regions. Furthermore, I test whether the tightening funding conditions in the main funding country are associated with currency crashes in the major investment countries located in the same region. The results indicate that the main funding countries’ key volatility measures and liquidity spreads have in general the highest explanatory power for carry trade returns in their own regions. While the liquidity spreads produce less significant values relating to carry trade returns, they prove to be more relevant measures when explaining the currency crashes in the major investment countries. I show that the contemporaneous change in the Swiss and U.S. volatility measures can alone explain around 20 percent of the regional currency carry trade returns and crashes in EMEA and Americas, respectively, leaving other main funding countries’ volatility measures redundant. In Asia Pacific, the changes in the key volatility measure have also delayed effect to carry trade returns due to slow collective action of numerous Japanese retail investors. Japanese and U.S. funding liquidity measures explain together one third of the carry trade excess returns and over 40 percent of the currency crashes in major investment countries in Asia Pacific region.
The Impact of Cash Transfers on Labor Force Participation and Household Consumption: Evidence from Post-Apartheid South Africa

OF DISSERTATION The Impact of Cash Transfers on Labor Force Participation and Household Consumption: Evidence from Post-Apartheid South Africa The Old Age Pension (OAP) program for elderly South Africans puts a significant cash transfer in the hands of many poor households. This dissertation investigates its impact on labor force participation and consumption of selected household items. In the first half of the dissertation, we take advantage of a policy reform that lowered men’s OAP eligibility age from 65 to 60 for men to match that of women for estimation identification. Using the General Household Survey data, we first demonstrate that both men and women respond to the eligibility age by dropping from labor force participation at the eligibility age, as expected. Using a difference-in-difference-indifference estimator, we estimate that at the median predicted wage, age eligibility reduces men’s probability of labor force participation by approximately 6.14 percentage points. Previous studies show that not only is the OAP take-up rate high among the ageeligible, but its value is sufficiently high to generally make it a significant component of total household income for the majority of pensioners and their households. Other studies add that it is a dominant source of income in older households, such that it is often the sole source of income in these households, especially those in rural areas. In the second half of the dissertation, therefore, we examine the impact of ageeligibility status on a number of selected household outcomes, such as food security, sanitation, source of drinking water, and ownership of consumer durable goods. We also examine the extent to which gender influences its impact on household outcomes. We find positive effects on a select number of outcomes; however, we note this is more associated with females’ age-eligibility status, but not that of males.
Electroporation-mediated HGF gene transfer ameliorated cyclosporine nephrotoxicity.

BACKGROUND The clinical utility of cyclosporine A (CsA) has been limited by its nephrotoxicity, which is characterized by tubular atrophy, interstitial fibrosis, and progressive renal impairment. Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) has been reported to protect and salvage from renal injury as a renotropic and antifibrotic factor. Here, we investigated protective effects of HGF gene therapy on rat CsA-induced nephrotoxicity using electroporation-mediated gene transfer. METHOD CsA was subcutaneously administered daily under low sodium diet, and HGF gene was transferred into skeletal muscle by electroporation on days 7 and 14. We also examined the antiapoptotic mechanism of HGF using human proximal tubular epithelial cells. RESULTS HGF gene transfer rescued CsA-induced initial tubular injury and suppressed interstitial infiltration of ED-1-positive macrophages in CsA-induced nephrotoxicity. In addition, HGF significantly inhibited tubular cell apoptosis, and increased the number of proliferating tubular epithelial cells. In vitro studies suggest that HGF executes the antiapoptotic function by enhancing the phosphorylation of Akt and Bcl-2. Northern blot analysis demonstrated that HGF gene transfer suppressed cortical mRNA levels of transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-beta). Consequently, HGF gene transfer significantly reduced a striped interstitial phenotypic alteration and fibrosis. CONCLUSION We demonstrated that HGF gene transfer reduced CsA-induced tubular cell apoptosis and interstitial fibrosis. HGF gene transfer could be a potential strategy for preventing renal fibrosis.
Measuring household food consumption: a technical guide. 2005 ed.

Many private voluntary organizations (PVOs) are engaged in projects aimed at improving food security and household nutrition worldwide. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) supports many of these projects through the provision of Title II food aid to PVOs designated as “Cooperating Sponsors. ” Increasingly Cooperating Sponsors (CS) are being asked to monitor and evaluate the impact of their interventions and USAID is generating materials to help them in this process. USAID Missions in collaboration with PVOs and technical staff from Regional and Central USAID Bureaus have identified a set of generic impact indicators for household food consumption to facilitate the monitoring and reporting process. This technical guide was developed to systematize this information. It is based around the three impact indicators defined by the PL480 Title II program: increased number of eating occasions increased dietary diversity and increased percentage of households consuming minimum daily caloric requirements. This guide demonstrates how to measure and quantify this information. (excerpt)
Glycogen Depletion Patterns in Trained Rats Adapted to a High-Fat or High-Carbohydrate Diet

Male Sprague-Dawley rats (n = 48, > 200 g) were progressively treadmill trained over 5 wk where they were running 60 min/d, 5 d/wk. One-half of the group consumed a high-fat diet (HF, 78.7% of energy), while one-half consumed a high-carbohydrate diet (HC, 68.7% of energy). On the day of the experiment, 6 rats per diet were run at 29 m/min, 8% grade for 0, 10, 20, or 60 min. Immediately post-exercise rats were anesthetized, and soleus (S), red vastus lateralis (RV), and white vastus lateralis (WV) muscles were removed. There were no significant differences between diets for S glycogen pre-, during, or post-exercise. RV glycogen (micromol x g(-1) wet wt) was lower (p < 0.05) at rest for the HF (27.5 +/- 3.9, Mean +/- SEM) vs the HC (37.6 +/- 3.5), but similar to HC at 60 min (11.0 +/- 1.9, HF; 8.6 +/- 1.3, HC). RV glycogen use rates (nmol x g(-1) x min(-1)) were lower for the HF (985 +/- 295, 356 +/- 61) than the HC (1593 +/- 144, 1055 +/- 272) for 0-10 and 11-20 min, respectively. Resting WV glycogen was lower for the HF (25.3 +/- 1.6) vs the HC (40.7 +/- 5.8), while post exercise values were similar (17.0 +/- 4.4, HF; 15.7 +/- 2.0, HC). WV glycogen use was negligible from 0-10 and 11-20 min in the HF compared to the HC (280 +/- 169 and 1601 +/- 177 nmol x g(-1) x min(-1), respectively). These data indicate that muscle glycogen is spared during the early stages of prolonged exercise in HF adapted rats and that the sparing occurs according to expected muscle recruitment patterns.
Effect of Hypertensive Diseases in Pregnancy on Birthweight, Gestational Duration, and Small‐or‐Gestational‐Age Births

We measured the impact of hypertensive disorders in pregnancy (chronic hypertension, pregnancy-induced hypertension, and eclampsia) on birthweight, gestational duration, and small-for-gestational-age births. We employed a retrospective cohort design using North Carolina birth certificate data for the years 1988–1990, with the analyses based on nearly 300,000 pregnancies. Women noted to have eclampsia during pregnancy had a substantially greater risk of delivering very-low-birth weight infants (birthweight ≤ 1,499 gm; risk difference (RD) = 6.7%) and moderately-low-birthweight infants (1,500–2,499 gm; RD = 14.6%), and very preterm (gestational age <33 weeks; RD = 7.1%) and moderately preterm (33–36 weeks; RD = 9.3%) births, compared with women without hypertension. Corresponding risk differences for these outcomes were 1.9% and 5.1% for very low and moderately low birthweight, and 1.6% and 3.0% for very preterm and moder ately preterm for women with chronic hypertension. Risk differences were of similar magnitude for women with pregnancy-induced hypertension for these outcomes. Hypertensive disorders in pregnancy were associated with small-for-gestational-age infants, with risk differences of 5.1%, 3.5%, and 9.2% for chronic hypertension, pregnancy-induced hypertension, and eclampsia, respectively. The patterns of risk were similar for preterm births due to spontaneous onset of labor and those due to other precipitating events. We observed similar patterns for black and white women. Control for confounders through multivariable logistic regression models did not alter the observed patterns. In spite of the limited data quality, we found that hypertensive disorders in pregnancy substantially increase the risk of low birthweight, preterm births, and small-for-gestational-age births.
Overview of the Wikidata Vandalism Detection Task at WSDM Cup 2017

We report on the Wikidata vandalism detection task at the WSDM Cup 2017. The task received five submissions for which this paper describes their evaluation and a comparison to state of the art baselines. Unlike previous work, we recast Wikidata vandalism detection as an online learning problem, requiring participant software to predict vandalism in near real-time. The best-performing approach achieves a ROC-AUC of 0.947 at a PR-AUC of 0.458. In particular, this task was organized as a software submission task: to maximize reproducibility as well as to foster future research and development on this task, the participants were asked to submit their working software to the TIRA experimentation platform along with the source code for open source release.
Complementary and alternative medicine in VA specialized PTSD treatment programs.

OBJECTIVE This survey documented the provision of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatments in U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) specialized posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment programs. METHODS Program coordinators or designated staff from 125 of 170 VA specialized PTSD treatment programs completed and returned surveys between September 2010 and March 2011, indicating which of 32 CAM treatments were offered in that program. RESULTS Ninety-six percent of programs reported use of at least one CAM treatment. Eighty-eight percent offered CAMs other than those that are commonly part of conventional PTSD treatments (guided imagery, progressive muscle relaxation, and stress management-relaxation therapies). CONCLUSIONS The widespread use of CAM treatments in VA PTSD programs presents an opportunity for researchers to assess the effect of CAM on mental health service use and PTSD symptoms among veterans. Future research should assess the effectiveness of CAM treatments and develop methods to tailor these treatments to veterans with PTSD.
Exploring automated space/time tradeoffs for OpenVX compute graphs

With the rise of FPGA-based implementation of Computer Vision (CV) applications, the need for a programming method that achieves the target throughput or area-budget while retaining flexibility is magnified. High-level synthesis (HLS) tools provide this opportunity while eliminating the necessity of hardware engineering knowledge. Existing methods of programming FPGAs with HLS require the user to explicitly manage resources at every stage in their algorithm in order to meet a specified area target or throughput target. In this paper, we provide a framework for meeting such targets with compute graphs specified in OpenVX, a C-based programming environment for computer vision. To do this, we build our own OpenVX system using Xilinx Vivado HLS, and add an algorithmic layer which allows the user to specify an area budget (while maximizing throughput) or a throughput target (while minimizing area). Our OpenVX system consists of a series of compute kernels, prewritten in C++ for HLS and heavily parameterized as well as an Intra-node Optimizer to enable the creation of different size/throughput targets using different image tile-sizes. It also uses a heuristic algorithm with an Inter-node Optimizer step which combines/splits kernels and then replicates them to minimize the area cost. We evaluate the system on typical OpenVX benchmarks under a variety of fixed area constraints, and find that our system is able to automatically achieve over 95% area utilization. We also evaluate the system with same benchmarks under variety of fixed throughput targets, and find our system saves up to 30% in area cost compared to manually parallelized implementations. Our results show our heuristic approach is able to hit the same throughput targets and save 19% area on average compared to existing ILP approaches. While existing methods can easily achieve a single design point, they are unable to automatically generate a set of solutions from the same source; a prominent capability embedded in our tool. Moreover our tool uses Inter-node Optimizer to find better space/time tradeoffs.
To Tell or Not to Tell : Essays on Corporate Financial Disclosure

This cumulative dissertation focuses on the topic corporate financial disclosure and explores several aspects of its function in mitigating information asymmetry. It consists of three individual essays, each of which focuses on one aspect regarding management’s disclosure decision. The first essay centers around the fundamental question, under which conditions the management voluntarily discloses private information. In particular, it explores the impact of information quality on such a decision. The second essay incorporates multiple dimensions of the textual disclosure such as quantity, readability and sentiment. Particularly, it investigates the possible interdependency of the management’s decision due to the different degree of decision discretion each of the dimensions brings. While the first two essays focus on voluntary disclosure, the third essay shifts the focus to the mandatory disclosure. It provides an explanation for the empirically observed positive relation between the enforcement effectiveness and the strictness of mandatory disclosure regulation in many economies
Employment status and indirect costs in patients with renal failure: differences between different modalities of renal replacement therapy.

BACKGROUND There are evidences of a different employment status between patients undergoing different modalities of renal replacement therapy (RRT). OBJECTIVES The present study aims to compare the indirect costs associated to morbidity in the following RRT alternatives: hemodialysis in a specialized center (HD), automated peritoneal dialysis (APD), continuous ambulatory dialysis (CAPD), and renal transplant (TX). METHODS An analysis on indirect costs was implemented following the Human Capital Theory. In total, 243 patients in working age were included (32 CAPD, 46 APD, 83 HD and 82 TX) from 8 hospitals. The potentially productive years of life lost (PPYL), the costs of lost labor productivity (LLPc) for the year 2009 and the total cost of PPYL (PPYLtc) until age of retirement were estimated. All the estimations were adjusted by age, sex rates. Non-parametric analysis (a bootstrap confidence intervals of differences in costs calculated following the simple bias-corrected percentile method -1,000 estimates-) was computed to highlight differences in costs. RESULTS No significant differences were found in age or sex between groups. LLPc-2009- in HD (6,547€-95% CI: 5,727€-7,366€) was significantly higher (p<.001) than TX (5,079€-95% CI: 4,127€-6,030€) or APD (4,359€-95% CI: 3,064€-5,655€) but not CAPD (5,785€-95% CI: 4,302€-7,269€). PPYLs were: HD 12.58 years-95% CI: 10.42-14.73; TX 10.05-95% CI: 7.45-12.65; APD 6.09-95% CI: 3.43-8.74; CAPD 10.69-95% CI: 6.14-15.23. PPYLtc was higher in HD than in TX, APD or CAPD in all the provided scenarios. CONCLUSIONS TX and, specially, APD are the modalities of RRT with the lowest impact on indirect costs due to morbidity showing higher rates of employment than HD and requiring less disability benefits.
Anemia and risk of dementia in older adults

Objective: To determine whether anemia is associated with incident dementia in older adults. Methods: We studied 2,552 older adults (mean age 76.1 years; 38.9% black; 51.8% female) participating in the Health, Aging, and Body Composition study and free of dementia at baseline. We defined anemia using WHO criteria (hemoglobin concentration <13 g/dL for men and <12 g/dL for women). Dementia diagnosis was determined by dementia medication use, hospital records, or a change in Modified Mini-Mental State (3MS) score of more than 1.5 SD from mean. Discrete time Cox proportional hazard regression models were used to examine the hazard for developing dementia associated with anemia. Results: Of 2,552 participants, 392 (15.4%) older adults had anemia at baseline. Over 11 years of follow-up, 455 (17.8%) participants developed dementia. In the unadjusted model, those with baseline anemia had an increased risk of dementia (23% vs 17%, hazard ratio = 1.64; 95% confidence interval 1.30, 2.07) compared to those without anemia. The association remained significant after adjusting for demographics, APOE ε4, baseline 3MS score, comorbidities, and renal function. Additional adjustment for other anemia measures (mean corpuscular volume, red cell distribution width), erythropoietin, and C-reactive protein did not appreciably change the results. There was no interaction by sex and race on risk of developing dementia. Conclusion: Among older adults, anemia is associated with an increased risk of developing dementia. Findings suggest that further study of anemia as a risk factor for dementia and a target for intervention for cognitive health is warranted.
Quantification of tolerance to lower body negative pressure in a healthy population.

Subtolerance and presyncopal lower body negative pressure (LBNP) has been used extensively to investigate the effect of various forms of exercise training on central hypovolemic tolerance. However, there are no population data concerning LBNP tolerance, and the validity of common LBNP tolerance indices has not been investigated. LBNP tolerance data from 86 males and 33 females were analyzed. All LBNP exposures were terminated with the onset of presyncopal signs and/or symptoms. LBNP tolerance was quantified using duration of exposure (DNP), maximal negative pressure tolerated (MNP, cumulative stress index (CSI), and the LBNP tolerance index (LTI). Average (+/- SD) LBNP tolerance was 22.12 +/- 5.01 min (DNP), -77 +/- 16 mm Hg (MNP), 975 +/- 402 mm Hg.min-1 (CSI), or 222 +/- 50 mm Hg.min-1 (LTI). All cardiovascular parameters exhibited the same responses as have been documented in the literature. While DNP, MNP, and LTI were normally distributed, CSI in this population was not normally distributed. Age, weight, height, gender, and VO2peak were not associated with LBNP tolerance. Compared to this population, it appears that the subjects that have participated in previous LBNP tolerance studies have had abnormally high LBNP tolerances and that the LTI is the most valid index of LBNP tolerance. Furthermore, in this population LBNP tolerance could not be predicted from physical characteristics.
HLA‐B polymorphism affects interactions with multiple endoplasmic reticulum proteins

To explore the nature of amino acid substitutions that influence association with TAP, we compared a site‐directed mutant of HLA‐B*0702 (Y116D) to unmutated HLA‐B7 in regard to TAP interaction. We found that the mutant had stronger association with TAP, and, in addition, with tapasin and calreticulin. These data confirm the importance of position 116 for TAP association, and indicate that (1) an aspartic acid at the 116 position can facilitate the interaction, and (2) association with tapasin and calreticulin is affected along with TAP. Furthermore, we tested three natural subtypes of HLA‐B15, and found that a B15 subtype with a tyrosine at position 116 (B*1510) was strongly associated not only with TAP, but also with tapasin and calreticulin. In contrast, two B15 subtypes with a serine at position 116 (B*1518 and B*1501) exhibited very little or no association with any of these proteins. Thus, very closely related HLA‐B subtypes can differ in regard to interaction with the entire assembly complex. Interestingly, when their surface expression was tested by flow cytometry, the HLA‐B15 subtypes with little to no detectable intracellular assembly complex association had a slightly, yet consistently, higher level of the open heavy chain form than did the B15 subtype with intracellular assembly complex association. These data suggest that the relatively low strength or short length of interaction between endoplasmic reticulum proteins and natural HLA class I molecules can decrease their surface stability.
Firms, Breach of Norms, and Reputation Damage

A large body of literature looks at how firms develop and maintain their reputation. Little is known, however, about factors leading to a damaged corporate reputation. In this article, the authors compare two sets of predictors of reputational damage following a reported breach of norms: the characteristics of the breach and the characteristics of the actor reporting the breach. Theoretically, the authors argue that the latter is likely to prevail over the former. The authors test this proposition in the highly normative context of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Building on a global data set of over 8,600 CSR-related norm breaches, directed against 451 firms on the Fortune ranking reputation over the 2006-2009 period, the authors find empirical support for the idea that reputation damage is not really driven by the severity and novelty of the allegation, but by the type of source reporting the issue as well as the credibility of this source. Hence, these results lend some support to a socially constructed view of reputational damage, in which being portrayed by prominent actors as deviating from the norm is more important than the actual deviation from the goal of the norm itself.