Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Economic Costs of Congenital Bilateral Permanent Childhood Hearing Impairment

OBJECTIVE. The objective of this study was to estimate the economic costs of bilateral permanent childhood hearing impairment (PCHI) in the preceding year of life for children aged 7 to 9 years. METHODS. A cost analysis was conducted by using a birth cohort of children born between 1992 and 1997 in 8 districts of Southern England, of which half had been born into populations exposed to universal newborn screening (UNS). Unit costs were applied to estimates of health, social, and broader resource use made by 120 hearing-impaired children and 63 children in a normally hearing comparison group. Associations between societal costs per child and severity of hearing impairment, language ability score, exposure to UNS, and age of confirmation were analyzed, including adjustment for potential confounders in a linear regression model. RESULTS. The mean societal cost in the preceding year of life at 7 to 9 years of age was £14092.5 for children with PCHI, compared with £4206.8 for the normally hearing children, a cost difference of £9885.7. After adjusting for severity and other potential confounders in a linear regression model, mean societal costs among children with PCHI were reduced by £2553 for each unit increase in the z score for receptive language. Using similar regression models, exposure to a program of UNS was associated with a smaller cost reduction of £2213.2, whereas costs were similar between children whose PCHI was confirmed at <9 or >9 months. CONCLUSIONS. The study provides rigorous evidence of the annual health, social, and broader societal cost of bilateral PCHI in the preceding year of life at 7 to 9 years of age and shows that it is related to its severity and has an inverse relationship with language abilities after adjustment for severity.
Market Timing and Managerial Portfolio Decisions

This paper provides evidence that top managers have contrarian views on firm value. Managers' perceptions of fundamental value diverge systematically from market valuations, and perceived mispricing seems an important determinant of managers' decision making. Insider trading patterns shows that low valuation firms are regarded as undervalued by their own managers relative to high valuation firms. This finding is robust to controlling for noninformation motivated trading. Further evidence links managers' private portfolio decisions to changes in corporate capital structures, suggesting that managers try to actively time the market both in their private trades and in firm-level decisions. Copyright 2005 by The American Finance Association.
Growth Effects of Globalization in the Low Income African Countries: A Systems GMM Panel Data Approach

The relationship between globalization and economic growth in the developing countries remains controversial. Liberals argue that globalization will lead to higher economic growth and prosperity. Skeptics contend the opposite, where globalization processes might lead to increased inequality and lower economic growth. Previous studies have examined this issue with single indicators such as trade openness or foreign direct investment (FDI) or aid etc. In this study we make use of a comprehensive measure of globalization developed by Dreher (2006), which measures globalization along three important dimensions viz., economic, political, and social fields to assess the pros and cons of globalization. Our panel data results with a systems based GMM (SGMM) method show a small but significant positive association between globalization and economic growth for a panel of 21 low income African countries for the period 1970 – 2005.
Disaggregated Spending and the Productivity Bias Hypothesis

According to the productivity bias hypothesis countries have a tendency for real appreciation in their domestic currency as a result of a productivity shock and the tendency is more pronounced in the non-tradable sectors. Balassa (1964) examines this thesis for 12 OECD countries in a cross section framework. This paper reexamines this empirically using a disaggregate data of consumption, investment, and government expenditures in a panel regression set-up. Using five different panel specifications and controlling for country specific heterogeneity, time specific heterogeneity, and openness this paper explores that the bias is more prominent in government sector compared to other component of aggregate spending.
Board governance and acquirers’ returns: A study of Australian acquisitions

This paper examines the relation between acquirer (abnormal) returns and governance characteristics of the board of directors of the acquiring firm. The central question is: Are higher (acquirer) abnormal returns associated with ‘better’ board governance, having controlled for other factors that can affect returns? As acquisitions represent a significant change in the acquirer’s corporate structure and operations, the determinants of a successful acquisition are of considerable importance. We examine the relation between returns and governance variables using a sample of 80 Australian acquisitions that occurred between 1999 and 2005. We use both short-run and long-run (abnormal) returns to capture the wealth effects of the acquisitions. We find very limited evidence of a connection between our governance variables and acquirer returns. JEL Classification: G14, G34.
Bid Functions in Auctions and Fair Division Games: Experimental Evidence

Abstract In auctions a seller offers a commodity for sale and collects the revenue. In fair division games the object is collectively owned by the group of bidders who equally share the revenue. We run an experiment in which the participants face four types of allocation games (auctions and fair division game under two price rules, first- versus second-price rule). We collect entire bid functions rather than bids for single values and investigate price and efficiency of the different trading institutions. We find that the first-price auction is more efficient than the second-price auction, whereas economic rationality assuming heterogeneous bidders suggests the opposite. Furthermore, we study the structure of individual bid functions.
Job Search and Unemployment Duration: Implications for the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis

This paper analyzes the relationship between unemployment duration and the spatial distribution of employment. It builds on the spatial mismatch literature by analyzing the role of access in a job search framework. A unique measure of access is created using municipal level employment growth and a matrix of commuting times for the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area. Individuals with more access to employment are found to have shorter unemployment spells. The effect of access on unemployment duration is found to be sensitive to the specification of access.
Correcting for endogeneity using the EMIS method: a case study with revealed preference data

Endogeneity is an important issue that often arises in discrete choice models leading to biased estimates of the parameters. We propose the extended multiple indicator solution (EMIS) methodology to correct for it and exemplify it with a case study using revealed preference data about mode choice in Switzerland. The same data is used as one of the first applications of the multiple indicator solution (MIS) method. These two methodologies - EMIS and MIS - are then compared to an integrated choice and latent variable model (ICLV), and a model without any correction. In order to compare the different methodologies between them, the value of time and the time elasticity in public transportation estimates are computed and reported for each of the methods.
Emergency peripartum hysterectomy: experience of a tertiary care hospital in South India

Emergency peripartum hysterectomy (EPH) has been de scrib d as the most dramatic operation in mod ern obstetric practice and a marker of severe mat ern l morbidity and near miss mortality. In th e past, the most common indications for EPH were uterine atony and u terine rupture. However, recent studies suggest tha t abnormal placental adherence and placenta praevia are the ma jor indications for EPH, probably due to increase i n caesarean delivery rate. The present study was conducted to k now the incidence, types and the indications for E PH and maternal outcome. This was a retrospective study co nducted in a tertiary care hospital in South India in June 2014. The data was obtained from the medical records depa rtment from June 2011 to May 2013. During the per iod of study there were 9287 deliveries and 30 peri partum hysterectomies were performed, rate of 0.32 % Age ranged from 18-439 years with majority belonging to he 26-30 years age group. Most of the patients were of low parity i.e. Para 1 or 2, while 9% of them were gran d multiparous. Unbooked case accounted for 53.3% of the total cases. Most common indication for hysterectomy was pl centa accreta, extensive uterine rupture and ute rine atony. Among patients with rupture, 60% of cases wer e unbooked and brought from peripheries in un stable condition with rupture uterus. All the admitted p atients with rupture had a previous caesarean secti on. The most common complication was febrile morbidity, anemia a nd bladder injury. There was one maternal mortality due to septicemic shock. The average period of hospital st ay was of 12 days, ranging from 7-41 days, the maxi um stay was in case of septicemia. All urinary complication s encountered were in patients with placenta accret a. Effective antenatal care, enhancement of blood transfusion fa cilities and improvement of surgeon skills are impo rtant to reduce the morbidity associated with the procedure.
Financial Constraints and Cash Tax Savings

ABSTRACT: We investigate the association between financial constraints and cash savings generated through tax planning. We predict that an increase in financial constraints leads firms to increase internally generated funds via tax planning. We measure financial constraints based on changes in firm-specific and macroeconomic measures. We find that firms facing increases in financial constraints exhibit increases in cash tax planning. Our results indicate that among profitable firms, firm-years with the largest increases in firm-specific constraints are associated with declines in firms' cash effective tax rates ranging from 3.00 to 5.14 percent, which equate to between 2.87 and 4.82 percent of operating cash flows. We also find that (1) the impact of financial constraints on tax planning is greatest among firms with low cash reserves, and (2) constrained firms achieve a substantial portion of their current tax savings via deferral-based tax planning strategies, despite the lack of a financial statement be.
Why Are American Presidential Election Campaign Polls So Variable When Votes Are So Predictable?

As most political scientists know, the outcome of the American presidential election can be predicted within a few percentage points (in the popular vote), based on information available months before the election. Thus, the general campaign for president seems irrelevant to the outcome (except in very close elections), despite all the media coverage of campaign strategy. However, it is also well known that the pre-election opinion polls can vary wildly over the campaign, and this variation is generally attributed to events in the campaign. How can campaign events affect people's opinions on whom they plan to vote for, and yet not affect the outcome of the election? For that matter, why do voters consistently increase their support for a candidate during his nominating convention, even though the conventions are almost entirely predictable events whose effects can be rationally forecast? In this exploratory study, we consider several intuitively appealing, but ultimately wrong, resolutions to this puzzle and discuss our current understanding of what causes opinion polls to fluctuate while reaching a predictable outcome. Our evidence is based on graphical presentation and analysis of over 67,000 individual-level responses from forty-nine commercial polls during the 1988 campaign and many other aggregate poll results from the 1952–92 campaigns. We show that responses to pollsters during the campaign are not generally informed or even, in a sense we describe, ‘rational’. In contrast, voters decide, based on their enlightened preferences, as formed by the information they have learned during the campaign, as well as basic political cues such as ideology and party identification, which candidate to support eventually. We cannot prove this conclusion, but we do show that it is consistent with the aggregate forecasts and individual-level opinion poll responses. Based on the enlightened preferences hypothesis, we conclude that the news media have an important effect on the outcome of presidential elections – not through misleading advertisements, sound bites, or spin doctors, but rather by conveying candidates' positions on important issues.
siRNA as a tool for investigating organogenesis

Removing the function of a specific gene from a developing organ, by making a ‘knockout’ mouse, is a powerful method for analyzing the molecular pathways that control organogenesis. The technique is expensive, though, in terms of time and money, and complex strategies for producing conditional knockouts are needed for genes that are essential for early development of the embryo, for which an unconditional knockout would be lethal before the organ of interest begins to form. Small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) offer a method of knocking down the expression of specific genes with no need for genomic manipulation. Almost as soon as they had been discovered, siRNAs began to be used to explore the molecular biology of mammalian cells in conventional, two-dimensional, culture. They have now also been applied successfully, by several groups, to knock down specific genes in various organ rudiments developing in organ culture. This article reviews the basic technique of siRNA-mediated gene knockdown and how it is being applied to organ culture. It also reviews some of the current problems and challenges in the field, and the ways in which these problems are likely to be overcome.
Selective Target Inactivation Rather than Global Metabolic Dormancy Causes Antibiotic Tolerance in Uropathogens

ABSTRACT Persister cells represent a multidrug-tolerant (MDT), physiologically distinct subpopulation of bacteria. The ability of these organisms to survive lethal antibiotic doses raises concern over their potential role in chronic disease, such as recurrent urinary tract infection (RUTI). Persistence is believed to be conveyed through global metabolic dormancy, which yields organisms unresponsive to external stimuli. However, recent studies have contested this stance. Here, various antibiotics that target different cellular processes were used to dissect the activity of transcription, translation, and peptidoglycan turnover in persister cells. Differential susceptibility patterns were found in type I and type II persisters, and responses differed between Staphylococcus saprophyticus and Escherichia coli uropathogens. Further, SOS-deficient strains were sensitized to ciprofloxacin, suggesting DNA gyrase activity in persisters and indicating the importance of active DNA repair systems for ciprofloxacin tolerance. These results indicate that global dormancy per se cannot sufficiently account for antibiotic tolerance. Rather, the activity of individual cellular processes dictates multidrug tolerance in an antibiotic-specific fashion. Furthermore, the susceptibility patterns of persisters depended on their mechanisms of onset, with subinhibitory antibiotic pretreatments selectively shutting down cognate targets and increasing the persister fraction against the same agent. Interestingly, antibiotics targeting transcription and translation enhanced persistence against multiple agents indirectly related to these processes. Conducting these assays with uropathogenic E. coli isolated from RUTI patients revealed an enriched persister fraction compared to organisms cleared with standard antibiotic therapy. This finding suggests that persister traits are either selected for during prolonged antibiotic treatment or initially contribute to therapy failure.
Nuclear poly(A) binding protein 1 (PABPN1) and Matrin3 interact in muscle cells and regulate RNA processing

Abstract The polyadenylate binding protein 1 (PABPN1) is a ubiquitously expressed RNA binding protein vital for multiple steps in RNA metabolism. Although PABPN1 plays a critical role in the regulation of RNA processing, mutation of the gene encoding this ubiquitously expressed RNA binding protein causes a specific form of muscular dystrophy termed oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD). Despite the tissue-specific pathology that occurs in this disease, only recently have studies of PABPN1 begun to explore the role of this protein in skeletal muscle. We have used co-immunoprecipitation and mass spectrometry to identify proteins that interact with PABPN1 in mouse skeletal muscles. Among the interacting proteins we identified Matrin 3 (MATR3) as a novel protein interactor of PABPN1. The MATR3 gene is mutated in a form of distal myopathy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). We demonstrate, that like PABPN1, MATR3 is critical for myogenesis. Furthermore, MATR3 controls critical aspects of RNA processing including alternative polyadenylation and intron retention. We provide evidence that MATR3 also binds and regulates the levels of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) Neat1 and together with PABPN1 is required for normal paraspeckle function. We demonstrate that PABPN1 and MATR3 are required for paraspeckles, as well as for adenosine to inosine (A to I) RNA editing of Ctn RNA in muscle cells. We provide a functional link between PABPN1 and MATR3 through regulation of a common lncRNA target with downstream impact on paraspeckle morphology and function. We extend our analysis to a mouse model of OPMD and demonstrate altered paraspeckle morphology in the presence of endogenous levels of alanine-expanded PABPN1. In this study, we report protein-binding partners of PABPN1, which could provide insight into novel functions of PABPN1 in skeletal muscle and identify proteins that could be sequestered with alanine-expanded PABPN1 in the nuclear aggregates found in OPMD.
The Effect of Task Characteristics On Hospitality Employees' Job Satisfaction and Burnout

This study examined the roles of task characteristics as determinants of various facets of job satisfaction and burnout for employees in the hospitality industry. Several conclusions can be derived from this study. First, task characteristics were found to be relatively powerful determinants of satisfaction with co-workers and satisfaction with supervisors. The major determinants of these two aspects of satisfaction were: feedback received from supervisors and peers and the experienced meaningfulness of the job. These two task characteristics were directly linked to improving satisfaction with coworkers and supervisors and may offer hotel management some concrete suggestions as to how to improve some facets of job satisfaction. Second, task characteristics were also found to affect one type of employee burnout, namely: emotional exhaustion. Once again, the same task factors that were positively related to satisfaction with supervisor and co-workers namely: experienced meaningfulness of the job and feedback received from supervisor and peers were also negatively related to emotional exhaustion.
Association of retinopathy and intima media thickness of common carotid artery in type 2 diabetic patients

Background: This study was carried out in order to evaluate the relationship between retinopathy and carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT). Materials and Methods: In a cross-sectional study, 154 diabetic patients who had a history of diabetic disease were evaluated in two equal groups of 77 patients with and without retinopathy, respectively. CIMT was evaluated in all of the patients. Results: Mean age of the patients was 59.65 ± 9.37 years. Mean CIMT of all patients was 0.84 ± 0.18. CIMT of patients with retinopathy was significantly greater than patients without retinopathy (P < 0.001). CIMT also correlated with age, duration of diabetes, systolic blood pressure, blood urea nitrogen, and serum creatinine. Conclusion: CIMT may be used as a simple, available and noninvasive method for screening of macro and microvascular complication of diabetic patients.
International sources of environmental policy change in China: the case of genetically modified food

Abstract China's agricultural biotechnology policy has undergone a profound transformation over the last decade, from a strongly promotional to a more precautionary approach. From the 1980s onwards, China invested heavily in biotechnology development and in the early 1990s emerged as the leading biotech country in the developing world. In the late 1990s, however, it halted the authorization of new genetically modified crops and introduced stringent safety regulations. This paper investigates this policy shift and argues that international factors have played a central role. Two trends, in particular, are identified as key sources of the move towards greater precaution: China's ongoing international socialization, particularly in the context of the international scientific debate on biosafety and the negotiations on a biosafety treaty; and the growing globalization of agriculture and trade, which has exposed China to international competitive forces and trade restrictions in food trade. As the case of genetically modified food in China shows, political integration and economic globalization can work together to promote a strengthening of the domestic environmental policy agenda.
Antitrust Analysis of Sports Leagues

I present an overview of the antitrust literature on sports leagues, with particular emphasis on the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League, as well as on sanctioning organizations such as NASCAR. I review the major antitrust court decisions, the commentaries of the leading antitrust experts on these decisions, and the extensive sports economics literature touching on issues raised in these cases, particularly empirical studies assessing the anticompetitive and procompetitive effects of various league rules and policies. I also review the broader industrial organization literature on issues such as factors affecting the stability of joint ventures. I conclude with a summary of proposals for addressing the monopoly power of sports leagues.
An Empirical Investigation of Asymmetric Behavior in Corporate Dividend Policy

Employing three alternative measures of ability to pay, the authors find support for the Lintner hypothesis that firms pursue a long-run target payout ratio and also that current earnings better explain long-run dividends than cash flows or stock prices. The evidence further indicates that corporations adjust dividends with a ratchet effect, raising them more readily than they lower them. More specifically, when dividends are below target levels, firms move toward equilibrium by increasing them, but when dividends are above target levels, firms approach equilibrium by restricting dividend increases as earnings rise. Copyright 1997 by Oxford University Press.