Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Speculation Channel and Crowding Out Channel: Real Estate Shocks and Corporate Investment in China *

This paper uses detailed land transaction data of Chinese listed firms from 1998 to 2012 to analyze how real estate shocks affect corporate investment. In addition to the widely documented collateral channel, we also uncover two other channels: rising real estate prices induce more investment in commercial land unrelated to firms’ core businesses but reduce non-land investment ( the speculation channel) ; rising real estate prices reduce debt capacity and corporate investment of firms without land ownership relative to land holding firms ( the crowding out channel ). Through these channels, we also find that real estate shocks lead to substantial capital misallocation both within and between firms: a 1-percentage-point increase in land price leads to 5-8 percentage points of TFP losses due to misallocation of capital.
Analyzing the Use of Audio Messages in WhatsApp Groups

WhatsApp is a free messaging app with more than one billion active monthly users which has become one of the main communication platforms in many countries, including Saudi Arabia, Germany, and Brazil. In addition to allowing the direct exchange of messages among pairs of users, the app also enables group conversations, where multiple people can interact with one another. A number of recent studies have shown that WhatsApp groups play an important role as an information dissemination platform, especially during important social mobilization events. In this paper, we build upon those prior efforts by taking a first look into the use of audio messages in WhatsApp groups, a type of content that is becoming increasingly important in the platform. We present a methodology to analyze audio messages shared in WhatsApp groups, characterizing content properties (e.g, topics and language characteristics), their propagation dynamics and the impact of different types of audios (e.g., speech versus music) on such dynamics.
Preliminary Study of Ground Level Ozone Nighttime Removal Process in an Urban Area

The depletion processes of nighhtime ground level Ozone (O3) concentrations in an urban area in Malaysia were evaluated. Annual monitoring records of O3 in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, were obtained from Department of Environment, Malaysia and separated into daytime and nighttime concentrations. In Malaysia, daytime starts from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. , and 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. is deemed as nighttime. The annual hourly average concentrations of O3 were 15.13±9.23 and 5.76±5.58 ppb for daytime and nighttime, respectively. The diurnal cycles of ground-level O3 concentrations suggests that a uni-modal peak occurs at 1 p.m. and high O3 concentrations was observed on December 2010 as a result of the higher rate of local photochemical production. Absence of photochemical reactions during nighttime identified as the main factor that contributed to low nighttime O3 concentrations. This study discovered that NO and NO2 play important role in O3 depletion process during nighhtime. Result confirmed that high nighttime NO concentration enhanced further destruction of nighttime O3 concentrations. © 2017 UMK Publisher. All rights reserved.
Reduced-order modelling of thermoacoustic instabilities in a two-heater Rijke tube

The topic of thermoacoustic instabilities in combustors is well-investigated, as it is important in the field of combustion, primarily in gas-turbine engines. In recent years, much attention has been focused on monitoring, diagnosis, prognosis, and control of high-amplitude pressure oscillations in confined combustion chambers. The Rijke tube is one of the most simple, yet very commonly used, laboratory apparatuses for emulation of thermoacoustic instabilities, which is also capable of capturing the physics of the thermally driven acoustics. A Rijke tube apparatus can be constructed with an electrical heater acting as the heat source, thus making it more flexible to operate and safer to handle than a fuel-burning Rijke tube or a fuel-fired combustor. Augmentation of the heat source of the Rijke tube with a secondary heater at a downstream location facilitates better control of thermoacoustic instabilities. Along this line, much work has been reported on the investigation of thermoacoustics by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling as well as reduced-order modelling for both single-heater and two-heater Rijke tube systems. However, since reduced-order models are often designed and built upon certain empirical relations, they may not account for the dynamic behaviour of the heater itself, which is a critical factor in the analysis and synthesis of real-time robust control systems. This issue is addressed in the current paper, where modifications have been made to existing models by incorporating heater dynamics. The model results are systematically validated with experimental data, generated from an in-house (electrically heated) Rijke tube apparatus.
Open Source Biomaterials for Regenerative Medicine

In 1997, a striking image depicting a mouse with a human ear growing on its back rapidly became a viral sensation circulating the media around the world (Figure 3-1). 5,6 It was through the media that the “earmouse” quickly became associated with fears about Dr. Frankenstein-created laboratory monstrosities and fears about the limits of human experimentation and genetic engineering. In spite of the fears, the earmouse kindled many hopes about future possibilities in medicine. Unfortunately, the image of the earmouse has often been circulated without any context, which rapidly generates many false assumptions about the origin and intent of this animal experiment. In fact, the original research group led by Dr. Charles Vacanti at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is often left unmentioned. What is significant about the earmouse model is that although it sparked much debate about genetic modification, it was not actually a genetically modified organism. Rather, the procedure to create the earmouse consisted of several key steps.3 First, an alginate cast of an ear from a three-year-old child was created. Then, using the cast as a mold, a synthetic biodegradable polymer (polyglycolic acid, or PGA) was shaped into an ear-like structure. At this point, cells naturally found in cartilage (chondrocytes) were isolated from slaughtered calfs and implanted into the polymer ear. Over time, the chondrocytes degraded the polymer scaffold while gradually replacing it with a new biological scaffold (cartilage) in the form of a human ear. This resulting sample of an earshaped cartilage was then implanted into mice in order to examine its durability and biocompatibility.
Effect of two different storage temperatures (-12 0C and -20 0C) on the proximate and microbial quality of Labeo rohita muscles

The present study was aimed to investigate the proximate and microbial profile of muscles of Labeo rohita kept under storage at two different temperatures viz. -12 0C and -20 0C for a period of 4 weeks. The analysis was carried out at an interval of 7 days. Initially, the proximate composition of fresh samples (at 0 day) revealed 16.00±0.1% protein, 3.55±0.01% lipid, 82. 28±0.04% moisture and 1.45±0.04% ash. However, after 4 weeks of frozen storage, there was a significant percentile decrease (p≤0.05) i.e. 36%, 60.2%, 8.53%, 27.5% in protein, lipid, moisture and ash content, respectively in -12 0C storage samples and in -20 0C storage sample the percentile decrease was comparatively less, i.e. 17.87% in protein, 24.50% in lipid, 5.28% in moisture and 20.68% in ash. The microbial load of fresh samples was found to be 2.10±0.2 log cfu/g (TPC i.e. Total Plate Count), 1.20±0.15 log cfu/g (CC i.e. Coliform Count), 2.12±0.02 log cfu/g (PC i.e. Psychrophilic Count). These values increased significantly (p≤0.05) during 4 weeks of frozen storage. The study further revealed that, TPC was within the acceptable limit (6 log cfu/g) on 21st day in samples stored at -20 0C whereas at -12 0C it crosses the limit on 7th day of storage, beyond which the quality of fish deteriorates thus, making it unfit for human consumption. Thus, storage of fish fillets at -20 0C extends their shelf life by 2 weeks as compared storage at -12 0C.
Linking Cross-Sectional and Aggregate Expected Returns

We argue that in a general equilibrium model, increases in equity risk premia represent “bad” news to investors because they reveal increases in marginal utility. We employ a new empirical methodology and find that the price of “discount rate” risk is negative in the data, contrary to prior research. Our approach relies on using future realized market returns to consistently estimate covariances of asset returns with the market risk premium. Covariances drive observed cross-sectional patterns in the expected returns of stocks and bonds. Ignoring the “risk-premium” factor causes drastic underestimation of the equilibrium price of “level” risk in bond returns. ∗We thank John Cochrane, Eugene Fama, Stefano Giglio, Valentin Haddad, Lars Peter Hansen, John Heaton, Bryan Kelly, Ralph Koijen, Stefan Nagel, Diogo Palhares, Jay Shanken, and seminar participants at Chicago, Emory, Maryland, Michigan, UIUC, Wisconsin for helpful comments and suggestions. †Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Email: sekozak@umich.edu. ‡R.H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. Email: shrihari@umd.edu.
THE IMPACTS OF GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP ON EARNINGS MANAGEMENT PRACTICES IN MALAYSIAN PUBLIC LISTED COMPANIES

Government Linked Companies (GLCs) are companies in which the Malaysian Government has a direct or indirect controlling stake and protected by government. Typically, GLCs are the main providers of the core strategic utilities and services in Malaysia and large companies demand better corporate governance due to higher agency problems. Thus, this ownership structure appears to be a vital factor influencing the reliability of financial reporting. Strict requirements issued by Bursa Malaysia would motivate listed companies to window-dress their earning figures to look healthy financially to investors. The empirical evidence regarding earnings management practices among GLCs is not conclusive because it is relatively difficult to detect earnings management. Based on prior studies, this study proposes to use discretionary accruals as a proxy for earnings management and recommends three earnings management detection models: Kothari model (Kothari, Leone, and Wasley, 2005), earnings-threshold-based model (Givoly, Hayn, and Katz, 2010), and augmented modified Jones model (Ball and Shivakumar, 2006) be applied to detect earnings management practices. It is expected that GLCs engage more earnings management in an accrual-based accounting environment as compared to non-GLCs. The test of differences on the residuals of augmented modified Jones model (Ball and Shivakumar, 2006) indicates that our prediction is true in the sense that GLCs report higher level of discretionary accruals as compared to non-GLCs.
Telicity and iconic scales in ASL

In a series of papers (Wilbur 2003, i.a.), Ronnie Wilbur shows that a number of sign languages display a non-arbitrary form-to-meaning correspondence in the verbal lexicon: telic verbs end with sharp deceleration (‘end-marking’); atelic verbs do not. In ASL, Wilbur also shows that the phonetic form of a verb may be manipulated with semantic effect. In this paper, I provide an analysis of these facts in terms of structural iconicity, where the interpretation of a sign preserves abstract structure of the form of the sign. I follow Kennedy and Levin (2008) in assuming that the meanings of change-of-state verbs are derived from scales; I argue that verbs in ASL iconically represent these scales, and that end-marking on telic verbs is the iconic representation of the maximum of a closed scale.
Female students are more likely to get higher grades than male students

Education is an essential requirement and it must be fulfilled for every individual. The requirement has been declared as the basic human rights along with the food and shelter by the United Nation Organization as well. Apart from that, the education reflects the personality of a person, so as the grades as well. The grades mirror the person’s behavior and its attitude towards its academics irrespective of whatever educational background the person possesses. People say that girls are always smarter than boys. Therefore, in this research paper I'm going to prove that female students do tend to get higher grades than male students do. Female students tend to care more about studies and they work harder than male students do. Boys are more interested in technology than girls since they are always on the computers exploring and video gaming and they rely on technology more than girls do. There definitely are solutions that could make both genders on the same academic level such as including more technology in studying and including more practical work in academics.
Finding a window of opportunity or escaping unemployment? The role of labour market dynamics in individual entrepreneurial decisions

This paper draws on the analytical framework of the job search theory to explore how labour market dynamics influence individual decisions to start a company. It investigates the role of short and longterm unemployment levels as well as the matching efficiency of regional labour markets in the entrepreneurial decisions of employed and unemployed individuals. The empirical findings suggest that unemployed individuals have a higher probability of starting their own company than employed individuals. In addition, changes in regional unemployment levels have stronger impact on the propensity to start one’s own company among unemployed than employed people. These differences are also moderated by the matching efficiency of regional labour markets. These findings imply the need to consider not only individual resources and motivations, but also the labour market efficiency when considering the impact of unemployment fluctuations on entrepreneurial activity.
Quantificational scope of Serbian exclusives A syntax-semantics interface account

In this paper, we explore the connection between agreement and semantic interpretation of Serbian exclusive operators. Serbian exhibits an alternation between two morphologically similar exclusives: agreeing sam-o/a and non-agreeing samo; the presence of agreement predicts the interpretation of the exclusive as either ‘alone’ or ‘only’. Furthermore, we identify three distinct sub-readings of the agreeing form which we label the no-company, no-help, and no-other-cause readings. Our approach utilizes syntactic frameworks deconstructing the vP layer and Neo-Davidsonian event semantics to account for the distinctions among these sub-readings as well as between the agreeing and non-agreeing forms. We argue that 1) these two operators have the same semantics, 2) the type of their semantic entry is acategorial, and 3) the distinctions between the readings are derived from the syntactic and semantic scope of the exclusive. The three sub-readings of the agreeing sam-o/a are derived below the event quantifier, and the ‘only’ reading of the non-agreeing samo is the result of the exclusive scoping above the event quantifier. Lastly, we argue that the locality of the agreement operation is what constrains the scope of agreeing sam-o/a to below the existential closure of the event variable.
How Policy Decisions Affect Refugee Journeys in South Sudan: A Study Using Automated Ensemble Simulations

Forced displacement has a huge impact on society today, asmore than 68million people are forcibly displaced worldwide. Existingmethods for forecasting the arrival of migrants, especially refugees, may help us to better allocate humanitarian support andprotection. However, few researchers have investigated the e ects of policy decisions, such as border closures, on the movement of these refugees. Recently established simulation development approaches have made it possible to conduct such a study. In this paper, we use such an approach to investigate the e ect of policy decisions on refugee arrivals for the South Sudan refugee crisis. To make such a study feasible in terms of human e ort, we rely on agent-based modelling, and have automated several phases of simulation development using the FabFlee automation toolkit. We observe a decrease in the average relative di erence from 0.615 to 0.499 as we improved the simulation model with additional information. Moreover, we conclude that the border closure and a reduction in camp capacity induce fewer refugee arrivals and more time spend travelling to other camps. While a border opening and an increase in camp capacity result in a limited increase in refugee arrivals at the destination camps. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to conduct such an investigation for this conflict.
The Role of Basic Human Values in Knowledge Sharing: How Values Shape the Postadoptive Use of Electronic Knowledge Repositories

A growing body of literature examines how to elicit knowledge contributions to electronic knowledge repositories (EKRs) with the goal of helping organizations increase implementation benefits. While this literature has explained in detail the initial EKR adoption by knowledge contributors, it has not yet examined the drivers of postadoptive EKR usage for contributing knowledge. Postadoptive EKR usage, such as innovative feature use, can potentially result in richer contributions to EKRs. To aid understanding of how to unlock the benefits of EKRs for organizations, this study examines the impact of basic human values on one type of postadoptive behavior that goes well beyond basic usage: trying to innovate with EKR features. We develop a research model that integrates human values and trying to innovate with EKRs, suggesting that human values indicate modes of independent thought and action and can lead to attempts to innovate in EKR use by increasing the frequency of EKR usage. Data collected from 233 knowledge workers support the model. Our findings shed light on how to encourage innovative EKR usage and underscore the importance of human values for the success of knowledge management initiatives.
Information Aggregation and Asset Prices in Large Markets with Institutional Investors

We study the joint determination of endogenous information acquisition and equilibrium asset prices in a rational expectation equilibrium model with a continuum of asset managers who care about their performance relative to a benchmark and have CRRA preferences. In the presence of benchmarking, managers are less willing to deviate from the benchmark and, thus, to speculate based on private information, such that less of a manager’s private information gets incorporated into prices. As benchmarking also reduces the fraction of managers that endogenously decide to acquire private information, prices are substantially less informative in the presence of institutional investors. The benchmark asset is therefore perceived to be more risky, leading to a decline in price, which can dominate the positive price effect stemming from the managers’ excess demand due to index-hedging, and a substantial increase in return volatility. ∗Matthijs Breugem is at Frankfurt School of Finance and Management gGmbH, Sonnemannstrasse 9-11, 60314 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. e-mail: m.breugem@fs.de. Adrian Buss is at INSEAD, Boulevard de Constance, 77305 Fontainebleau Cedex, France. For useful comments or suggestions to this paper and its previous versions we thank Joel Peress, Zacharias Sautner, Larissa Schaefer, Gunther Strobl, Laura Veldkamp, Jing Zeng and seminar participants at Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.
Infecções virais em crianças internadas por doença aguda do trato respiratório inferior Viral infections in hospitalized children affected by acute lower respiratory tract disease

Objective: To evaluate the frequency of the main respiratory viruses in hospitalized children affected by acute lower respiratory tract disease at a university hospital. Methods: This is a prospective trial that included two cohorts of hospitalized children in the period from April to July 1996. The groups wereselectedaccordingtothepresenceoflowerrespiratorytractdisease on admission: Group A- with acute disease (history of less than 7 days) andB-withoutpresentorrecentrespiratorydisease.Theparametersfor defining lower respiratory tract disease included physical and/or radiological pulmonary changes. Clinical and radiological criteria were established for the classification of lower respiratory tract diseases in group A. Nasopharyngeal swab was collected from all children on admissionforviraldetectionbycellularculturesanddirectimmunofluorescence. Results: 201 cases were selected, 126 in group A and 75 in group B.Viruseswereidentifiedin71childrenfromgroupA(56.4%)andonly in 3 from group B (4.0%). The predominant agent in group A was respiratory syncytial virus, identified in 66 cases; adenovirus (4) and influenza(1)weredetectedinotherpatients.IngroupBtwopatientswith respiratorysyncytialvirusandonewithadenoviruswereidentified.The patients from group A affected by respiratory syncytial virus were younger (median age 3 months versus 13 months) and more wheezy on physical examination (78.7%) than the other patients of the group (33.3%). This virus was associated to most of the bronchiolitis cases (84%) and to half of the pneumonia cases (46.4%). Conclusion: The authors found a significant presence of viruses in the majority of children hospitalized with acute lower respiratory tract disease. The respiratory syncytial virus was the predominant agent identified. These results are similar to others previously reported both indevelopedandsomedevelopingcountries.Theauthorsemphasizethat thepresentstudyevaluatedonlypartiallythepossibilityofsimultaneous infectionbyotherpathogensandthatthepresentprotocolwasconducted during the season with the highest incidence of respiratory syncytial virus.
Why We Cannot Resist Our Smartphones: Investigating Compulsive Use of Mobile SNS from a Stimulus-Response-Reinforcement Perspective

Compulsive smartphone use has attracted extensive social attention because of serious and even fatal outcomes associated with it. However, there has been little theory-driven research systematically investigating the mechanism of compulsive behavior in smartphone use. Although a significant line of literature exists in the area of personal-computer based technology addiction, the mechanism underpinning compulsive smartphone use differs significantly because the unique and specific characteristics of smartphones have given rise to a fundamentally different usage context with new usage behavioral patterns. In order to comprehensively theorize this issue, we first defined compulsive behavior in smartphone use, focusing on mobile social networking services (SNSs) in particular, and then extended the stimulus-response-reinforcement framework to investigate the theoretical network of compulsive use of mobile SNSs. We used online survey data from 368 active mobile SNS users in China to empirically test and validate the proposed model and hypotheses. Our results indicate that both positive and negative reinforcements, as well as the compensatory component, invoke the feeling of urge that leads to compulsive mobile SNS use. The positive effects of interactivity as an incentive stimulus on those reinforcements and compulsive mobile SNS use were also found to be significant.