Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Adrift Community in Mainstream Bangladesh: Case of Tea Workers

This research was conducted to analyze the status of tea workers of selected areas of Bangladesh. Primary data were collected through direct interview and secondary data were also collected from different sources. A total of 100 tea workers were randomly selected from Ootterbhag and Indanugger tea estate of Moulvibazar. Descriptive statistics and functional analyses were employed to achieve the objectives of the research. Risk facing index, food security index, food consumption score were calculated and binary logistic regression were carried out to identify the factors affecting food security status. The study revealed that the life of tea workers in selected areas are vulnerable. Wages are not adequate to meet basic needs and the wage raises are not keeping pace with the cost of living. Considering 4.51 average family member the respondent family household is far below the international poverty line (1.90 US$). It was observed from the analysis that 52% sample respondents were illiterate. However, the maximum respondents also agreed that they faced various Original Research Article Fatema et al.; AJAEES, 39(1): 43-56, 2021; Article no.AJAEES. 65075 44 psychological, mechanical and biological hazards. Household calorie availability or consumption behavior was revealed by food consumption score, which exemplified that 49% respondents are in borderline food consumption pattern while 5% and 46% are in poor and acceptable level respectively. The overall average daily per capita calorie intake by tea workers was observed to be 2076.3996 kilo calorie, which is lower than the national average of Bangladesh. Only 35% household were food secure based on calorie intake. Household was food insecure if number of dependent persons in family increases; food secure with increase in household monthly income; and household food security decreases with increase in household size.
EFFECT OF FEEDING WITH MIXTURE OF COLOURD RICE ON SERUM LIPID PROFILE AND ANTIOXIDANT STATUS IN EXPERIMENTAL RATS

The present investigation was carried out to study the influence effect of colourd rice mixture on serum lipid parameters and hepatic enzyme activities in rats and effect of protein, total lipids, crude fiber and ash of rice samples.The data pointed to the following results: Milling processes led to decrease the percentage of protein, total lipids, crude fiber and ash of rice samples. Whereas it was increased the carbohydrate content in white rice samples. The total phenolic compound content (TPC) of Brown rice varieties had the highest value (1.6 and1.1 mg GAE/g) of Black and Giza 178, respectively, whilst milled rice varieties had the lowest ones (0,8 and 0.5 mg GAE/g). Antioxidant activity was determined in brown black, white black, brown and white Giza 178 extracts. The present study cleared that brown black extract had the highest the antioxidant activity among the investigated extracts followed by brown Giza 178, white black and white Giza 178 extracts. There are nine phenolic acids where identified. Ferulic acid was the major phenolic compound in all rice samples. Furthermore, the highest concentration of ferulic acid that found in brown black rice (4.82 mg/100g). Results of the biological experiment revealed that, the final body weight and weight gain of rats fed on mixture of brown rice and black rice were significantly lower, but food intake was higher compared with the rats fed on basal diet at the end of the experimental period (8 weeks), As for total Cholesterol (T.C), Low density liboprotien cholesterol (LDL-C) and Plasma Triglyceride (T.G) of rats fed on white rice dite were higher than other groups. Furthermore, HDL-C significantly higher in rats fed on mixture of (white rice + black rice) and (brown rice + black rice) diets compared to those fed on white rice and mixture of white rice and brown rice ones. The antioxidant levels in the rat livers ranged from highest in those fed on ( brown rice + black rice) diet, followed by white rice + black rice then white rice + brown rice . Whilst, rice had the lowest level . Finally, it can be concluded that, using brown and black rice have the pronounced effect for lowering cholesterol levels of the blood in experimental rats.
The determinants of capital structure in insurance companies Evidence from Saudi Arabia

The study examines the significant determinants of the insurance companies' capital structure listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) from 2010 to 2018. In this study, one dependent variable capital structure is represented by leverage and six independent variables, firm characteristics variables (profitability, growth rate, risk, size, age) and macroeconomic variable (GDP). A random effect on a panel data regression model is employed as a tool of analysis. This study attempts to fill the lack of research in Saudi insurance companies to arrive at constructive suggestions that could contribute to financial structure decisions. The results show that profitability, age and risk have a statistically significant negative effect on the capital structure. Growth rate and firm size significantly positively influence the capital structure, while gross domestic product is insignificant.
Studying Duplicate Logging Statements and Their Relationships With Code Clones

Developers rely on software logs for a variety of tasks, such as debugging, testing, program comprehension, verification, and performance analysis. Despite the importance of logs, prior studies show that there is no industrial standard on how to write logging statements. In this paper, we focus on studying duplicate logging statements, which are logging statements that have the same static text message. Such duplications in the text message are potential indications of logging code smells, which may affect developers’ understanding of the dynamic view of the system. We manually studied over 4K duplicate logging statements and their surrounding code in five large-scale open source systems: Hadoop, CloudStack, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, and Flink. We uncovered five patterns of duplicate logging code smells. For each instance of the duplicate logging code smell, we further manually identify the potentially problematic (i.e., require fixes) and justifiable (i.e., do not require fixes) cases. Then, we contact developers to verify our manual study result. We integrated our manual study result and developers’ feedback into our automated static analysis tool, DLFinder, which automatically detects problematic duplicate logging code smells. We evaluated DLFinder on the five manually studied systems and three additional systems: Camel, Kafka and Wicket. In total, combining the results of DLFinder and our manual analysis, we reported 91 problematic duplicate logging code smell instances to developers and all of them have been fixed. We further study the relationship between duplicate logging statements, including the problematic instances of duplicate logging code smells, and code clones. We find that 83 percent of the duplicate logging code smell instances reside in cloned code, but 17 percent of them reside in micro-clones that are difficult to detect using automated clone detection tools. We also find that more than half of the duplicate logging statements reside in cloned code snippets, and a large portion of them reside in very short code blocks which may not be effectively detected by existing code clone detection tools. Our study shows that, in addition to general source code that implements the business logic, code clones may also result in bad logging practices that could increase maintenance difficulties.
Cyberbullying: Its Social and Psychological Harms Among Schoolers

Criminal justice around the world has prioritized the prevention and protection of bullying and its victims due to the rapid increases in peer violence. Nevertheless, relatively few studies have examined what treatments or assistance are effective for peer victims to reduce and recover from their social and psychological suffering, especially in cyberbullying cases. Using data derived from the National Crime Victimization Survey-School Crime Supplement data in 2011 and 2013 (N=823), the current study examined the impact of two emotional support groups (i.e., adult and peer groups) on cyberbullying victims' social and psychological harm. The findings indicated that both adult and peer support reduced social and psychological harm inflicted by cyberbullying victimization. Based on these findings, the study recommends developing or modifying existing adult and peer support groups to minimize victims' social and psychological distress.
Auditors’ Response to Analysts’ Forecast Properties: Some Evidence from Audit Fee Pricing

This study investigates the association between analysts’ forecast properties (accuracy and dispersion) and audit fee pricing in U.S. publicly listed firms for years 2000 to 2012. Our findings provide evidence that analysts’ earnings forecast accuracy (dispersion) is negatively (positively) associated with audit fee pricing. These results suggest that analysts, as important financial intermediaries in the information environment, provide useful information to auditors in their assessment of client risk. We find that these associations are stronger for small firms and younger firms in line with these firms having a higher extent of information asymmetry.
FX Volatility Calibration Using Artificial Neural Networks

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in the application of artificial neural networks (ANNs) to the calibration of financial models. In this dissertation we explore two distinct but complementary applications of ANNs to the calibration of FX volatility models. We first consider Heston’s stochastic volatility model, and demonstrate how the calibration map from quoted implied volatilities to model parameters can be effectively learned using an ANN. Once the supervised training step has been performed, the trained net can be used to perform calibrations at speeds orders of magnitude faster than more conventional optimization-based approaches. <br><br>We next turn our attention to a local-stochastic variant of the Heston model, in which the pure stochastic model is augmented with a local component — the leverage function — enabling exact re-pricing of the input calibration set. There exists an extensive literature concerned with the calibration of these local-stochastic volatility (LSV) models. We explore the possibility of approximating the leverage function using a series of ANNs. The nets are trained in an unsupervised learning routine which seeks to minimize the discrepancy between market and model option prices. The latter are computed via Monte Carlo, and variance reduction techniques prove crucial in bringing calibration times down to reasonable levels. In numerical tests we were unable to achieve calibration speeds comparable to those of alternative existing approaches, although the application of ANNs to the calibration of LSV models has several interesting features which make it worth consideration.
Do Pension Funds Manage Cash Efficiently?

Using unexplored data on Swiss pension funds, we study whether pension funds manage their cash efficiently. While a share of cash is held to meet certain operational and investment needs, the remaining is accumulated from past activity and slowly invested. Most of the variation observed in pension fund cash holdings is, however, attributable to pension fund-specific time-invariant factors rather than to differences in pension funds’ needs. We estimate that pension funds with excessive cash holdings hold an average of 8.4% of total assets in excess cash. Investing this excess cash in a representative portfolio of assets could translate into an additional expected annual return of 30 basis points. Furthermore, we show that pension funds in a deccumulation phase, as well as large pension funds, are more efficient in managing their cash and that the introduction of negative interest rates by the Swiss National Bank triggered a systematic reduction in pension fund cash holdings.
Toxicity of selected RCRA compounds to activated sludge microorganisms

A modified OECD Method 209, "Activated Sludge, Respiration Inhibition Test," was applied to 33 com pounds on the RCRA list that have been found in municipal wastewaters. Fifteen of the compounds had EC50 values (concen trations reducing the oxygen consumption rate to 50% of the control) less than 1000 mg/L or below their solubility limit if it was lower. Seven had EC50 values greater than 1000 mg/L, and 11 had EC50 values in excess of their solubility limits. The use of dimensionless inhibition plots revealed that many of the inhibitory compounds could be characterized by simple linear, reversible, inhibition models. / Water Pollut. Control Fed. , 60,1850(1988).
Small Area Fair Market Rent Demonstration Evaluation: Final Report

This groundbreaking report evaluates the impact of implementing Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs) in seven Public Housing Agencies (PHAs) in a variety of geographic and market types. This report examines whether and to what extent the shift from metropolitan-wide Fair Market Rents (FMRs) to ZIP Code-based SAFMRs provides better access to areas of higher opportunity for Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) families. The report also examines how the use of SAFMRs affects HCV families and landlords, as well as the impact of SAFMRS on Housing Assistance Payments (HAP) paid by HUD and the tenant portion of rent paid by SAFMR families. This report also reviews the PHA administrative procedures imposed and costs incurred in implementing SAFMRs.
The Effects of Local Government Financial Distress: Evidence from Toxic Loans

We examine the response from both local governments and their voters to a sudden increase in public debt burden. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the ex post cost of toxic loans, a notorious financial innovation adopted by a large number of local governments. A large increase in the debt burden of a local government results in a significant reduction in its investments, but leaves expenses and taxes mostly unchanged. This effect is dampened for local governments that are more politically contested. An increase in public debt reduces the likelihood of re-election for incumbent mayor and its political party. Overall, these findings support the existence of a public debt overhang effect, which binds differently depending on the political context as contested mayors strive to maintain investments.
Innovation Valuation, Human Capital Quality, and Firm Leverage Puzzles

We study how R&D-driven firm innovation and capital structure interact in a tradeoff model allowing for inventor mobility, innovation strategy switches, and limited failure tolerance. Debt use reduces firms’ acquirable R&D benefits by hurting their ability to attract inventive human capital. Optimal capital structure equates marginal traditional leverage tradeoff benefits and marginal R&D-value losses due to debt use. The model generates the interaction among leverage, R&D investment, human capital costs, and firm growth endogenously. Implications over this interaction help explain a rich set of leverage puzzling phenomena; e.g., the mixed leverage-wage relation, the asymmetric leverage-tax sensitivity, and the zero-leverage anomaly.
Predicting Audit Failure: Evidence From Auditing Enforcement Releases

This study aims to identify the main determinants of audit failure and contribute to the current debate raised by recent European Union regulation on auditor’s tenure and economic policies to prevent impairment of auditor’s independence. We approach audit failure through auditing enforcement releases triggered by the investigations conducted by the Spanish public oversight board. The sample of sanctioned individual auditors and audit firms covers the period 2002 to 2013. Our results reveal that audit failure likelihood increases when the probability of financial distress is higher, the auditor is permissive of upward earnings management, and the audit report is signed by an individual auditor. The results reveal a positive association between auditor tenure and audit failure only for individual auditors. The relative economic weight of the auditor–client is also positively associated with audit failure, plausibly because audit firms are more concerned with reputation loss tied to big scandals than succumbing to economic pressure from their clients.
The Effect of Product Quality, Service Quality, and Product Price on Customer Satisfaction in Shopee

This study aims to determine the effect of product quality, service quality, and product price on costumer satisfaction in shopee. Times are getting more advanced and developing so that people's lifestyle will also be more instantaneous. One of the online shopping sites that are widely used by Indonesians is shopee. Shopee is one of the most popular e-commerce in Indonesia. E-commerce like shopee makes it easier for people to find the product they want, shop, sell, and transact using only their cellphones. This type of research is quantitative research with the population is shopee users who always shop at Shopee e-commerce and are&gt; 15 years old. The sample in this study were 102 respondents. The sample collection technique used in this study is a non-probability sampling technique. The data was collected using a questionnaire that was processed using SPSS version 24. The results of this study indicate that product quality, service quality, and price greatly influence customer satisfaction at shopee, so that later they can be included in developing better strategies in the future.
What Types of Companies Have Female and Foreign Directors?

This paper analyzes the determinants of the presence and the number of female and foreign directors among Japanese companies. First, listed and long-established companies, subsidiaries, and unionized companies tend not to have female directors. On the other hand, owner-managed companies are likely to have female directors and chief executive officers (CEOs). Company size and foreign shareholdings do not have significant relationships with the presence of female directors. Second, while some past studies in the United States and European countries find evidence of “tokenism,” whereby female-led companies do not appoint additional females as directors, we do not find such evidence among Japanese companies. Third, while foreign-owned companies and companies engaged in overseas activities tend to have foreign directors, other company characteristics, such as size and listing status, do not have systematic relationships with the presence of foreign directors.
Sparse Modeling for Cross-Industry Returns Predictability

We develop a new variational Bayes approximation method to deal with sparse estimation of large-dimensional vector autoregressive models. Unlike traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, our approach allows to directly model sparsity in the cross-industry lead-lag relationships which otherwise could only be indirectly imaposed via a structural form representation of the model. Empirically, we investigate the out-of-sample predictability of the returns for a large cross section of industry portfolios, spanning almost a hundred years of monthly data. We provide robust evidence that by explicitly shrinking weak cross sectional interdependencies one can substantially increase both the statistical and economic performance of VAR models when forecasting financial returns. This result holds across alternative shrinkage priors, such as the Bayesian LASSO, the Normal-Gamma and the Horseshoe prior.
Board Committee Overlap and the Use of Earnings in CEO Compensation Contracts

Using proxy statement data describing the terms of compensation contracts, we examine how overlapping membership between compensation and audit committees influences the use of earnings metrics in compensation. Although research predicts that such overlap could either increase or decrease the reliance on earnings, we find that firms with overlapping directors rely less on earnings-based performance measures in incentive contracts without altering the overall level of performance-contingent cash bonuses. In addition, we provide evidence that firms substitute earnings measures with measures less subject to earnings management. Our findings are robust to potential alternative explanations, extend to an implicit relation between earnings and compensation for a larger sample, and are not driven by the tendency toward an overlapping committee structure more broadly. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting.
The Influence of Regulation Affecting Non-GAAP Reporting on Executive Compensation Contracting

The regulatory landscape for non-GAAP reporting has been evolving due to changes in the U.S. SEC’s interpretations of regulations affecting non-GAAP disclosures. I examine whether the regulation of non-GAAP disclosures constrains efficient compensation contracting. I use the regulatory shock of the January 2010 update by the U.S. SEC to its interpretive guidance on non-GAAP disclosures, which some believe relaxed the bar for non-GAAP reporting. Using a novel hand-collected dataset on non-GAAP measures used by S&amp;P 900 firms over the period from 2007 to 2017 and a difference-in-differences estimation approach, I find that firms with strong incentives to use non-GAAP measures in CEO incentive plans started using more of these measures after the guidance update to those that did not. I also find that this increase was more pronounced among firms with a higher propensity to fail a non-GAAP regulatory test in fiscal years 2010-11, which was relaxed after the update. Based on the history of regulations affecting the use of non-GAAP performance metrics and their specific applicability to non-GAAP measures used for contracting and valuation, I conclude that these effects are largely an unintended consequence of SEC rulemaking.
Bond Return Predictability and its Economic Value: The Case of China

This paper investigates bond return predictability and its economic value. Using regression models, we first examine both the statistical and economic significance of bond return predictability in the Chinese market, and analyze the non-Markov and stochastic volatility properties of bond yields. On the basis of the above analysis, we propose a systematic method for constructing non-Markov dynamic term structure models (DTSMs) under a generalized Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM) framework with stochastic volatility. Then, we investigate the roles of the non-Markov property and stochastic volatility in bond return predictability and its economic gains realizing. Finally, we analyze the economic drivers of bond return predictability. Empirical results show that bond return predictability in the Chinese market is statistically significant, which also can be converted into significant economic gains. The non-Markov property and stochastic volatility are of critical importance for this conversion process. Moreover, time-varying risk premia driven by the economic environment are the main source of the bond return predictability in the Chinese market, while unspanned stochastic volatility factors also contain much information for future bond returns.
The Global Financial Centres Index 5

GFCI 5 results reflect the severe loss of confidence across all centres. There has been a significant fall in scores for all 62 centres rated here, reflecting a more negative perception of the performance of financial services generally and the effect of the severe downturn in some financial sectors, in particular in investment banks and hedge funds. There is also a much higher degree of uncertainty about the future amongst financial services professionals, demonstrated by a greater degree of volatility in their questionnaire responses regarding current and future competitiveness and success – this is a global crisis with a widespread negative effect on predictability.