Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gallic acid as the major antioxidant in pequi (Caryocar brasiliense Camb.) fruit peel

In this study, ethanol-water extracts of pequi fruit peel were fractionated in order to identify and quantify the major antioxidant present in it. The fractions were subjected to liquid-liquid phase extraction and silica-gel column chromatography, and antioxidant activity was monitored using the 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl radical-scavenging assay. The purity of the fractions was evaluated using thin-layer chromatography and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The substance with antioxidant property was identified through the analysis in a liquid chromatography-mass spectroscopy fragmentation and was quantified using HPLC. After the Silica-gel fractionation, it was identified a fraction with high antioxidant activity and purity, which contained gallic acid as the main compound. The gallic acid was found at the amount of 26.54 ± 1.13 mg/g of the dry mass of the pequi fruit peel. Because the quantifications were performed using crude ethanol-water extract, it was suspected that gallic acid was present in a free form. Thus, pequi fruit peel may serve as an attractive alternative of feedstock for natural antioxidant production. Moreover, the results obtained in this study emphasize the value of the pequi plant, and suggests improved opportunities for families that use this fruit`s products.
Risk-Taking, Competition and Uncertainty: Do Coco Bonds Increase the Risk Appetite of Banks?

We assess the impact of contingent convertible (CoCo) bonds and the wealth transfers they imply conditional on conversion on risk-taking behaviour of the issuing bank. We also test for regulatory arbitrage: do banks by issuing CoCos try to maintain risk taking incentives when regulators reduce them by insisting on higher capitalization ratios? While we test for and reject sample selection bias, we show that CoCo bonds issuance has a strong positive effect on risk-taking behaviour, and so do conversion parameters that reduce dilution of existing shareholders upon conversion. Higher volatility amplifies the impact of CoCos on risk taking.
Competition and Agency Problems within Banks: Evidence from Insider Lending

This paper studies whether greater competition can mitigate agency problems within banks. We measure the intensity of the agency conflict within a bank by the volume of loans that the bank lends to its insiders (e.g., executives). We first check that these loans are a form of private benefit. By exploiting interstate branching deregulation, we then show that banks react to greater competition by reducing insider lending, especially when the entry of new competitors may more strongly affect bank profitability. Results are robust to using various identification approaches and alternative indicators of agency conflict. We conclude that competitive pressure reduces managerial self-dealing. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.
Predicting the Fed Sentiment in a Data-Rich Environment

This paper examines the predictability of the Federal Reserve (Fed) sentiment conveyed by the words in the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statements. First, we construct a Fed sentiment index based on textual analysis. Second, we predict the Fed sentiment index by using a large set of macro-finance variables (a data-rich environment). For the prediction, we employ several methods; OLS regressions, factor models, and penalized regressions. We find that most of the models outperform the benchmark, AR (1), in our in-sample analysis, suggesting that the use of a large dataset can improve forecasting performance. However, a simple OLS model with economic policy uncertainty and industrial production is the only model that beats the benchmark in our out-of-sample setting. Moreover, we assess the usefulness of the predicted Fed sentiment by forecasting two financial variables. The results suggest that the predicted Fed sentiment indices provide more information than its lag.
Who watches the Auctioneer? Supervising primary bond markets to reduce agency costs

We study the mandated introduction of an auction (and its subsequent supervision) for the pri-mary bond market in China. These regulatory interventions significantly reduce the cost of debt for Chinese issuers. While this reduction is partly driven by reduced information asymmetry, we show the majority of the benefits flow from reduced agency conflict between underwriters and issuers. Using unique bidder-level data from a lead underwriter, we develop replicable tools and techniques to identify collusive bidding behavior that results in artificial (and economically costly) increases in bond yields. Such evidence can benefit global regulators, issuers and investors currently using unsupervised auction mechanisms.
How Does Deleveraging Affect Funding Market Liquidity?

How does deleveraging affect the market liquidity of high-embedded-leverage securities issued by financial institutions and the funding constraints of these institutions? We use the forced deleveraging of structured mutual funds during the 2015 Chinese stock market crash to study the effects of deleveraging. Our regression-discontinuity analysis shows that deleveraging significantly reduces the market liquidity of the deleveraging funds’ equity units. Moreover, our difference-in-differences analysis shows that deleveraging results in large decreases in subsequent fund flows, stock and cash holdings, and performance, with the impact channeled through the deterioration of the market liquidity of the fund’s equity units. This paper was accepted by Victoria Ivashina, finance.
Electoral Maldistricting

We introduce a framework to examine, both theoretically and empirically, electoral maldistricting. Maldistricting is defined as districting in pursuit of a policy at the expense of social welfare. Analysis is performed on the set of implementable (via some district map) legislatures, which are characterized geometrically (via majorization) and in information theoretic terms. The index of maldistricting that we propose aligns with courts' purported motivations for requesting redistricting in the three states that form our case study. The maldistricting we document favors Republicans over Democrats.
Limited Attention, Legalized Bribery and the Initial Public Offering Process

An initial public offering (IPO) is one time when a company can legally ‘bribe’ institutional investors to pay attention to it – investors that regularly attend road shows and give reliable feedback can expect allocations of underpriced shares in hot offerings. Our model generates a novel set of predictions regarding the relationship between initial returns and attention, retention, expansion and the benefits of attention, plus the asymmetry of the relationship with attention. Consistent with our model, investors’ attention is positively related to both initial returns and the magnitude of price revision. The relationship between attention and underpricing is asymmetric, and stronger when ex ante uncertainty is greater. Our work has implications regarding direct listings, is consistent with partial adjustment to public information, explains the relative unpopularity of grey market/when-issued trading and predicts that, even if the JOBS Act leads to more active pre-IPO trading (through crowdinvesting/equity crowdfunding), underpricing will still occur.
The Shadow Costs of Illiquidity

Abstract We solve a flexible model that captures transactions costs and infrequencies of trading opportunities for illiquid assets to better understand the shadow costs of illiquidity for different origins of asset illiquidity and heterogeneous investor types. We show that illiquidity that results in suboptimal asset allocation carries low shadow costs, whereas these costs are high when illiquidity restricts consumption. As a result, the shadow costs are high for short-term investors, investors who face substantial liquidity shocks, and investors who desire to allocate a large fraction of their wealth to illiquid assets.
Revealed Deliberate Preference Change

We propose a model of rational preference change that is identifiable,<br>empirically testable and founded on two normative principles. First, the<br>decision maker (DM) must be able to justify her preference change by making<br>attributes of the alternatives relevant or irrelevant. For instance, an employer<br>who stops discriminating candidates based on race or gender must<br>make the attribute “race” or “gender” irrelevant for all her future choices. <br>Second, DM must be consistent in her preference change. For instance, in<br>the future the employer cannot make relevant again the attribute “race” or<br>“gender”—unless he makes (ir)relevant other complementary attributes. <br>We show that two axioms on choice data which reflect these principles are<br>necessary and sufficient to represent preference change by the maximization<br>of a meta-preference. Finally, we apply our model and derive new<br>insights on the polarization of political preferences. <br>
Temporary Workers and Cash Holdings

We investigate the effect of firm reliance on temporary workers on cash holdings by exploiting the quasi-natural experiment created by a temporary worker protection law in South Korea which requires firms to change a worker’s status to full-time once the worker has been employed at the firm for two years. Although the law passage increases the rigidity of labor costs, firms that relied more on temporary workers prior to the law strategically lower their cash holdings afterward. This occurs because the law passage raises the likelihood that workers not belonging to a union become union members. The negative effect of the law on cash holdings is driven by firms for whom lower cash holdings provide more credible evidence that a firm is unable to concede to union demands and by firms with lower ex-ante operating leverage. The stock prices of unionized firms which rely more on temporary workers react negatively to the law passage and stock market participants value cash holdings less highly for these firms. Lastly, we show that low cash holdings and using subcontracting are complement mechanisms that firms in South Korea use to decrease union bargaining power.
Anticipation of Mandatory Audit Firm Rotation and Audit Quality

Researchers and regulators regularly debate whether mandatory audit firm rotation affects audit quality. Theoretically, rotation might improve auditor independence but impair competence. In 2014, the European Commission mandated audit firm rotation for public-interest entities, starting from 2020 for nonfinancial firms. However, any auditor change in the transition period could already be interpreted in light of the upcoming mandatory rotation regime, consistent with anecdotal evidence on such interpretations. These changes provide a unique setting because auditors have strong incentives to build a reputation for high-quality audits when choosing to participate in the market for rotations during the transition period. Using a balanced panel of 287 German firms and data from 2014 through 2019, we hypothesize and find lower discretionary accruals, abnormal working capital accruals, and total accruals in the first year after rotation. This effect is restricted to smaller public companies. Data Availability: The data are from public sources and are available from the third author upon written request. JEL Classifications: M42; M48.
Unemployment and Crime Victimization: A Local Approach

This paper explores the relationship between unemployment rate and crime victimization at the neighborhood level, using data from the French victimization survey. The very local nature of the data enables me to tackle the endogenous location selection issue: once I control for the characteristics of a larger area into which household select their location, the remaining variation of observables across neighborhoods within this larger area can be considered as exogenous. The contribution of this paper to the economics of crime literature is then twofold. First, I show that, at the very local neighborhood level, unemployment rate is an important factor explaining victimization. Second, I take advantage of the precise localization of the data to compare the effect of unemployment rate in the reference neighborhood and in adjacent neighborhoods. The results support the idea that criminals are mobile across neighborhoods for more serious economic crimes, but that petty crimes and vandalism do not involve any mobility.
The Expert and The Charlatan: an Experimental Study in Economic Advice

How do people choose what economic advice to heed? We develop a set of validated multiple-choice questions on economic policy problems, to examine empirically the persuasiveness of expert versus populist advice. We define populism as advice that conforms to commonly held beliefs, even when wrong. Two (computerized) advisers suggest answers to each question, and experimental participants are incentivised to choose the most accurate adviser. Do participants choose the high-accuracy adviser (`the Expert'), or the low-accuracy one (`the Charlatan'), whose answers are designed to be similar to the modal participant's priors? Our participants overwhelmingly choose the Charlatan, and this is only slowly and partially reversed with sequential feedback on the correct answer. We develop Bayesian models to determine optimal choice benchmarks, but find that behavior is best explained by a naive choice model akin to reinforcement learning with high inertia.
Invite Your Friend and You’ll Move Up in Line: Optimal Design of Referral Priority Programs

This paper studies the optimal design of referral priority programs, in which customers on a waitlist can jump the line by inviting their friends to also join the waitlist. Recent years have witnessed a growing presence of referral priority programs as a novel customer acquisition strategy for firms that maintain a waitlist. Different variations of this scheme are seen in practice, raising the question of what should be the optimal referral priority mechanism. We build an analytical model that integrates queueing theory into a mechanism design framework, where the objective of the firm is to maximize the system throughput, i.e., to accelerate customer acquisition as much as possible. Our analysis shows that the optimal mechanism has one of the following structures: full-priority, partial priority, first-in-first-out (FIFO), and strategic delay. A full-priority (partial-priority) scheme enables referring customers to get ahead of all (only some) non-referring ones. A FIFO scheme does not provide any priority-based referral incentive. A strategic-delay scheme grants full priority to referring customers, but artificially inflates the delay of non-referring ones. We show that FIFO is optimal if either the base market size or the referral cost is large. Otherwise, partial priority is optimal if the base market size is above a certain threshold; full priority is optimal at the threshold base market size; strategic delay is optimal if the base market size is below the threshold. We also find that referrals motivate the firm to maintain a larger capacity and therefore, can surprisingly shorten the average delay even though more customers sign up and strategic delay is sometimes inserted. Our paper provides prescriptive guidance for launching the optimal referral priority program and rationalizes common referral schemes seen in practice.
Competition in Parental Investments

We study the competition in parental investments among students' parents using random class assignment of students. We introduce five types of investments, namely, two out-of-family investments and three intra-family investments, which cover various forms such as money, time, and parenting style. We substantiate that competition exists and is more intense for investments with better observability. Heterogeneity analyses confirm that the competition is due to parents' high educational expectations and high returns to education. Discussions on the effects of investments suggest that more effective ways of parenting are to select appropriate parenting styles and enable children to rationally participate in tutoring.
Subjective Shadow Rate Beliefs at the Zero Lower Bound

We investigate the sensitivity of estimates of the "shadow rate", the counterfactual one-period interest rate that would obtain absent the zero lower bound. Using U.S. Treasury forward rates and short-term survey forecasts, we estimate models with different factor structures and assumptions about forecasts. Revisiting the channels of monetary policy from 2008-15, we find robust evidence of a structural break in monetary policy transmission before and after the Great Recession. While most models agree on the effects of calendar-based forward guidance, only models with distorted forecasts attribute non-trivial portions of announcement effects to expectations of short-term rates rather than term premia.
Income Approach and Discount Rates for Valuing Income-Producing Illiquid Assets - Outlines of New Framework: Revisiting the Concepts in Income Approach and Developing the Model of Illiquid Assets Transactional Pricing

This paper offers outlines of a new model for valuing income-producing illiquid assets (stocks of private companies in industries not quoted on public exchanges, intangible assets, income-producing specialized real property etc) where the valuation is for purposes of determining values-in-exchange (as opposed to investment value). In exploring the principle of discounting for such assets this paper makes a departure from equilibrium 'broad-market' thinking characteristic of CAPM-like models (which seem to be mostly applicable in their field of valuing liquid assets, but the transference of which to valuing assets which are involved only in sporadic exchanges is called into question) and offers a formalization of the new principle of 'transaction equilibrium' (which was inspired by the general definition of Market Value contained in the International Valuation Standards). Proceeding from this principle, it is possible to view the rationale for DCF-based exchange valuations at a new angle and offer alternative justifications for compressing general DCF format into particular income capitalization techniques (such as the Gordon Model, Inwood framework etc). Therefore, this paper offers (in Part 2) alternative derivations of those income capitalization techniques, while Part 1 is devoted to formulating discounting procedure which is seen to be more befitting for cases of valuing illiquid assets in transaction equilibrium conditions. Besides, general DCF framework is a multi-period framework which sits badly with one-period discounting techniques (such as CAPM or APT corollaries) which are having wide currency in practical valuations. The proposed discounting technique is explicitly multi-period and has investment behavioral features of presumed buyers/sellers transacting in illiquid assets for its inputs.
Identification and Estimation of a Nonseparable Production Function

This paper studies a nonseparable production function, which relaxes the standard Cobb-Douglas production function’s additive structure. Moreover, this model relaxes two widely used assumptions in production function literature: the M -th Markov process of productivity shock and the time-invariant functional form. This paper establishes a novel nonparametric identification of all the unspecified elements. The productivity shock, which is identified from the firm’s investment choice, is used to identify the production function and the random shock. The endogeneity problem in the investment choice is addressed using the previous period’s capital and investment and the current period’s input prices as control variables (Imbens and Newey (2009)). Concerning estimation, this paper proposes easy-to-implement kernel estimators. By the functional delta method, the estimators are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. The model is then applied to study Spanish firms’ behaviors. The estimation results show widely distributed productivity shock and non-monotonic elasticity
Is the Market Over-Optimistic About the Prospects of Firms that Issue Equity? Evidence for the Spanish Market

Previous evidence has documented that equity issuers underperform in the long-run. One possible explanation is that investors have over-optimistic expectations regarding future earnings and the underperformance occurs as these expectations are corrected over time. Our central focus is to test this hypothesis for Spanish rights issuing firms, for that firstly, we examine analysts' predictions about furture earnings of these companies. We observe that forecasts are unusually favourable and, moreover, the post-offering underperformance is most pronounced when analyst predictions have higher optimistic bias. Secondly, we study the market response to issuing firms' earnings announcements in the post-offering period observing a significant negative reaction. So the evidence in this paper is consistent with the excessive optimism hypothesis about issuing firms.
Zawał serca u chorego na cukrzycę - istotny problem kardiologiczny

Cukrzyca sprzyja rozwojowi zmian mia? d? ycowych i przyspiesza ich manifestacje kliniczn±. Jednym z najgro¼niejszych powik³an mia? d? ycy jest zawa³ serca. Ze wzgledu na nietypowy przebieg kliniczny i wspo³istnienie ro? nych powik³an cukrzycy postepowanie w przypadku zawa³u serca u chorych na cukrzyce stwarza wiele problemow diagnostycznych i terapeutycznych, ktore zosta³y w tej pracy omowione i usystematyzowane.
Scuttle for Shelter: Investor Flight-to-Safety and Political Uncertainty during the Spanish Second Republic

The Spanish Second Republic was a unique experiment of democratization in interwar Spain, which was characterized by extreme levels of political uncertainty. In response to this uncertainty, we find that investors sold stocks in favor of government bonds. In fact, political uncertainty had a negative effect on the aggregate stock market index, a positive effect on stock market volatility, and significant differences in the cross-section of stock return, consistent with their exposure to the uncertainty. This suggests that Spanish investors did not seem to perceive a soviet-style social revolution as a credible threat.
Chief Audit Executive Turnover: Market Reactions, Financial Reporting Quality, and Audit Risk Assessment

We understand relatively little about factors that affect the internal audit function’s ability to serve as an important monitor of financial reporting quality. We therefore study how turnover of the chief audit executive (CAE) influences financial reporting quality and stakeholders’ perceptions. Using data from Taiwan where companies are required to disclose when CAEs change position, we study how investors react to the announcement of a CAE turnover event, whether financial statements are of higher or lower quality after the turnover event, and how external auditors change their pricing behavior after the turnover event. We find that a CAE turnover event is associated negative stock mark reactions, a reduction in financial reporting quality, and higher external audit fees. Combined, the results provide evidence of the important monitoring role of internal auditing and especially of the critical role of the CAE. <br><br>