Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Divide and Conquer: Financial Ratios and Industry Returns Predictability

We propose a novel approach for forecasting the equity premium within a data-rich environment based on ensembling small-scale linear models. The economic nature of the predictors is exploited to efficiently retain all of the information available without assuming a priori that some predictor might be irrelevant or easily reducible to a latent factor. Empirically, our results lend strong support for transparent linear predictive models and the use of accounting-based information when forecasting both industry and aggregate stock market excess returns: positive statistical and economic out-of-sample performance compared to sparse predictive regressions, forecast combination strategies and complex non-linear machine learning algorithms.
O gênero Indigofera L. (Leguminosae-Papilionoideae-Indigofereae) no Rio Grande do Sul - Brasil

A recent survey of the species of Indigofera L. occuring in the Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil, revealed four species in the area: Indigofera sabulicola Benth. , I. asperifolia Bong. , I. suffruticosa Mill, and I. campestris Bong. It is given a short historical review on the systematic position of the genus. Identification key to the species studied, descriptions, illustrations, and data such as distribution, habitat, flowering and frutification are also- presented.
Forecasting Inflation in Asian Economies

This paper surveys the recent literature on inflation forecasting and conducts an extensive empirical analysis on forecasting inflation in Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong paying particular attention to whether the inflation-markup theory can help to forecast inflation. We first review the relative performance of different predictors in forecasting h-quarter ahead inflation using single equations. These models include the autoregressive model and bivariate Philips curve models. The predictors are selected from business activity, financial activity, trade activity, labour market, interest rate market, money market, exchange rate market and global commodity market variables. We then evaluate a vector autoregressive inflation-markup model against the single equation models to understand whether there is any gain in forecasting using the inflation-markup theory. The paper subsequently analyses the robustness of these results by examining different forecasting procedures in the presence of structural breaks. Empirical results suggest that inflation in Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea is best predicted by financial and business activity variables. For Japan, global commodity variables provide the most predictive content for inflation. In general, monetary variables tend to perform poorly. These results hold even when structural break is taken into consideration. The vector autoregressive inflation-markup model does improve on single equation models as forecasting horizon increases and these gains are found to be significant for Japan and Korea.
A Theory of Insider Purchases

Although prior work indicates that insider purchases signal undervaluation, there is scant evidence about what specific information such purchases convey, or what determines the extent of the undervaluation. Our theory explains the nature of the information conveyed by insider purchases, their incidence, and their signaling value. We argue that, conditional on information asymmetry, open market purchases occur when they plausibly signal that risk averse, undiversified insiders are willing to bear incremental wealth risk. Our tests account for limits to the public observability of insiders’ wealth and show, consistent with our predictions, that insider purchases are more frequent and informative in higher-risk contexts which we define, alternatively, as firms with higher fundamental risk (e.g., small, high book-to-market, high volatility firms), firms experiencing riskier circumstances (e.g., poor financial and market performance, low reporting credibility), and firms where insiders’ are exposed to higher risk as a result of their compensation contracts and ownership (e.g., option and share holdings, employment horizon). Further, exploiting our prediction that the signaling value of purchases depends on the increase in the insider’s wealth risk that is inferred by investors, we show that strategies based on linear combinations of the high-risk facets of these factors magnify the abnormal returns to strategies mimicking insider purchases by a factor of two to three. Finally, our results are robust to considering opportunistic/routine partitions of the sample, suggesting that insider purchases are largely strategic.
Book Review: Dilemmas and Challenges in Islamic Finance - Looking at Equity and Microfinance, Routledge, London

Islamic finance has witnessed a phenomenal growth during the past couple of decades. However, this remarkable growth has also been accompanied by some challenges and dilemmas. Islamic finance today is at the crossroads where resolving these issues is a prerequisite for its future sustained growth. The current book under review, edited by Yasushi Suzuki and Muhammad Dulal Miah, highlights and discusses some of the issues and dilemmas the Islamic finance industry is facing today. The book comprises of 11 Chapters divided into three parts. Part I deals with the dilemmas related to the prohibition of ribā and gharar. Part II elaborates on the challenges related to Islamic equity finance and microfinance and Part III is devoted to the discussion of the dilemmas and challenges related to the governance structure of Islamic finance. This article reviews and critically evaluates the aforementioned book.
Proxy CDS Curves for Individual Corporates Globally

Corporate credit default swap (CDS) premium is the market price of credit risk posed by a corporate obligor. Although corporate CDS are commonly used for risk benchmarking in accounting and credit risk management, liquid CDS are limited to less than 500 corporate names globally. CDS users must either confine their usage to this limited subset or resort to aggregates derived from the liquid CDS in different industry/rating combinations. This paper offers an intuitive, practical and robust predictive regression model linking liquid USD-denominated CDS premiums of different tenors to a set of obligor-specific attributes, and with the model one can generate proxy CDS curves for corporates without liquid or traded CDS. One key attribute is the actuarial spread that reflects the actuarial value of a CDS contract and is made available by the Credit Research Initiative of National University of Singapore for all exchange-listed firms globally. Other attributes in the predictive regression model include investment vs. speculative grades based on an obligor's credit rating, and some general credit environment variables such as the April 2009 CDS Big Bang, among others. This predictive regression, constructed with the historical record on 405 corporate CDS names, enables daily production of proxy CDS curves on around 35,000 exchange-listed corporates globally.
English Versus Vickrey Auctions with Loss Averse Bidders

Evidence suggests that people evaluate outcomes relative to expectations. I analyze this expectation-based loss aversion in the context of dynamic and static auctions, where the reference point is given by the (endogenous) equilibrium outcome. If agents update their reference point during the auction, the arrival of information crucially affects equilibrium behavior. Consequently, I show that - even with independent private values - the Vickrey auction yields strictly higher revenue than the English auction, violating the well known revenue equivalence.
The Evolution of Payments in Europe, Japan, and the United States: Lessons for Emerging Market Economies

Lessons from the evolution of payment systems in Europe, Japan, and the United States provide a useful guide for emerging market economies in improving their own payment arrangements to foster economic growth. Some payment arrangements are more efficient than others in promoting economic growth in a market-based economy. The payment experience of industrial countries is diverse enough to identify those payment arrangements that provide the infrastructure for sustained growth and the emergence of market-based enterprise. Based on the historical experiences of Europe, Japan, and the United States, a number of country attributes have led to the intensive use of different payment instruments and, in some cases, a different mix of private and public ownership and participation in the payment system. Such attributes include country size, population density, banking structure, legal framework, safety, and payment instrument pricing. These attributes explain why Japan relies heavily on cash at the point of sale but uses electronic payments for bill payments and business transactions. They also are the reason Europe relies on credit-transfer giro payments for all types of transactions and the United States instead relies on checks. Finally, the fact that consumer payment needs were not met within the banking system led to the establishment of postal giros in Europe, while untimely business payments led to central bank involvement in payment processing in the United States. Unmet user needs, inefficient payment arrangements, differences in payment instrument costs, and improper pricing of payment services will determine the future structure of payment systems in emerging market economies just as they have determined the evolution of payment systems in industrial countries. The authors discuss these issues and apply the lessons learned to payment arrangements in emerging market economies. Although the evolution of payments has taken decades in industrial countries, emerging market economies hope to complete the process in just a few years, and so will benefit by having a better roadmap for transforming their payment systems. This paper - a product of the Financial Sector Development Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to promote the development of financial sector infrastructure to support banking and capital market activities.
On Diversification

Undiversified - or stock picking - portfolios may dominate well diversified benchmarks, when these benchmarks are not mean-variance efficient. Starting from Markowitz's Modern Portfolio Theory we derive simple (linear regression) tests to separate stock picking from diversification. Over 60% of the time we cannot reject our null hypothesis of stock picking in favor of well diversified benchmarks, even for individual stocks. Stock picking dominates during recessions, diversification during expansions. 'Stockpicking' stocks tend to be stocks of large size companies, stocks with high B/M, high E/P or Momentum stocks. Our new tests also explicitly relate diversification and return predictability.
Interaction of temperature and photoperiod in the regulation of spawning by American lobsters (Homarus americanus)

Various studies have yielded conflicting information on the role of photoperiod in the regulation of spawning by the American lobster (Homarus americanus). Some have indicated a requirement for short days followed by long days, while others have suggested that there is no photoperiod requirement. To resolve the question of photoperiod control, we exposed mature female lobsters to various combinations of temperature and photoperiod for 1 yr starting in December and found that there was no requirement for spring photoperiod under local winter seawater temperature (0–5 °C, but when winter seawater temperature was maintained at 10–17 °C, spawning came under the influence of spring photoperiod. It therefore appears that vitellogenesis and spawning of nearshore lobster populations are normally regulated by seasonal seawater temperature but that photoperiod can assume a regulatory role if the winter seawater temperature remains abnormally high.
Controlling Immigration?

The effects of immigration policies on immigration rates have hardly been investigated so far as we lacked the necessary data. For the first time two new datasets are combined in this paper to systematically measure immigration policies and dyadic migration flows for 32 destination countries from over 170 countries of origin over the period 1982-2010. We find that immigration policies have an important effect on immigration rates. The effect however also depends on other factors in attracting or deterring immigrants. We show that the deterrence effect of restrictive immigration policies increases when unemployment rates are high. We argue that in these circumstances states start to care more to effectively protect their national economy. Moreover, we show that policies are more effective for migrant groups from former colonies or when the stock of this group is already high in a destination country. We argue that in these circumstances information on border regulations are more easily disseminated, which in turn makes them more effective.
Instability of Wealth Effect on Consumption and Investment Under Regime Switches

The instability of wealth effect on consumption over the business cycles is widely recognized in recent empirical studies. We develop a consumption and investment problem for an investor with direct preference for wealth where the drift and volatility of asset return switches between two regimes. Furthermore, the model is extended to allow the investor's borrowing rate to be higher than her risk-free rate. An utility-maximizing policy is derived explicitly such that optimal consumption-wealth ratio depends not only on both current and future regimes, but also on the transition across different regimes. Numerical simulation demonstrates that low frequent changes in regimes produce instability of consumption-wealth ratio, while high frequent regime-shifts produce stable consumption-wealth ratio. These features are enhanced by investor's wealth accumulation motive and tighter credit spread between borrowing rate and risk-free rate, both of which can be applied to explain the instability of consumption-wealth ratio observed in the U.S.
Effect of different nitrogen and carbon sources and concentrations on the mycelial growth of ectomycorrhizal fungi under in-vitro conditions

Effect of different nitrogen and carbon sources and their concentrations in liquid media on the mycelial growth of six different ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungal species was studied. Differences were found in the utilization of the different nitrogen and carbon sources between the fungal species. All the species showed better mycelial growth in the medium containing ammonium as nitrogen source. Growth was low in all species in medium in which nitrogen was supplied in nitrate form. All the ECM isolates investigated showed reduced growth in the medium containing maleic acid as the carbon source. The effect of glucose and di-ammonium hydrogen orthophosphate concentrations on mycelia growth of all the six fungal species was studied with ranges for glucose of 2–40 g/l, and for di-ammonium hydrogen orthophosphate of 2–20 g/l. Cortinarius fulvoconicus and Cortinarius flexipes showed maximal mycelial growth at a glucose concentration greater than 20 g/l. Suillus luteus, Scleroderma citrinum, Laccaria laccata, and Tricholoma aurantium showed maximal growth at a glucose concentration of 20 g/l. All six species showed maximal mycelial growth at 5–10 g/l of di-ammonium hydrogen orthophosphate concentration and with increased concentration mycelial growth in all species decreased.
Pacific Insular Floras and Pacific Paleogeography

INSULAR floras were barely touched upon by von Humboldt and other early plant geographers, but interested Charles Darwin particularly as to that of the Galapagos Islands during the voyage of the Beagle, 1831 to 1836. In 1859, in "The Origin of Species," he brought forward three ideas concerning them: (1) The species of all kinds which inhabit oceanic islands are few in number compared with those on equal continental areas; (2) although the species are few in number, the proportion of endemic species is often extremely large, and (3) the proportional numbers of the different orders are very different from what they are elsewhere (certain whole groups which might perhaps be expected may be absent). Darwin thus opened the study and discussion of "insular floras" and introduced, although vaguely, their relation to paleogeography. J. D. Hooker, in 1846, began an enumeration of Darwin's Galapagos plants and, in 1847, followed this by a comparison with the vegetation of some other tropical islands and that of the continent of America. It was in 1867, however, that he delivered his classical lecture on "Insular Floras" before the British Association for the Advancement of Science. It was Alfred Russel Wallace who, in 1869, first brought forward a clear distinction between oceanic and 1 Delivered before the seminar on. pa~leogeography in memory of the late Professor W D. Matthew, University of California. Avril 22. 1931.
The life history and descriptions of Halictophagus silwoodensis sp.n. (Strepsiptera) and its host Ulopa reticulata (Cicadellidae) in Britain

Halictophagus silwoodensis sp.n. is described and distinguished from the unique holotype of H.curtisii, the only other member of the genus known from Britain. All stages of the life history are described. Percentage parasitism exceeding 60%, and superparasitism by one or both sexes of strepsipteron, are recorded, with up to three parasitoids developing successfully in a single host individual.
A Practical Guide to Counterfactual Estimators for Causal Inference with Time-Series Cross-Sectional Data

This paper introduces a unified framework of counterfactual estimation for time-series cross-sectional data, which estimates the average treatment effect on the treated by directly imputing treated counterfactuals. Its special cases include several newly developed methods, such as the fixed effects counterfactual estimator, interactive fixed effects counterfactual estimator, and matrix completion estimator. These estimators provide more reliable causal estimates than conventional two-way fixed effects models when the treatment effects are heterogeneous or unobserved time-varying confounders exist. Under this framework, we propose two sets of diagnostic tests, tests for (no) pre-trend and placebo tests, accompanied by visualization tools, to help researchers gauge the validity of the no-time-varying-confounder assumption. We illustrate these methods with two political economy examples and develop an open-source package, fect, in both R and Stata to facilitate implementation.
Experimental Studies in Insect Parasitism. III.--Host Selection

Every parasite has a number, one or more, of host species which it will attack. The inclusion in this number of some species and the exclusion from it of others implies a process of selection on the part of the parasite which is usually known as “host selection. ” That parasites do choose certain hosts from the larger number of animals available to them is a well-known fact; but why they choose those particular species and reject others remains unknown. That, indeed, is the principal problem of host selection—to discover the criteria used by a parasite in selecting its hosts.
Dispersal of adult Colorado potato beetles (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) on plant models

Abstract Five artificial plant models mimicking potato plants, each having different and increasing numbers of structural components, were used to observe individual adult Colorado potato beetles (Leptinotarsa decemlineata (Say); Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) over a period of 6 hours. The objective was to determine if plant architecture affected residency time, within plant dispersal, and distribution of the species. The number of transitions between sections, the time spent on each section, the residency time on each model, and the proportion of individuals walking off were recorded. Results showed a positive relationship between the proportion of beetles remaining after 6 hours and the number of connections on respective models. The unexpectedly long residency on all but the simplest model in spite of the absence of food indicates that architectural complexity had an impact on beetle retention. Dispersal activity and residency time were heavily skewed towards the top of models. Beetles exposed to positive light gradients of different intensities and a negative light gradient showed that a phototactic response could explain much of the dispersal pattern to the upper model sections. Results show that manipulation of plant structure remains an option for managing the beetle but will require further research on the contribution of heterogeneity and scale to residency time. Résumé Cinq modèles de plantes artificielles imitant les plantes de pomme de terre, chacun ayant des nombres différents et croissant de composantes structurelles, ont été utilisés pour observer les adultes du doryphore de la pomme de terre (Leptinotarsa decemlineata (Say); Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) sur des périodes de 6 heures. L'objectif était de déterminer si l'architecture des plantes affectait le temps de résidence, la dispersion au sein des plantes, et la distribution de l'espèce. Le nombre de transitions entre les sections, le temps passé sur chaque section, le temps de séjour sur chaque modèle et la proportion des insectes abandonnant le modèle ont été enregistrés. Les résultats ont montré une relation positive entre la proportion de doryphores qui restaient après 6 heures et le nombre de connexions sur chacun des modèles. La longue durée inattendue du temps de résidence sur la plupart des modèles en dépit de l'absence de nourriture indique que la complexité architecturale a eu un impact sur la rétention du doryphore. L'activité de dispersion et le temps de séjour étaient fortement biaisés vers le haut des modèles. L'exposition de doryphores à des gradients de lumière positifs de différentes intensités et un gradient de lumière négatif démontra que la réponse phototactique est probablement responsable de leur dispersion vers les sections supérieures du modèle. Les résultats montrent que la manipulation de la structure des plantes demeure une option pour la gestion du doryphore mais qu'il faudra d'abord poursuivre les recherches sur la contribution de l'hétérogénéité et de la taille sur le temps de séjour.
Arbitraging Liquidity

This paper shows how arbitrage activity contributes to the convergence of liquidity across markets. Based on simple arbitrage arguments, I show how arbitrageurs' market and limit orders create co-movement across markets of bid prices, ask prices, and bid-ask spreads. Empirically, I document how the intensity of arbitrage activity increases the co-movement of market liquidity between securities linked by arbitrage. I test these hypotheses on Canadian stocks cross-listed in the United States, and then verify the generality of my results by repeating the analysis for the commonality across stocks and corporate bonds linked by capital structure arbitrage.