Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Primary and secondary stress responses to line capture in the blue mao mao

Primary and secondary stress responses were measured in wild Scorpis violaceus subjected to burst swimming from angling. Fish were blood sampled from 20 s to 30 min after hooking. Consequent rises in plasma adrenaline (14–316 nmol l−1), noradrenaline (25–345 nmol l−1), and cortisol (0.4–197 ng ml−1) correlated with time since capture, and plasma lactate (0.1–12.2 mmol l−1) reflected work done during intense exercise. Haemoglobin concentration and haematocrit also increased with exercise, and erythrocyte swelling occurred. Wild S. violaceus demonstrated a spontaneity and intensity of exercise not seen in fish acclimatized to aquarium conditions. By contrast, the stress responses of fish in captivity, despite careful husbandry, differed qualitatively and quantitatively from those in the wild. Cannulated fish had higher resting plasma cortisol concentrations (61.9±9.5 ng ml−1) than did rapidly caught wild fish (<5 ng ml−1) and these values were not significantly changed with burst swimming. Catecholamine secretion, possibly suppressed by cortisol, was insufficient to cause erythrocyte swelling. Erythrocyte nucleotides do not play a role in exercise, but are elevated in captive fish. It is hypothesized that primary endocrine responses are triggered by higher cortical processing of sensory information which is fundamentally different in the natural environment.
Leveraging Overconfidence

In theory, investors who have low security selection ability trade more, use leverage more, and perform worse if they are overconfident. We confirm these predictions empirically by analyzing the overconfidence, trading, and performance of retail investors who use margin. Using survey data, we measure overconfidence as the difference between an investor’s self-assessment of knowledge and tested knowledge; margin investors have greater overconfidence than cash investors. Using broker data, we find margin investors trade more, speculate more, and have worse security selection ability than cash investors. A long-short portfolio that follows the trades of margin investors loses 35 bps per day.
Complements or Substitutes? Private Codes, State Regulation and the Improvement of Labor Standards in Global Supply Chains

Recent research on regulation and governance suggests that a mixture of public and private interventions is necessary to improve working conditions and environmental standards within global supply chains. Yet, less attention has been directed to how these (potentially) complementary forms of regulation might interact together. The form of these interactions are investigated through a contextualized comparison of suppliers producing for Hewlett Packard, one the world’s leading global electronics firms. Using a unique dataset describing Hewlett Packard’s supplier audits over time, coupled with qualitative fieldwork at a matched pair of suppliers in Mexico and the Czech Republic, this study shows how private and public regulation can interact in different ways – sometimes as complements; other times as substitutes – depending upon both the national contexts and the specific issues being addressed. The paper closes with a discussion of the theoretical implications of these findings.
Focal Species, Community Representation, and Physical Proxies as Conservation Strategies: a Case Study in the Amphibolite Mountains, North Carolina, U.S.A.

Abstract: Conservation organizations are increasingly employing representative‐based conservation strategies to overcome the limits of a species‐by‐species approach and to expand the focus of conservation to include overall biodiversity and ecosystem processes. To compare focal‐species, community‐level, and physical‐proxy approaches in terms of their ability to predict vegetation communities and capture rare species, we used plot‐level data from the Amphibolite Mountains of North Carolina. We identified diagnostic species via indicator‐species analysis to calculate predictability and capture rates at the focal‐species and community levels. We performed classification and regression‐tree analysis to determine whether the biotic communities could effectively be characterized by their physical environment and to assess community predictability at this scale. At both the focal‐species level and the community level, common indicator species were most reliable when the indicator species were themselves habitat specialists occurring in distinct sites. In most cases, rare‐species capture was maximized with a focal‐species approach, but this approach required high levels of investment. Alternatively, conservation strategies based on physical proxies were not dependent on intense field surveys, but were less effective in capturing rare species. This approach may still provide an important first cut for narrowing down the number of sites requiring intense field surveys and finer‐scale analysis. Both coarse‐filter approaches provided effective mechanisms for targeting and protecting large‐scale ecological processes and overall biodiversity, and community‐level conservation also recognized the inherent value of communities beyond their capacity as representative indicators. An effective and efficient conservation‐design strategy might employ each of these three conservation targets in a multistage approach. Conservation efforts could also benefit from further research into the ecological characteristics that regulate the distribution of rare species and the implications for species capture with these different conservation approaches.
Do the Basis and Other Predictors of Futures Return Also Predict Spot Return with the Same Signs and Magnitudes? Evidence from the LME

Abstract The LME is a major international commodity exchange for industrial metals. Both futures contracts and spot metals are traded there, and the textbook principle of the futures-spot convergence precisely holds there. In this paper, we formulate two claims about spot and futures return prediction. First, the predictors of futures price return should also predict spot price return with the same signs and magnitudes under certain conditions. Second, the futures-spot basis is an exception. These claims lead to testable hypotheses, and provide theory-based restrictions for the coefficients of spot and futures return regressions. We investigate six industrial metals and find empirical support for our hypotheses. The in-sample and out-of-sample evidence shows that financial variables, proxies for global economic activities, and the basis predict futures and spot price returns consistently with our hypotheses. Furthermore, our out-of-sample trading exercises document economic significance of the restrictions.
Bond Insurance and Public Sector Employment

Local governments are opaque and, due to asymmetric information, face credit rationing. Bond insurance alleviates this problem by shifting the burden of information production from investors to insurers. The value of bond insurance lies in its ability to grant governments access to the municipal bond market. More opaque governments buy more bond insurance and have more persistent insurance relationships, highlighting the role of information frictions. During the Global Financial Crisis, governments associated with ailing insurers issued less debt, cut expenditures, and hired fewer workers. These effects are concentrated among opaque governments and persisted for many years because these governments remain excluded from the municipal bond market. Partial equilibrium calculations show that affected governments' aggregate expenditures and employment levels in 2017 would have been 6% to 10% higher, if bond insurance had remained available.
Corporate Governance during the Financial Crisis: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates (UAE)

This study evaluates corporate governance practices of listed firms in the UAE and investigates whether corporate governance mitigates/exacerbates the impact of leverage and risk on firm performance during crisis and non-crisis times. The study constructs a corporate governance index not only to examine the dispute of the role of corporate governance during the crisis, but also its influence on other factors that fuelled the crisis. A firm-level panel data is used that spans the period 2008 to 2012 of all listed firms on ADX and DFM. The study finds a positive influence of corporate governance strength on the accounting performance, but a negative influence on the firms’ economic performance. In normal times, corporate governance mitigates the negative influence of leverage and risk on the accounting and economic firm performance. However, this synergy effect varies across performance indicators during crisis.
Bundling

In this paper, we look at the case for bundling in an oligopolistic environment. We show that bundling is a particularly effective entry-deterrent strategy. A company that has market power in two goods, A and B, can, by bundling them together, make it harder for a rival with only one of these goods to enter the market. Bundling allows an incumbent to defend both products without having to price low in each. The traditional explanation for bundling that economists have given is that it serves as an effective tool of price discrimination by a monopolist. Although price discrimination provides a reason to bundle, the gains are small compared to the gains from the entry-deterrent effect.
International Fund Inflows, Economic Growth and Health Care Development: The Case of Bangladesh

Inflow of foreign currencies is believed to generate multidimensional impacts in shaping the economy of the recipient nations, particularly the underdeveloped nations that are unable to finance their development investments. To the best of knowledge, no previous study has focused simultaneously on all the four sources of foreign inflows and their individual effects on Bangladesh’s economic growth and healthcare development prospects. This paper fills this gap by investigating the effectiveness of the foreign inflows in generating favorable impacts on the two utmost imperative macroeconomic targets in Bangladesh during the period 1983-2014. This paper attempts to analyze the individual influences of all the sources of foreign currency inflows on economic growth and health sector development in context of Bangladesh during the period from 1983 to 2014. As per the methodology, the Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF), Phillips-Perron (PP), Johansen Cointegration tests were followed by the Granger Causality test and the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) approach. The findings reveal that most of the sources of foreign currency inflows affect both economic growth and health care development in the long run but are ineffective in the short run. Thus, there is a scope for further studies to identify the factors attributing to the ineffectiveness of foreign inflows in the short run and design effective policies in rectifying the problems to attainment of socio economic goals both in the long run and short run.
The Determinants and Effects of Board Committees

Abstract The governance reforms of 2003 require corporate boards to establish various committees. This paper studies how these committees are structured and the corresponding impacts. I find that independent directors with long tenures and multiple board seats tend to multitask and sit on more committees. The firms that multitask their independent directors are associated with comparatively low CEO compensation and high ROA. In particular, the benefits of multitasking independent directors are more pronounced in firms with long-tenured CEOs. I contribute to the literature by showing that board performance depends not only on the directors' identities, but also on their task assignments.
The Economic Impact of Changes in the Local Bank Presence

The study analyses the economic consequences of changes in the local bank presence. Using a unique dataset of banks, firms, and counties in Poland over the period 2009-2014, we show that changes in local banking that increase the role of the relationship banking model are associated with improvements in local labour markets and easier access of SMEs to bank debt. Moreover, radical changes in the ownership structure of large commercial banks result in a more rapid new firm creation. Finally, we document that young companies’ performance is more sensitive to the instability of local banking markets.
Managing liquidity with portfolio staleness

Liquidity is a risk factor of primary relevance that can significantly affect the asset allocation decisions of investors. In this paper, we introduce the concept of portfolio staleness and propose a simple framework to manage portfolio liquidity, intended as the cost needed to liquidate the portfolio. Within this framework, the traditional minimum variance problem is solved under the additional constraint that portfolio staleness must be smaller than a given threshold. We show that a dynamic asset allocation strategy based on the staleness constrained portfolio can significantly enhance portfolio liquidity over the standard minimum variance solution. Meanwhile, the increase in portfolio risk is limited, generating large liquidity gains per unit of risk.
The dorid nudibranch genus Jorunna Bergh, 1876 (Gastropoda: Opisthobranchia) in New Zealand

Two Jorunna species are recorded from New Zealand waters for the first time. One species is recognized as the temperate Australian J. pantherina (Angas, 1864), the other as a new species. Both species are described and illustrated. The distinction between Jorunna Bergh, 1876 and the closely related Kentrodoris Bergh, 1876 (both in the family Kentrodorididae), and Rostanga Bergh, 1879 (Rostangidae) is lessened after a re-appraisal of descriptions of these genera and, particularly, the analysis of the structure of the new species. Jorunna is still separable from Kentrodoris in having a pleurembolic penis (an ensheathed muscular glans when retracted), and Rostanga in possessing a solid stylet (accessory part of the reproductive system) and fewer rows and teeth/row in the radula. Lessening the distinction between these genera strengthens further the case against the maintenance of many of the cryptobranch dorid families. Therefore, Jorunna is classified here as a member of the virtually all-embracing Doridida.
Choice of Accounting Practices in Brazil: An Analysis from the Contractual Covenants Hypothesis Perspective

This paper aims to investigate whether managers of Brazilian companies registered at the Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) which have made long-term financial borrowings (bonds and bank loans), voluntarily have changed their accounting practices in order to prevent the violation of their covenants (based on accounting numbers) specified in their lending agreements. During the analysis of this phenomenon, previous studies suggest that company managers have adopted less conservative accounting practices (increasing their earnings and equity) in order to avoid violation of financial covenants. It was possible to demonstrate by the analysis of 125 Brazilian companies (registered at the CVM), with records of long-term borrowings in the credit market via bonds and bank loans (from 2000 to 2006), and using univariate (empirical histograms and chi–square tests) and multivariate (logistic regression) statistical tests, that these companies did not fulfill voluntarily changes in accounting practices in order to avoid violation of financial covenants. Two relevant items can explain the observed results: the low costs in cases of violation of financial covenants, and the active accounting regulations and monitoring efforts of regulatory agencies for public services, especially in the electricity sector. The main contribution of the observed results is to demonstrate that, despite the existence of financial covenants in debt securities issued by the Brazilian companies analyzed, there is no significant evidence of opportunistic changes in accounting practices to avoid breaches in financial covenants.
The Role of Chinese Economic Variables on the Australian and New Zealand Equity Returns

This study investigates the explanatory power of Chinese economic variables on the Australian and New Zealand equity returns. Results suggest that Chinese economic variables have significant explanatory power for both market-level and industry-level portfolio returns. Our results are robust when using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) approach. We also find the predictive power is stronger for the post-FTA period. In addition, the out-of-sample analysis confirms our previous results, suggesting that Chinese economic variables contain incremental information when estimating Australian and New Zealand equity market returns. We believe our findings have important implications for investors and policymakers in both countries.
Lazy Prices

Using the complete history of regular quarterly and annual filings by U.S. corporations from 1995-2014, we show that when firms make an active change in their reporting practices, this conveys an important signal about future firm operations. Changes to the language and construction of financial reports also have strong implications for firms’ future returns: a portfolio that shorts “changers” and buys “non-changers” earns up to 188 basis points in monthly alphas (over 22% per year) in the future. Changes in language referring to the executive (CEO and CFO) team, regarding litigation, or in the risk factor section of the documents are especially informative for future returns. We show that changes to the 10-Ks predict future earnings, profitability, future news announcements, and even future firm-level bankruptcies; meanwhile firms that do not make changes experience positive abnormal returns. Unlike typical underreaction patterns in asset prices, we find no announcement effect associated with these changes–with returns only accruing when the information is later revealed through news, events, or earnings–suggesting that investors are inattentive to these simple changes across the universe of public firms.
Short- and Long-Term Effects of Innovations on Enterprise Market Value

Innovations seem crucial for contemporary enterprises willing to achieve the objective of increasing firm’s value. The aim of this paper is to examine, both conceptually and empirically, the relationship between innovations and tourism enterprises’ market value. Tourism sector was taken into consideration in order to fulfill the existing research gap. This focused paper was based on relevant market data. Event study and calendar time portfolio approaches were chosen to test investors’ responses to innovation announcements. Six tourism companies listed on the Main Market of Warsaw Stock Exchange were examined within the six years research period and 34 innovation announcements were identified. Polish Press Agency database and Warsaw Stock Exchange databases were used to collect data. Results indicate that innovations affected positively investors’ valuation of tourism enterprises. The average event day market value change equaled 0.63% and differed considerably from the one-year one of 3.02% meaning that investors adjust their initial reaction over time. Initially investors reacted mostly to marketing, distributional and external relations innovations while within one-year period they attributed the most value to marketing and external relations ones.
Monetary Policy Expectation Errors

We use survey data on expectations about future monetary policy to decompose excess returns to fed funds (FF) futures and overnight index swaps (OIS) into a term premium and an expectation error component. We find that excess returns are almost entirely driven by expectation errors, while term premia are slightly negative and economically small. We show that most of the expectation errors stem from market participants underestimating how aggressively the Federal Reserve has eased policy during the last three decades. Our evidence suggests that market participants at the time were unaware of changes in the central bank's reaction function, in particular the importance attributed to deteriorating financial conditions and falling stock market returns. We confirm our main results in an international sample of six major currency areas.
Heat stress in cattle and the effect of shade on production and behaviour: a review

At high temperatures, evaporative cooling is the principal mechanism for heat dissipation in cattle. It is influenced by humidity and wind speed and by physiological factors such as respiration rate, and density and activity of sweat glands. Following exposure to heat, cattle appear to acclimatise within 2-7 weeks. The failure of homeostasis at high temperatures may lead to reduced productivity or even death. Knowledge of characteristic behavioural signs of increasing heat stress may alert cattle handlers to impending heat distress, particularly in areas of potential climatic extremes of high temperatures and humidities. Reduction of the heat increment of feeding by dietary manipulation may partially protect cattle from forecast heat stress. Under high heat stress, Bos indicus breeds and their crosses have better heat regulatory capacities than Bos taurus breeds, due to differences in metabolic rate, food and water consumption, sweating rate, and coat characteristics and colour. Also, because Bos taurus have a higher heat loading at the skin, they must evaporate substantially more sweat than Bos indicus to maintain normal body temperatures. Welfare concerns exist about heat stress and the provision of shade for feedlot cattle. In hot weather, cattle actively seek shade, which may reduce the radiant heat load by 30% or more. Under conditions of extreme heat load, shading may maintain production and reduce deaths from heat stroke. Shading of feed and water also offers production advantages for British and European breeds of cattle.
Defensive traits of savanna trees – the role of shoot exposure to browsers

To investigate patterns of plant defence, a study was conducted on 13 tree species in Botswana. We tested the hypotheses that (1) shoots on small, young trees are more defended than shoots at the same height on tall, mature individuals and (2) shoots within browsing height are more defended than shoots above the reach of browsers, on mature trees. Plant traits studied were total phenolics, tannin activity, nitrogen (N), acid-detergent fibre (ADF), and degree of spinescence (in three species). We found some support for the first hypothesis. Overall young trees had a significantly higher concentration of total phenolics than mature trees and on species level these differences were significant for three of the 13 species. However, we found no differences in tannin activity, spinescence or ADF concentration between young and mature trees, and four species had higher levels of N in young trees, suggesting higher overall palatability. Contrary to our second hypothesis, shoots within browsing height were less chemically defended (total phenolics and tannin activity) than shoots above browsing height in six of 13 species. Two species had less ADF in lower shoots, and no significant differences were found in N or spinescence for any species. This study included a broad range of tree species at two sites and the results indicate that general theories of plant defence, originating from boreal and northern temperate forests, cannot be simply applied to savanna ecosystems.