Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Disentangling the Effects of Ad Tone on Voter Turnout and Candidate Choice in Presidential Elections

We study the effects of positive and negative advertising in presidential elections. We develop a model to disentangle these effects on voter turnout and candidate choice. The central empirical challenges are highly correlated and endogenous advertising quantities that are measured with error. To address these challenges, we construct a large set of potential instruments, including interactions with incumbency that we demonstrate provide the critical identifying variation, and apply machine-learning causal inference methods. Using data from the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections, we find that positive and negative ads play fundamentally different roles. Negative ads are more effective at driving relative candidate shares, whereas positive ads stimulate turnout. These results indicate that a candidate geographically targeting tone trades off local relative share gains and local increases in turnout for localities with a strong base. Counterfactual simulations, where the candidates adjust the quantity of positive and negative advertising while budgets remain fixed, indicate that ad tone alone can impact the outcome of close elections. Our analysis also provides potential explanations as to why past studies have produced mixed findings on both ad-tone and turnout effects. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing.
Do Vegetarian Marketing Campaigns Promote Adoption of a Vegan Diet?

Globally, there are hundreds of millions of people following a vegetarian diet (which excludes meat) or a vegan diet (which excludes all animal-derived products). The authors examine an active debate on whether adoption of a vegan diet is promoted by marketing campaigns for a vegetarian diet. Proposing a new category-level model of adoption and disadoption, and flexible MLE estimation of diffusion models, the authors find for U.K data that most temporary vegetarian campaigns leave vegan adoption unchanged in the long run, but cause a transient rise in adoption when starting near equilibrium rates. For sustained campaigns the authors estimate that for every new vegetarian household, around 0.64 households adopt a vegan diet. There is little change in the campaign effect if the vegetarian to vegan transition rate is also reduced, and an organiser’s valuation of a campaign depends greatly on the relative values they attach to adoption of each diet. Very large campaigns that raise vegetarian rates above 21 percent may trigger self-sustained growth in vegan adoption, although the result is subject to high uncertainty.
Speculative Pressure

The paper investigates the information content of speculative pressure across futures classes. Long-short portfolios of futures contracts sorted by speculative pressure capture a significant premium in commodity, currency and equity markets but not in fixed income markets. Exposure to commodity, currency and equity index futures’ speculative pressure is priced in the broad cross-section after controlling for momentum, carry, global liquidity and volatility risks. The findings are confirmed by robustness tests using alternative speculative pressure signals, portfolio construction techniques and sub-periods inter alia. We argue that there is an efficient hedgers-speculators risk transfer in commodity, currency and equity index futures markets. <br><br>
Exchange Rate Passthrough to Import Prices and Domestic Inflation in Egypt

This paper studies exchange rate passthrough to import prices and domestic inflation in Egypt. Exchange rate passthrough to import prices is examined using yearly data from 1980 to 2016. Whereas exchange rate passthrough to domestic inflation is investigated using monthly data from 2011 to 2017. By regressing the import value index on exchange rate and lagged values of import value index, the paper predicts that passthrough in almost complete to imports, and import values tend to decrease on the long-run following a depreciation in the Egyptian Pound. For domestic inflation, after regressing CPI on nominal exchange rate and lagged values of CPI, the findings of the model show that inflation and exchange rate are positively correlated; a depreciation in the Egyptian pound translates into an increase in the overall inflation levels.
Distinguishing Factors and Characteristics with Characteristic-Mimicking Portfolios

We advance a procedure for deriving systematic factors from characteristics based on maximizing each factor’s exposure to a characteristic for given factor variance. The resulting characteristic-mimicking portfolios (CMPs) price assets identically as the original characteristics and have maximum power to identify underlying factors. Performance differences of mimicking factors and characteristics in explaining mean returns are artifacts of arbitrary procedures for generating mimicking factors. CMPs are ideally suited to distinguish factors and characteristics by explanatory power for the time series of returns and are useful for improving risk management and to determine if return explanations are justifiably linked to systematic risk.
It Depends on Where You Search: Institutional Investor Attention and Under-Reaction to News

We propose a direct measure of abnormal institutional investor attention (AIA) using news searching and news reading activity for specific stocks on Bloomberg terminals. AIA is highly correlated with institutional trading measures and related to, but different from, other investor attention proxies. Contrasting AIA with retail attention measured using Google search activity, we find that institutional attention responds more quickly to major news events, leads retail attention, and facilitates permanent price adjustment. The well documented price drifts following both earnings announcements and analyst recommendation changes are driven by announcements where institutional investors fail to pay sufficient attention.
Out of the Palaeotropics? Historical biogeography and diversification of the cosmopolitan ectomycorrhizal mushroom family Inocybaceae

Aim The ectomycorrhizal (ECM) mushroom family Inocybaceae is widespread in north temperate regions, but more than 150 species are encountered in the tropics and the Southern Hemisphere. The relative roles of recent and ancient biogeographical processes, relationships with plant hosts, and the timing of divergences that have shaped the current geographic distribution of the family are investigated.
On the Relation between Income Inequality and Happiness: Do Fairness Perceptions Matter

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived fairness will experience higher levels of life-time utility and are less in favor of income redistribution. In societies with a high level of actual social mobility, income inequality is perceived more positively with increased expected fairness. The opposite is expected for countries with low actual social mobility, due to an increasing relevance of a disappointment effect resulting from unsuccessful individual investments. Using the World Values Survey data and a broad set of fairness measures, we find strong support for the negative (positive) association between fairness perceptions and the demand for more equal incomes (subjective well-being). We also find strong empirical support for the disappointment effect in low social mobility countries. In contrast, the results for high-mobility countries turn out to be ambiguous.
The Impact of Business Cycle Conditions on Firm Dynamics and Composition

This paper estimates the causal impact of short-term aggregate fluctuations in Egypt, 1911–48, using global cotton price shocks. Firm entry was procyclical, and exit was acyclical. There were persistent differences between cohorts over the cycle; expansionary cohorts were of lower quality. The evidence supports models of firm entry with ex-ante heterogeneity. The findings highlight the extensive margin of entry as the primary adjustment mechanism. As a result, recessions had a strong “isolation” effect. This nature of firm entry amplified and propagated temporary price shocks.
Independent Directors, Critical Mass and Firm Performance: Empirical Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Taiwan

We examine the impact on firm performance of independent directors as a minority group. We find that, when there are only one or two independent directors, firm performance suffers, while with three or more independent directors it improves. We use the changes in independent director composition mandated by the Amendment of Security and Exchange Act in Taiwan as a natural experiment for identifying firms to be studied. Our results confirm the tokenism and critical mass theories reported in other board composition literature.
Fungos micorrízicos arbusculares (FMA) e aspectos fisiológicos em cafeeiros cultivados em sistema agroflorestal e a pleno sol

O trabalho foi realizado em cafeeiros cultivados a pleno sol e consorciado com grevileas em Vitoria da Conquista (BA), em duas estacoes: seca e chuvosa, com objetivo de verificar a influencia da arborizacao dos cafezais e da disponibilidade hidrica sobre a densidade de Fungos Micorrizicos Arbusculares (FMA) e ainda relacionar tais fatores com aspectos fisiologicos do cafeeiro. O experimento foi realizado em campos de observacao com dois tratamentos e seis repeticoes, sendo as medias comparadas pelo teste t (p<0,05), relacionando os sistemas e as estacoes. Verificou-se maior numero de esporos em epoca seca. A taxa de colonizacao radicular de FMA foi maior no cultivo consorciado, nao diferindo em funcao da estacao. O manejo dos cafeeiros sob sombra e a epoca seca contribuiram para maior teor de clorofila nas folhas. Maior valor absoluto do potencial hidrico foliar foi verificado quando avaliado na epoca chuvosa.
Relationship Life Cycle and Firm’s Payout Policy

This paper examines the effect of relationship duration with major customer on supplier’s payout policies. I find that firm which remains the relation with major customer in a longer period pays higher dividend. This finding is unbiased by the substitutional effect between dividend and repurchase and robust in different model specifications. Digging deeper, I find that the positive effect of relationship duration with major customer on supplier dividend payout is contributable to the reduction in adverse effect of cash flow volatility, dependence on major customer and the increase in knowledge spillovers from customer.
The Role of Divestitures in Horizontal Mergers

Divestitures accompanying horizontal mergers affect both the market power and the competitive efficiency of merging firms. Stock price reactions of customer firms are more positive (hence divestitures are more effective in mitigating market power impact of mergers) if merging firms divest assets to buyers outside the industry rather than existing rivals. This result is stronger when the merging industry is more concentrated and when powerful customers are absent. Stock price reactions of the acquirer and rivals suggest that firms are more concerned with maintaining a competitive edge relative to each other than gaining market power relative to customers.
Active and Passive Information Acquisition: Application to Financial Markets

Investors overreact to salient information and neglect nonsalient information. I conjecture that this is the result of cognitively effortful information processing with limited processing capacity and heterogeneous processing costs. On the one hand, the allocation of the limited information-processing capacities is subject to the means and objectives of the decision maker, that is, (active) goal-driven attention. On the other, the salience or visibility of news affecting the processing cost, that is, external (passive) stimulus-driven attention. I model this by extending the framework of rational inattention by heterogeneous marginal costs of the information processing, which are dependent on the visibility of the piece of information. This model of information processing is applied to a simple asset-pricing model. The main findings are that higher visibility of a piece of information leads to a lower risk premium, more informativeness, and a stronger reaction of the asset price to the piece of information. Furthermore, there exists a visibility threshold beyond which the investor decreases the attention capacities spent on a piece of information. Finally, investors will neglect a piece of information if it is below a threshold of visibility. Explicitly modeling the relevant aspects of information acquisition of a decision maker helps make sense of contradictory empirical results and can be useful for more structural estimations in the future.
CYTOPLASMIC DYNEIN OF THE SEA URCHIN EGG I. PARTIAL PURIFICATION AND CHARACTERIZATION *

Cytoplasmic ATPase of sea urchin eggs was partially purified by ammonium sulfate fractionation, DEAE‐cellulose chromatography, gel‐filtration chromatography and sucrose density gradient centrifugation. The specific activity increased to 0.7 μmole/min/mg protein indicating 100 fold purification. The ATPase had a sedimentation constant of 12S and was highly specific for ATP. The enzyme fraction contained neither (Na, K)‐ATPase, Ca‐ATPase, oligomycin‐sensitive ATPase, phosphatases, nor myosin. This cytoplasmic ATPase was inhibited by a low concentration of vanadate (V). Half‐maximal inhibition was observed at a vanadate concentration of 1 μM at low ionic strength. The inhibition was almost totally reversed by addition of norepinephrine. The vanadate‐sensitivity of cytoplasmic ATPase decreased with increasing KCl concentration. The activation by Mg2+ or Ca2+, and dependence of the activity on KCl concentration characteristic of dyneins from sea urchin sperm flagella and the embryonic cilia were observed with cytoplasmic ATPase. These results allowed the cytoplasmic ATPase to be classified as a dynein. In addition, this designation was reinforced by the fact that an oligomeric 23S form of cytoplasmic dynein was identified in the cytoplasm as well as in the isolated mitotic apparatus.
Effect of Korean Red Ginseng Extract on Cell Death Responses in Peroxynitrite-Treated Keratinocytes

Korean red ginseng (KRG) has been used worldwide as a traditional medicine for the treatment of various diseases, includ- including cancer. In this study, we determined the effect of KRG on the responses of HaCaT cells to peroxynitrite (ONOO? ). Cells treated with ONOO? (2 mM) prior to incubation with control medium for 12 hours displayed reduced viability, as determined using the 3-[4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl]-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide assay (viability about 48% of that of non-treated control cells). When KRG was added to the post-incubation medium, the negative effects of ONOO? on cell viability were significantly reduced. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction analysis indicated that KRG alone did not significantly alter p53 or “growth arrest and DNA damage” (GADD)45 mRNA levels. However, the addition of KRG to the post-incubation medium significantly and dose-dependently reduced levels of p53 and GADD45 mRNA in ONOO? -treated cells. Western blot analyses revealed that incubation with KRG decreased p53 and GADD45 protein levels in ONOO? -treated cells, relative to those in cells incubated with control medium. Collectively, these results suggest that Korean red ginseng extract protects cells against ONOO? -induced genotoxicity by increasing cell viability through modulating the expression of p53 signaling intermediates.
The SKEW Index: Extracting What Has Been Left

Abstract This study disentangles a measure of implied skewness that is related to downward movements in the U.S. equity index from the corresponding implied skewness that is associated with upward movements. A positive SKEW index is constructed from S&P 500 call options, whereas a negative SKEW index is constructed from the S&P 500 put options. We show that the positive SKEW is linked to market sentiment, whereas the negative SKEW is related to existing tail risk measures. The negative SKEW is proposed as a more objective prudent tail risk measure, and it is found to be able to predict recessions, market downturns, and uncertainty indicators up to one year in advance. The predictive power of the negative SKEW is also confirmed when we control for other tail risk measures and also out-of-sample.
A Comparison of the Missing-Indicator Method and Complete Case Analysis in Case of Categorical Data

The research aims to provide a complex analysis of missing-indicator method’s performance in case of a categorical independent variable in regression in comparison with complete case analysis. While the latter seems to be the most popular way to handle missing data, the former appears to be a simple and effective alternative that allows making a full sample available for analysis. By means of a statistical experiment and simulated data, we examined how these methods perform in conditions that differ in a mechanism of missingness, proportion of missing data, and model specification. The final results show that, overall, both methods produce unbiased estimates of regression coefficients, but crucially biased estimates of their standard errors and additional statistics such as R2, adjusted R2, and F-statistic, especially in case of a missing-indicator method. We explain these results by contribution of a missing-indicator variable, coefficient of which always turns out to be significant and far away from zero.
Bursaphelenchus hofmanni sp. n. (Nematoda, Aphelenchoididae) from spruce wood in Germany.

Investigations on the occurrence of Bursaphelenchus nematodes were carried out in damaged coniferous forests in Germany during the summer and autumn, 1996. The survey was part of a joint research project supported by the Commission of the European Communities (FAIR programme) aiming at the evaluation of the importance of Bursaphelenchus nematodes in South East and Central Europe. During this survey a new species, Bursaphelenchus hofmanni, was found in spruce wood in Thuringia, Germany. The species is characterized by a relatively small body length, females and males averaging 578 and 530 μm, respectively, the a-value in females and males 28 (23-31) and 25 (22-31), respectively, with a stylet length of 12 (11-14) μm. The males have relatively small and slightly curved spicules (length 13 [11-17] μm) with a prominent rostrum and a small cucullus.The female tail is conoid and curved with a finely rounded terminus. The females have a small vulval flap.
Impact of Outcome Ambiguity on Self‐Insurance and Self‐Protection: Experimental Evidence

This experimental study examines and compares individual valuations of the two risk reduction mechanisms: self&#8208;insurance and self&#8208;protection in risky versus ambiguous outcome situations. Results confirm that individuals do not perceive these mechanisms differently under risk. Moreover, ambiguity in the outcome (i.e., size of loss) affects valuations weakly, and changing representations of ambiguity do not alter valuation. In general, individuals are found to be ambiguity averse for low sizes of loss and ambiguity neutral for high sizes of loss, regardless of the probability of loss. Finally, no strong support is found for any particular model of ambiguity.
Organic Agricultural Products: A Comparative Study of India with Other Economies

Organic agricultural products have a unique method of production which protects the environment and minimizes the erosion of soil and thereby reduces pollution by encouraging a balanced system of usage of organic standard for agriculture products in India and other economies. The main objective of this case study is to assess the factors that influence the utilization of the geographical area and export activities of organic products in the Asian continent including India. This case study highlights the issues related to organic farming and is developed by using secondary data to assess the factors that influence agricultural organic products. The secondary data were obtained from exhaustive literature reviews of journals and internet sources. The scope of the case study is limited to the organic products and land areas which are used for its cultivation. The analysis of secondary data reveals that along with the increase in production, there is also an increase in the different varieties o forganic agricultural products. It is evident that organic farming has increased due to increased land usage for the cultivation in recent years in the Asian continent. From the study it is observed that the cumulative aggregate growth rate has increased from 6% to 29%during the year 2010-11 till 2015-16.
Are Large Banks Less Risky in the Basel III Period?

Basel III has significantly increased the capital requirements for large banks after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008 to 2009. And regulators claim that large banks are safer as they are well capitalized in terms of capital adequacy ratios in recent years. However, some studies argue that the credit risk of large banks perceived by the market has not fallen significantly since the GFC, and regulatory changes have been one contributing factor. To contribute to this debate, this paper evaluates whether the credit risk of large banks perceived by the market has decreased from the pre-crisis period to the period after the GFC by investigating the eight U.S. global systemically important banks (GSIBs). By analysing the drivers of the stock market valuation of these large banks, the paper finds that although U.S. GSIBs perform much worse than other sectors, they are less risky as perceived by the market in the Basel III period than other periods because these banks have increased their equity as a fraction of total assets significantly.
Welfare Gains from Trade: Weak Linkages and Complementarity of Intermediate Goods

In this paper we propose a theoretical model of international trade that shows the welfare gains from trade are much higher than what Arkolakis et al 2014 find. We use the idea of weak linkages and the complementarity between the intermediate goods as in Jones 2011. The idea is simple. Production requires many different intermediate goods to get together and if the firm cannot purchase any of them from home nor from foreign, the production process fails. Same is true if any of these linkages are low productive and the firm cannot import it from a high productive sector from abroad. We propose a multi-industry multi-country trade model, and show that the complementarity of the intermediates goods results in much larger welfare gains than the current literature measures, using the same trade data. Also, similar to Ossa2015, we show that the variation of trade elasticities among industries greatly increases the welfare gains from trade; using Ossa's mechanism alongside the assumption of complementarity magnify the estimated welfare gains from trade.