Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Muslims and the Politics of Discrimination in India

Discrimination has been a central category in understanding inequality and exclusion in most societies. But exclusions vary in their scope and also in the specific socio-political ideologies underlying them. India has been on the whole more aware of discrimination than other countries but this awareness is for the most part restricted to caste based discrimination. It does not extend to recognition of discrimination against other groups, especially religious minorities even though there are significant differences in key outcomes between various social groups differentiated by religion and caste. It is important to recognize that religious identity remains an important axis of discrimination in India and today even more than before. Resentment and prejudice against minorities, particularly Muslims is common in India, as indeed in many developed and developing countries, but we have simply not acknowledged the sheer existence and scale of prejudice and discrimination. Hence, there has been little public debate or empirical analysis to establish the presence of discrimination against Muslims and/or identify its sources. Here’s the crucial point. The exclusion and discrimination of Muslims is not episodic: it is both everyday and institutional. It runs across all sectors and runs so deep that it appears normal to most people who perhaps don’t notice it or are unaware of it. This paper seeks to analyses social discrimination against Muslims and its manifestations. It has two main objectives. The first objective is to examine the concept and relevance of institutional discrimination with regard to the experience of Muslims in India, and to argue that the fight against institutional discrimination involves not only ideological/pedagogical struggle but also practical policy and legal measures to eradicate it. The second objective is to understand to what extent the ideology of majoritarianism has an influence on public institutions by delving deeper into the institutional bias of public policies and institutions. This is examined through two issues: the claims for Scheduled Caste status by Dalit Muslims and the recent decision of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to investigate complaints of Hindu exodus from a town in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. At the theoretical level, the paper examines the viability and implications of excluding religious minorities from the discourse of development and policy making in the context of the buildup of a new axis of majoritarian politics and the wider social and political context in which religion and religious communities have come to dominate public discourse in India, and yet governments disallow any policy that could ameliorate the socio-economic neglect of religious minorities.
Race relations, nationalism and the humanitarian Rohingya crisis in contemporary Myanmar

ABSTRACT The recent ethnic tensions in Myanmar especially in the Rakhine state has once again placed the country onto the centre stage of global media attention. The aim of this paper is to look at race relations in contemporary Myanmar with a special focus on the Rohingya community. The paper argues that problematic race relations in the country today should be analysed within a certain historical context and should be seen as part of a historical continuum. This paper places a lot of importance on this historical continuum. In this connection, the British colonial policies of divide and conquer, politicians and their obsession with Buddhism and trying to make it the state religion shortly after independence in 1948, and the xenophobic policies followed by the military junta after 1962 deserve special mention. The paper further argues that the current state of affairs and escalation in violence has happened recently because of the convergence of the activities and ideologies of certain political groups like the military junta, the National League for Democracy, the Arakan League for Democracy, and the role played by certain Buddhist extremist groups like the MaBaTha in Burmese politics. To ease the existing tension in the Rakhine, the central government would need to take a more federally minded approach and introduce meaningful democracy and development in the frontier parts of the country where there is a strong ethnic minority presence.
The Relationship of Economic Fundamentals and Real Exchange Rate between Korea and China

This paper examines the real exchange rate’s (REER) response to the real GDP, FDI, M2, trade openness (OPEM), foreign reserves (FER) and government expenditure(GE) for Korea and China. The analyses are based on the VECM and NATREX models. In short run for China, we find that RGDP, FER and GE have positive impacts on REER; M2 has negative impact on REER; REER has positive impact on RGDP. For Korea, we find that OPEN and GE have positive impacts on REER; RGDP and M2 have negative impacts on REER. REER does not have significant impact on RGDP. In long run for China, we find RGDP, FER and GE have positive impacts on REER; OPEN and M2 have negative impacts on REER. For Korea, we find that OPEN, FER and GE have positive impacts on REER; RGDP and M2 have negative impacts on REER. The results of Half-life show that the speed of equilibrium movement of Korean real exchange rate is faster by comparing with the Chinese real exchange rate, And comparing with Chinese RGDP, the speed of equilibrium movement of Korean RGDP is slower. With the implementation of one belt and road initiative, we think that the exchange rate regime of China may be transferred to the flexible exchange rate like Korea.
Exchange Rate Misalignment and Capital Flight from Botswana: A Cointegration Approach with Risk Thresholds

This study investigates the impact of exchange rate misalignment on outward capital flight in Botswana over the period 1980–2015. The study uses the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration and the Toda and Yamamoto (1995) approach to Granger causality. Botswana’s currency misalignment was caused by current account imbalances. The most important determinant of capital flight from Botswana is trade openness, which indicates that exportable commodities are misinvoiced leading to net capital outflows. Our main findings show that in the long-run, when the currency is overvalued, the volume of capital flight through trade misinvoicing declines and increasing foreign reserves does not reduce outward capital flight. However, when the currency is undervalued, the volume of capital flight through trade misinvoicing increases and foreign reserves reduce outward capital flight. Investors respond more to prospects of devaluation than to inflation. Botswana should tolerate overvaluation of the pula of only up to 5%. When the pula is overvalued beyond 5%, capital flight increases substantially. The government has to formulate trade regulations and monitor imported and exported commodities. Botswana should also implement capital controls to limit capital smuggling and maintain monetary autonomy.
Putting Educational Reform Into Practice: The Impact of the No Child Left Behind Act On Students, Teachers, and Schools

This thesis seeks to investigate the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) on U.S. student achievement and teacher effectiveness. By combining the results from various data sources, I am able to indicate the levels of student preparedness, school spending, and specific classroom practices. After an analysis of my results, I suggest that NCLB has found moderate success in increasing the level of math preparedness for younger students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds. On the other hand, the data also suggests that there have been no statistically significant gains in reading achievement after the implementation of NCLB. Additionally, spending by school districts increased a significant amount and NCLB raised teacher pay and the number of teachers entering the profession with graduate degrees. Within schools, NCLB appears to have directed instruction towards math and reading and away from other subjects as teachers strove to achieve proficiency on the new accountability measures implemented by NCLB.
Socio-demographic Predictors of Political participation among women in Nigeria: Insights from Afrobarometer 2015 Data

Despite the important role that women generally play in development processes, they are disproportionally underrepresented in politics and leadership positions compared to men, as exemplified in the case of Nigeria. Using the Afrobarometer data of 2015, this study seeks to examine the socio-economic factors that predict women’s political participation in Nigeria. The study shows that education, religion, place of residence, party affiliation, and geo-political zone predict political participation. Based on the beta values generated from the multivariate linear regression analysis, post-secondary education, South-Eastern geo-political zone, and party affiliation are the most significant predictors of women’s political participation. The study particularly points to the impact of education, and the encouragement of women to become affiliated with political parties to make more influence in the Nigerian polity.
The effect of European Parliament elections on political socialisation

ABSTRACT Do European Parliament (EP) elections have adverse effects on the political socialisation of individuals? Instilling a lasting political disaffection in impressionable voters, the supranational contest may have negative consequences for long-term political socialisation. Relying on a large cross-national dataset from 2004, I identify the causal effect of first-time eligibility and voting in the EP elections by exploiting the exogenous variation in adolescents' birth months. The results of a discontinuity design show that the elections do not politically disengage young voters or strengthen their party bonds to radical or Eurosceptic parties. Instead, the EP elections arouse their political interest in general and their European interest in particular; a long-lasting effect that persists for more than five years. Placebo tests and various robustness tests confirm the results. Considering that individuals are most receptive towards political socialisation stimuli during early adulthood, this study sheds light on the integrative potential of the EP elections.
The interdisciplinarity of iSchools: An analysis and visualization of research publications (doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.22452/mjlis.vol21no2.3)

Based on the papers published in journals indexed by SCI/SSCI between 2008 and 2012, we studied the interdisciplinarity of iSchools and visualized publication portfolios among different journals and clusters. The findings indicate that the iSchools can be seen as interdisciplinary environments from a macroscopic perspective, but each individual iSchool has its own strengths and specializations. In many cases, the ‘i’ in the individual ‘iSchool’ can only be interpreted as ‘information’ not ‘interdisciplinary’. The results also show that LIS-related journals still occupy the most important position in the research output of iSchools, although some iSchools with strong computer science background are members of this organization. This work is compared to earlier analyses and provides a different view of the state of the interdisciplinarity of iSchools.
The Scale-Dependent Behaviour of Cities: A Cross-Cities Multiscale Driver Analysis of Urban Energy Use

Hosting more than half of the world population, cities are currently responsible for two thirds of the global energy use and three quarters of the global CO2 emissions related to energy use. As humanity becomes more urbanized, urban systems are becoming a major nexus of global sustainability. Various studies have tried to pinpoint urban energy use drivers in order to find actionable levers to mitigate consumption and its associated environmental effects. Some of the approaches, mainly coming from complexity science and industrial ecology disciplines, use city-scale data to find power-laws relating to different types of energy use metrics with urban features at a city-scale. By doing so, cities’ internal complexity and heterogeneity are not explicitly addressed. Moreover, to our knowledge, no studies have yet explicitly addressed the potential scale dependency of such drivers. Drivers might not be transferable to other scales and yield undesired effects. In the present study, power-law relations are examined for 10 cities worldwide at city scale and infra-city scale, and the results are compared across scales. Relations are made across three urban features for three energy use intensity metrics. The results show that energy use drivers are in fact scale-dependent and are city-dependent for intra-urban territories.
Does MAX Anomaly Exist in Emerging Market: Evidence from the Turkish Stock Market?

In this paper, I investigate a recent asset pricing anomaly proposed by Bali et al. (2011) in the Turkish stock markets during the period between January 2011 and December 2017 using univariate and bivariate sorting methodologies. Bali et al. (2011) suggest that there is a negative link between maximum daily return and future expected a return. If an investor constructs a hedge portfolio buying stocks which are in the highest maximum daily return portfolio and shorting stocks which are in the lowest maximum daily return portfolio, they get the negative payoff at the end of the next month. Results of this study suggest that the MAX anomaly does not exist in Turkish stock markets.
International Credit Markets and Global Business Cycles

This paper stresses a new channel through which global financial linkages contribute to the co‐movement in economic activity across countries. We show in a two‐country setting with borrowing constraints that international credit markets are subject to self‐fulfilling variations in the world real interest rate. Those expectation‐driven changes in the borrowing cost in turn act as global shocks that induce strong cross‐country co‐movements in both financial and real variables (such as asset prices, gross domestic product, consumption, investment, and employment). When firms around the world benefit from unexpectedly low debt repayments, they borrow and invest more, which leads to excessive supply of collateral and of loanable funds at a low interest rate, thus fueling a boom both at home and abroad. As a consequence, business cycles are synchronized internationally. Such a stylized model thus offers one way to rationalize both the existence of a world business‐cycle component, documented by recent empirical studies through dynamic factor analysis, and the factor's intimate link to global financial markets.
A modified EKC for sustainability assessment in Sub-Saharan Africa: A panel data analysis

A modified Environmental Kuznets Curve is proposed, where, by substituting the traditional measure of pollution with the level of natural resource depletion and degradation, a more sustainability-oriented EKC model is presented. The focus is placed on a panel data set of 30 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, over a period of thirty-five years (1980-2014). SSA is chosen as the subject of this research, as it is a resource-rich region and is currently one of the world’s fastest-growing regions in terms of foreign direct investment (FDI), especially natural resource seeking, but SSA is also plagued with poor institutional quality and widespread poverty and income inequality. Several studies also associate SSA with a resource curse. The EKC hypothesis is tested for natural resource depletion after controlling several variables pertinent to the SSA region. One of the major findings is that no EKC or inverted U-shape relationship is found between natural resource depletion and the level of economic development. In other words, natural resource depletion does not seem to subside after a given per capita income level is reached for the sampled countries. In addition, the results show that globalisation, which is measured through trade openness, and industrialisation both contribute towards a greater depletion of natural resources and hence have an adverse impact on environmental sustainability for this sample of countries.
Decision-making efficiency, accountability and democracy in inter-municipal cooperation arrangements: The case of Iceland

Inter-municipal cooperation in Iceland has a history of many decades. There has been significant cooperation between smaller and larger municipalities in order to improve the provision of services, which in many cases has been difficult for the small and smallest units – a question of capacity. In this article, the main task is to look at the democratic aspect of inter-municipal cooperation arrangements. The main research questions are on consequences for democracy, democratic accountability, efficiency and decision-making in this context, which have been pointed out as the main democratic concerns by various European researchers. To answer this for the case of Iceland, responses to questions on the topic from two different surveys among local leaders are analysed. The main conclusion is that the general concerns stated by the above-mentioned researchers also seem to be present in the case of inter-municipal cooperation in Iceland.
GAYA BAHASA SINDIRAN IRONI, SINISME DAN SARKASME DALAM BERITA UTAMA HARIAN KOMPAS

The problem of this research is how the use of sarcasm, sarcastic and sarcasmic sarcasm in Kompas April 2015 headlines and whether the contents of the protests contained in Kompas headlines in April 2015 are reviewed based on political elements. The purpose of this study describes the use of sarcastic, sarcastic and sarcastic sarcasm styles contained in the headlines in Kompas daily in April 2015 and describes the contents of the protest contained in the headlines in the April 2015 Kompas newspaper reviewed based on political elements. Theoretically this research is expected to contribute to the theory of language style satire of irony, cynicism and sarcasm in relation to political protests. It is practically useful as one of the alternatives in Teaching Indonesian about the use of sarcastic, sarcastic and sarcastic sarcasm styles in fiction and non fiction. The method used is descriptive. Source of data in this research is derived from Kompas political news in April 2015. Political news that was studied was taken from Kompas daily for one month from 1-30 April 2015. While the data analysis techniques used content analysis techniques and change analysis techniques. The results show the use of sarcastic, sarcastic and sarcasmic sarcasm style which contains political protests in Kompas headlines in April 2015 consisting of replacement elements and replaceable elements that have similarities in semantics, categories, or analogies. The use of sarcastic, sarcastic and sarcastic sarcasm in the headlines of Kompas daily in April 2015 amounted to 17 sarcasm, sarcastic and sarcasmic sarcasm. In this regard, there is a need for further efforts to introduce analytical teaching of a kind of sarcastic, cynicism and sarcasm Keywords — Language style satire of irony, cynicism and sarcasm
Do Corporate Whistleblower Laws Deter Accounting Fraud?

We examine the deterrence effect of whistleblower laws on accounting fraud. We exploit state False Claims Acts (FCAs), under which reporting fraud at a firm invested in by a state's pension fund can result in monetary rewards from that state’s government. Using staggered adoption of FCAs between 2001 and 2010, we compare the accounting fraud probability of firms owned by state pension funds after FCA adoption in the state to that of firms not exposed to any state’s FCA. We find that firms' exposure to FCAs reduces the likelihood of accounting fraud by 5% to 9%. Consistent with the reduced likelihood of fraud lowering the risks of auditing the affected firms, audit fees are 4.5% to 6% lower after a firm is exposed to state FCAs relative to firm-years not treated. Conversely, we find little evidence consistent with increased investment in internal auditing being a mechanism by which whistleblowing exposure lowers fraud risk. Finally, we find the introduction of the Dodd-Frank whistleblower provision in 2011 reduced the probability of accounting fraud to a greater extent for firms that had not been affected previously by state FCAs, corroborating the deterrence effect of the state and federal whistleblower laws.
Acoustic Quality and Sound Insulation between Dwellings

During the years, there have been several large field investigations in different countries with the aim to find a relationship between sound insulation between dwellings and the subjective degree of annoyance. This paper presents an overview of the results, and the difficulties in comparing the different findings are discussed. An attempt is made to establish dose-response relationships between airborne sound insulation or impact sound pressure level according to ISO 717 and the percentage of people being annoyed by noise from neighbours. The slopes of the dose-response curves vary from one investigation to another, however, several of the results show a slope around 4 % per dB. The results may be used to evaluate the acoustic quality level of a certain set of sound insulation requirements, or they may be used as a basis for specifying the desired acoustic quality of future buildings.
Relatedness, Economic Complexity, and Convergence Across European Regions

The aim of this paper is to analyze how the heterogeneous structure of the European regions has affected their patterns of convergence or divergence. We analyse data collected by Eurostat, from a balanced panel of 191 regions and 55 economic branches over the period 2003–2015. In this way, we are able to describe and capture technological proximity across the regions and analyse how it has evolved over space and time. Limiting the analysis to the manufacturing activities, we are also able to measure the degree of economic complexity of the regional production systems and assess how this affects their patterns of growth.
First Peoples Lost: Determining the State of Status First Nations Mortality in Canada Using Administrative Data

We present the most comprehensive set of estimates to date for Status First Nations mortality in Canada. We use administrative data from Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada to establish a set of stylized facts regarding Status First Nations mortality rates from 1974 to 2013. Between 2010 to 2013, the mortality rates of Status First Nations men and boys are highest in nearly all age groups considered with the exception of Status girls between the ages of 10 to 14. On reserve, Status boys between the ages of 15 to 19 have mortality rates nearly four times that in the general population, while Status girls between the ages of 15 to 19 have mortality rates five times that in the general population. We demonstrate substantial regional variation in mortality rates which are correlated with economic factors. We document that there has been no improvement in mortality among Status women and girls living on-reserve in the last 30 years and relative mortality rates for all Status people on-reserve has not changed in 40 years. Mortality rates may be worsening among some age groups. JEL Classification: J15,J16,I15,I14