Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Dynamics of Corporate Debt Structure

We find that US public firms spread out their debt more across different sources in recession quarters, making measures of debt concentration move pro-cyclically. There is substantial cross-sectional variation in these dynamics. Firms with less leverage and higher debt concentration further decrease leverage and increase debt concentration in recessions. The opposite is true for firms with higher leverage and lower debt concentration. The latter (former) group consists of firms that are larger (smaller), less risky (riskier), have fewer (more) growth options and lower (higher) cash levels. While the fraction of total assets funded by bank debt increases in the recession by approximately 18% of its average non-recession level, the equivalent measure for market debt drops by approximately 7%. Bank debt, in particular, term loans, appears to become more attractive during recession quarters, especially for borrowers characterized by high profitability while firm size, in contrast, has a positive effect on the use of market debt in recessions. A cluster analysis shows that a substantial fraction of firms changes its debt policy over the business cycle. For example, 12% of the firms that exclusively use bond-financing pre-recession switch to bank-financing during recessions.
Biologia e exigências térmicas do ácaro-vermelho (Tetranychus ludeni Zacher) em folhas de algodoeiro

O objetivo deste trabalho foi estudar a biologia e as exigencias termicas de Tetranychus ludeni Zacher (Acari: Tetranychidae) em folhas de algodoeiro (Gossypium hirsutum L. r. latifolium (Hutch)). Foram utilizadas câmaras climatizadas, ajustadas nas temperaturas de 20, 23, 25, 28 e 30oC, umidade relativa de 70% e fotofase de 12 horas. Os periodos de desenvolvimento de ovo a adulto variaram de 20,77 (20oC) a 8,50 dias (30oC), em femeas, e de 18,83 (20oC) a 7,75 dias (30oC), em machos. As temperaturasbase, estimadas pelo metodo da interseccao de X, para os periodos de desenvolvimento de ovoadulto, foram de 14,05oC para femeas e 13,91oC para machos, enquanto os valores da constante termica estimados de acordo com a lei de Reamur foram de 138,34 grausdia, para femeas e 130,91 grausdia, para machos. Na temperatura de 30oC foram observados os maiores valores de razao intrinseca de crescimento (0,418), numero de ovos de femeas/dia (3,47), fecundidade (61,29) e taxa liquida de reproducao (48,00) e o menor valor para o tempo medio de uma geracao (9,27).
Alterações em propriedades do solo adubado com composto orgânico e efeito na qualidade das sementes de alface

This work had the objective to evaluate the effect of organic compost levels in chemical properties of soil, nutrient contents of seeds and quality of lettuce seeds. The experimental design was randomized blocks, with five treatments (T0: without organic compost; T30: 30 t ha-1; T60: 60 t ha-1; T90: 90 t ha-1 and T120: 120 t ha-1 of organic compost) and five replications. There were not differences in seed nutrient contents and physiological quality (germination and vigor). However, linear increases were observed in organic matter levels, calcium, magnesium, basis sum, CEC and base saturation of soil at final culture cycle.
The ostrich meat - an updated review. II. Nutritive value.

Ostrich meat is a niche product gaining popularity among consumers especially in Europe. Nutrient composition of this meat considering protein, amino acids, fat, cholesterol, fatty acids, minerals and vitamins was henceforth assessed. Ostrich meat is characterized by low intramuscular fat content, a favourable fatty acids profile (PUFA/SFA and n-6/n-3 ratios), a high content of iron and vitamin E and low of Na. Thus, it can be considered as a high quality product of high nutritive and dietetic value. It may thus be a valuable component of human diet.
Early Mover Advantages: Evidence from the Long-Term Care Insurance Market

Researchers frequently question whether financial firms benefit by developing new products because barriers to entry common to other industries generally do not exist. Studies of early mover advantages for new financial products provide mixed evidence at best. We find evidence of early mover advantages in the relatively young market for long-term care insurance (LTCI) using data that allows broad testing of financial performance. Product differentiation, individual lines exposure, firm size, and traditional health insurance experience also affect financial performance.
Negative Impact of CTT on Gold Futures Traded in MCX: Analysis of Evidence Using Impulse Response Function

The primary reason for the existence of commodity derivatives market is to offer instruments for price discovery and risk management. Imposition of CTT on futures trading in non-agriculture commodities has allegedly disturbed the Indian commodity market from carrying out its function price discovery and risk management. MCX, a world leader in Gold futures, experienced significant drop in volume, since July 2013. Experts argue that CTT is indirectly halting India’s strong presence in such market, by making a way for exchanges in other countries where there are no transaction taxes like CTT. In this background, this study tries to throw light on the impact on imposition of CTT in India’s non-agricultural commodities, particularly gold futures market, by analyzing the variables such as trading volume, intraday volatility and Bid-Ask spread. Using VAR based Impulse response function, the study is conducted in three different scenarios. Viz. (a) before implementing CTT (b) after implementing CTT and (c) by assuming that the CTT is repealed. The result shows that there is a significant drop in trading volume and increase in volatility after implementing CTT. For third scenario, which assumes that the government repeals the CTT, the results indicate there would be significant increase in trading volume and reduced volatility in the market. Hence, this paper concludes that if the reason behind imposition of CTT was to generate revenue, control speculation, discourage noise traders, and to reduce volatility etc. than the idea does not hold well in the present scenario.
Does Banking Competition Affect Innovation?

We exploit the deregulation of interstate bank branching laws to test whether banking competition affects innovation. We find robust evidence that banking competition reduces state-level innovation by public corporations headquartered within deregulating states. Innovation increases among private firms that are dependent on external finance and that have limited access to credit from local banks. We argue that banking competition enables small, innovative firms to secure financing instead of being acquired by public corporations. Therefore, banking competition reduces the supply of innovative targets, which reduces the portion of state-level innovation attributable to public corporations. Overall, these results shed light on the real effects of banking competition and the determinants of innovation.
The Internet Effects on Sex Crime and Murder – Evidence from the Broadband Internet Expansion in Germany

This paper studies the effects of the introduction of a new mass medium on criminal activity in Germany. The paper asks the question of whether high-speed internet leads to higher/lower sex crime offences and murder. I use unique German data on criminal offences and broadband internet measured at the municipality level to shed light on the question. In order to address endogeneity in broadband internet availability, I follow Falck et al. (2014) and exploit technical peculiarities at the regional level that determine the roll-out of high-speed internet. In contrast to findings for Norway (Bhuller et al., 2013), this paper documents a substitution effect of internet and child sex abuse and no effect on rape incidences. The effects on murder increase under the instrumental variable approach however remain insignificant. Overall, the estimated net effects might stem from indirect effects related to differences in reporting crime, a matching effect, and a direct effect of higher and more intensive exposure to extreme and violent media consumption. After investigating the potential channel, I do find some evidence in favor of a reporting effect suggesting that the direct consumption effect is even stronger. Further investigation of the development of illegal pornographic material suggests that the direct consumption channel does play a significant role in explaining the substitution effect.
Bank Competition and the Effects of Macroprudential Policy on Procyclicality of Lending

Despite the extensive debate on the effects of bank competition on risk-taking and procyclicality, there is no evidence of its role in the effects of macroprudential policy on loans’ growth and on the sensitivity of lending to the business cycle. We contribute to the literature by investigating the impact of bank competition on the effects of individual macroprudential tools in a sample covering over 70,000 bank-level observations in 109 countries from 2004 to 2015. Our results are in line with the competition-fragility hypothesis and suggest that increased market power is associated with enhanced loans’ growth in countries in which macroprudential policy is effective in reducing credit growth and with decreased credit growth for instruments that are not effective in diminishing lending. We also find support for the view that increased market power in the banking sector helps to achieve reduced sensitivity of lending to the business cycle in countries that apply cyclical macroprudential instruments due to increased risk-taking in the banking sector. Moreover, we show that, for countries in which macroprudential policy is associated with reduced procyclicality of lending, some degree of market power is beneficial for bank lending, as it tames the excessive countercyclicality of credit.
Competitive Diffusion

This paper studies the evolution of a competitive industry in which a fixed number of firms reduce costs by innovating and by imitating their rivals' technologies. As the firms' technologies gradually improve, industry output expands and price falls. Technological leaders tend to rely on innovations to reduce their costs, whereas the laggards rely more on imitation. Imitation causes technology to spread from the leaders to the followers and forces some convergence of technology among firms as the industry matures. This convergence is accompanied by faster growth of smaller firms and a consequent tightening of the distribution of output over firms. Since imitation is a kind of spillover of technology, equilibrium is likely to involve insufficient innovative and imitative effort relative to a social optimum.
Size at Maturity and Tail Elongation of Loggerhead Turtles (Caretta caretta) in the North Pacific

Abstract Understanding reproductive biology is important to elucidate the ecology and life history of animals and is needed to predict population dynamics and demography for conservation. The loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta) is an endangered sea turtle species, and the vast majority of what is known about their reproductive biology has been learned from nesting females, with little information available on mature males and the time before reaching maturation. In order to increase the understanding about biology of maturation, size at maturity and puberty and the relationship between tail elongation and sexual maturation in loggerhead turtles in the North Pacific Ocean were investigated. The maturity stages of 54 males and 106 females, mostly captured at Kochi and Mie prefectures, Japan, were determined on the basis of gonadal development. There is no significant size difference between males and females in all maturity stages. The straight carapace length notch to tip (SCLn-t) at maturity was estimated as 82.1 cm. Tail elongation is the main secondary sexual characteristic of mature males. The elongation appears to begin when a male reaches to 65.8 cm in SCLn-t. The SCLn-t coincides with the size at puberty, which was estimated as 66.0 cm in this study.
Influence of different schedules of feeding on daily rhythms of blood urea and ammonia concentration in cows

Abstract Many physiological processes of domestic animals exhibit daily rhythmicity. The goal of the present study was to investigate, in cows, the influence of different schedules of feeding on daily rhythms of blood urea and ammonia concentrations. Fifteen Italian Brown cows, from the same farm, clinically healthy and placed at the same environmental temperature and photoperiod, were used for this study. Thirty days before the experiment, all the subjects were divided into three homogeneous groups of five cows: A group was fed at 08.00, B group was fed at 16.00, both having access to food for two hours (A group 08.00 – 10.00; B group 16.00 – 18.00) and C group was fed ad libitum. Blood samples were collected at four hour intervals for 72 consecutive hours starting at 08.00 of the first day and finishing at 04.00 of the third day via intravenous cannula inserted into the jugular vein. On each serum, blood urea and ammonia concentrations were assayed. Data analysis was conducted by one-way repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) and by the single cosinor method. ANOVA showed a significant effect of time on all parameters studied, in either day, with P < 0.0002 for ammonia in A group and P < 0.0001 for ammonia and P < 0.0005 for urea in B group. Cosinor analysis identified the periodic parameters and their acrophases (expressed in hours) during the three days of monitoring: urea showed nocturnal acrophases in B group, ammonia showed diurnal acrophases both in A and B groups. Our results suggest the influence of external stimuli, such as feeding time, on the rhythmic pattern of the metabolites involved in liver function and the hypothetic interaction between circadian clocks placed in the liver and the mean circadian system.
Shareholder Liability and Bank Failure

Does enhanced shareholder liability reduce bank failure? We compare the performance of around 4,200 state-regulated banks of similar size in neighboring U.S. states with different liability regimes during the Great Depression. The distress rate of limited liability banks was 29% higher than that of banks with enhanced liability. Results are robust to a diff-in-diff analysis incorporating nationally-regulated banks (which faced the same regulations everywhere) and are not driven by other differences in state regulations, Fed membership, local characteristics, or differential selection into state-regulated banks. Our results suggest that exposing shareholders to more downside risk can successfully reduce bank failure.
A mathematical model of A-V conduction in the rat heart. II. Quantification of concealed conduction

A mathematical model of A-V conduction in the rat heart has been developed which describes A-V junctional behaviour quantitatively during propagation, blocking, and concealed conduction of atrial impulses. The model enables prediction of the ventricular rhythm from atrial stimulation patterns, as well as definition of an atrial rhythm which might have caused a certain ventricular rhythm.
Biased Assessment of Comovement

I document a systematic bias in the assessment of comovement: individuals assess a moderate relationship between two variables regardless of the actual strength of the relationship between them. In a survey of finance professionals, participant-assessed betas of different financial and macroeconomic variables with the market exhibit compression. In an empirical setting, electricity futures exhibit moderate comovement with gas futures despite persistent heterogeneity in their relationship in the spot market. Trading against this bias generates annualized excess returns of 7.3 percent and a Sharpe ratio of 1.14. Finally, professional forecasters also exhibit this bias, leading to predictable macroeconomic forecast errors.
An Historical Review of African Freshwater Ichthyology

Abstract The history of ichthyology in Africa is reviewed. From the time of the Ancient Egyptians to the present, more than 3200 species have been discovered, drawn and described. Michel Adanson initiated the first material collections during the 18th century. During the 19th century, the work of travelling scientists (Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Andrew Smith) and explorers (including Mungo Park, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza and Henry Morton Stanley) added substantially to developing zoological collections from their field trips. At that time, many species descriptions were based on fish preserved in these collections. Towards the end of the 19th and into the early part of the 20th century, knowledge of African fishes was greatly enhanced, especially through the work of Georges A. Boulenger, Albert C.L. G. Günther and Franz Steindachner, who, respectively, described 640, 119 and 53 species. The majority of the naturalists working in Africa during the middle and later parts of the 20th century tended to specialise in particular groups. In addition to conventional systematic studies, there was a steady rise in the numbers of contributions invoking genetics, specific parasites, and electrophysiology, amplifying fish identification using criteria other than morphology. These methods have proved helpful in finding explanations for the radiation of cichlids in the Rift Valley Lakes of East Africa, one of the most rapid and extensive involving vertebrates. Blending all these methods, descriptions of hitherto unknown species continue to be published. Whereas, until the mid-20th century, descriptions of new species and inventories of existing ones were the principal objectives of ichthyology, interests during the last 50 years have moved much more to the ecology of fish and to its application in aquaculture and aquariology: it is only during this period that most of the publications dealing with the biology and ecology of freshwater fishes and the science of fish culture have appeared. Brief biographies of the modern ichthyologists are presented, together with outlines of their main contributions.
Institutional Investors’ Ownership Stability and Firms’ Innovation

We examine the relationship between various measures of institutional ownership and investee firms' level of innovation as measured by the number of patents and patent citations. We find a direct association between the stability in the equity ownership of institutional investors and their investee firms' level of innovation. Our main finding would serve to reassure managers that they benefit from the support of long-term-oriented institutional investors who adopt a "buy and hold" investment philosophy as opposed to a "trading" philosophy. We also examine the association between the proportion of a firm’s equity held by institutional investors and its innovation and find that it relies on the type of the investor. For instance, while there exists a positive association between mutual funds and firm innovation yet, the association is only positive for funds that actively manage their portfolios different from their benchmark index. Next, pressure-sensitive institutional investors’ shareholdings are positively correlated with firm innovation; however, it is not necessarily the case for all the pressure-insensitive investors.
Tipificação polínica em Leguminosae de uma área prioritária para conservação da Caatinga: Caesalpinioideae e Papilionoideae

The municipality of Mirandiba, in Pernambuco, is considered a priority area for conservation of Caatinga and has a diverse flora. In this region, the family with the greatest number of species is the Leguminosae, which is represented by about 25% of the species known from the Caatinga. In this study we characterized the pollen grains of the subfamilies Caesalpinioideae and Papilionoideae, and established groups based on pollen morphology. Differences found within the Caesalpinioideae are discussed, especially exine ornamentation, which is striking between the different genera. In Papilionoideae, the most conspicuous difference was the type of aperture, where pores, colpores, and colpi were observed. In the two subfamilies, most genera are considered stenopalynous, making it difficult recognize species by only morphometric characters.
Nutrition Management of Dairy Cows as a Contribution to Pollution Control

Dairy production causes unavoidable losses in respiration, feces, and urine, which may become an environmental burden as contributors to the “greenhouse” effect (CO2, CH4) or to the pollution of air NH3), soil, surface, and subsoil water NO3, P). Losses in respiration can be reduced by increasing feed quality and level of production. Increased feed quality can reduce losses in methane, whereas an increased level of production decreases the relative losses in maintenance. Fecal and Urinary losses can be reduced by minimizing the intake of N and P relative to energy. Further reductions can result from increasing feed quality and level of production, from matching or synchronizing the availability of N and energy in the rumen, and from shifting the site of digestion of protein and starch from the rumen to the small intestine. Improved feed quality will reduce endogenous protein losses. In order to exploit fully the potential of nutritional management in pollution control, computer simulation models describing dairy production in a dynamic way are needed.
The Determinants of Credit Union Failure in the United Kingdom: How Important Are Macroeconomic Factors?

Using regulatory data on credit unions, this paper provides empirical evidence on the determinants of credit union failure in the United Kingdom. We find that a small set of financial attributes related to capital adequacy, asset quality, earnings performance and liquidity is useful for early identification of troubled credit unions. In and out-of-sample results indicate that this parsimonious set of firm-level characteristics, augmented with national and regional unemployment rates, reliably identifies failures while keeping false alarm rates at modest levels. The results provide support for establishing early warning criteria for supervisory use in monitoring credit unions.
Persuasive Signalling

We present a model of persuasive signalling, where a privately-informed sender selects from a class of signals with different precision to persuade a receiver to take one of two actions. The sender’s information could be either favourable or unfavourable. The receiver observes both the sender’s choice of signal and a random realization of the signal. We characterize the set of D1 equilibria. We show that all of them must involve some pooling and any informative signal must be associated with an optimistic posterior. When the receiver is ex ante skeptical or indifferent, there is a unique D1 equilibrium, which is semi-separating and where the levels of precision are independent of the prior. Finally, we investigate the sender’s optimal persuasion policy – choice of signal before (commitment) or after (discretion) he learns his type. We show that the sender is indifferent between the commitment and discretion when the prior is optimistic, prefers discretion to commitment when the prior is sufficiently pessimistic, and could either prefer discretion or commitment when the prior is neutral.
Knightian Uncertainty and Dynamic Capital Structure

I incorporate ambiguity-averse equity-holders who are uncertain about the distribution of a firm’s assets into the dynamic capital structure model of Leland (1994). My model shows the optimal default threshold increases with Knightian uncertainty, whereas it decreases with risk. When the effect of uncertainty dominates that of risk, a firm optimally defaults earlier than predicted by a traditional dynamic model with risk alone. My ambiguity-augmented model predicts substantially lower leverage ratios, in comparison to the benchmark model of Leland (1994).