Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of E-Cigarette Taxes on E-Cigarette Prices and Tobacco Product Sales: Evidence from Retail Panel Data

We estimate the effect of e-cigarette tax rates on e-cigarette prices, e-cigarette sales, and sales of other tobacco products using NielsenIQ Retail Scanner data from 2013 to 2019. We find that 90% of e-cigarette taxes are passed on to consumer retail prices. We then estimate reduced form and instrumental variables regressions to examine the effects of e-cigarette and cigarette taxes and prices on sales. We calculate an e-cigarette own-price elasticity of -2.2 and particularly large elasticity of demand for flavored e-cigarettes. Further, we document a cigarette own-price elasticity of -0.4 and positive cross-price elasticities of demand between e-cigarettes and cigarettes, suggesting economic substitution.
Is firm-level clean or dirty innovation valued more?

We examine how Tobin's Q is linked to ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ innovation and innovation efficiency at the firm level. Clean innovation relates to patented technologies in areas such as renewable energy generation and electric cars, whereas dirty innovation relates to fossil-based energy generation and combustion engines. We use a global patent data set, covering over 15,000 firms across 12 countries. We find strong and robust evidence that the stock market recognizes the value of clean innovation and innovation efficiency and accords higher valuations to those firms that engage in successful clean research and development activities. The results are substantively invariant across innovation measurement, model specifications, estimators adopted, select sub-samples of firms and United States and European patent offices.
Making Sense of Informal Economies in Fragile Contexts

Increased attention for job creation, private sector development and illicit financial flows in fragile contexts has rekindled policy interest in the phenomenon of economic informality. Yet, conventional responses to informal economies may not be suitable for fragile situations due to the particular challenges posed by the dynamics of fragility and conflict. International development actors therefore need to recalibrate intervention strategies geared toward addressing economic informality in fragile contexts. This also requires them to look beyond the economic dimension of informal economies and pay attention to the political and social undercurrents that sustain patterns of economic informality in fragile environments. Development actors are also confronted with a number of dilemmas about the appropriate level of engagement with the informal economy, the envisaged role for the state, the development potential of informal economies, and hybrid forms of economic governance. Finally, important questions about the manner in which informal economies shape governance, development and conflict patterns in fragile environments remain to be addressed. Making Sense of Informal Economies in Fragile Contexts Issues, Dilemmas and Questions JUNE 2015
Comparing the costs of pedestrian wayfinding heuristics across different urban network morphologies.

During wayfinding, pedestrians do not always choose the shortest available route. Instead, route choices are guided by several well-known wayfinding strategies or heuristics. These heuristics minimize cognitive effort and usually lead to satisfactory route choices. The length of the route obtained from applying a wayfinding heuristic is dependent on the spatial arrangement or morphology of the urban pedestrian network. This study evaluates the cost of four popular wayfinding heuristics across nine different urban network morphologies. It observes that the cost of these wayfinding heuristics vary significantly and individually differently with morphology, supporting the assumption that people choose heuristics by environment.
V-Shaped Disposition Effect, Stock Prices, and Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift: Evidence from Korea

Abstract This study investigates the impact of the V-shaped disposition effect on asset prices in the Korean stock market, which is characterized by a high proportion of retail investors. By utilizing a specified dataset containing stock-level information on the trading activities of different types of investors, we find evidence to support the presence of V-shaped net selling propensity in the Korean stock market. In addition, we find that net selling pressure has a positive effect on the cross-section of subsequent stock returns, and this relationship appears only when accounting for individual trading. Furthermore, this net selling propensity of retail investors delays the incorporation of good news into stock price, while helps stock price reflect its bad news. We show that good (bad) news lead to positive (negative) drifts in stock prices following earnings announcements in the presence (paucity) of investors exhibiting the V-shaped disposition.
DEEP REINFORCEMENT LEARNING AGENTS

As deep reinforcement learning driven by visual perception becomes more widely used there is a growing need to better understand and probe the learned agents. Understanding the decision making process and its relationship to visual inputs can be very valuable to identify problems in learned behavior. However, this topic has been relatively under-explored in the research community. In this work we present a method for synthesizing visual inputs of interest for a trained agent. Such inputs or states could be situations in which specific actions are necessary. Further, critical states in which a very high or a very low reward can be achieved are often interesting to understand the situational awareness of the system as they can correspond to risky states. To this end, we learn a generative model over the state space of the environment and use its latent space to optimize a target function for the state of interest. In our experiments we show that this method can generate insights for a variety of environments and reinforcement learning methods. We explore results in the standard Atari benchmark games as well as in an autonomous driving simulator. Based on the efficiency with which we have been able to identify behavioural weaknesses with this technique, we believe this general approach could serve as an important tool for AI safety applications.
ANOTHER LOOK AT THE LOW TAXABLE INCOME OF FOREIGN-CONTROLLED COMPANIES IN THE UNITED STATES by

Another Look at the Low Taxable Income of Foreign-Controlled Companies in the United States This paper takes another look at the differential in the profitability of foreign-controlled and domestic companies. It both uses more recent data and extends previous work. One feature is the recognition of U.S. based companies. The sensitivity of the results to weighting observations by size to reduce the role of small firms also receives more attention. This paper also relies more on company sales rather than assets to scale net income because of the valuation and other problems associated with assets reported on corporate tax returns. The paper concludes that more than 50 percent, and perhaps as much as 75 percent, of the foreign-domestic profitability differential can be explained by systematic differences between foreign-controlled and domestic companies. This is greater than the share attributed to measurable differences in the earlier paper by Grubert, Goodspeed and Swenson (GGS) published in 1993. The suggestion that income shifting does not explain most of the differential is reinforced by the finding that companies with foreign ownership of between 25 and 50 percent exhibit the same low profitability as 100 percent foreign-owned companies. Income shifting would seem less likely when there are other shareholders, particularly since majority seem to be either domestic companies or public stockholders. A panel of companies from 1987 to 1993 revealed growing profitability over time for foreign-controlled manufacturing companies compared to domestic companies. A comparable “maturation” effect was also found in the earlier study by GGS. The paper also presents an analysis of the data from Form 5472, on which foreign owned companies report on transactions with offshore affiliates. There is some suggestion that greater purchases from foreign affiliates, particularly from those in low-tax countries, are associated with lower U.S. income. But the statistical results are not robust and, at best, would explain only about 15 percent of the profitability differential.
Relating Heavy Snacking to Variation in Consumption Across Snack Brands and Categories

The authors use a rich diary panel data on snacks consumed, to address the following questions: (1) To what extent do heavy snackers exhibit greater variation in consumption? Is variation in consumption across product categories or brands or both? (2) Are consumers high in varied consumption at the category level also high in varied consumption at the brand level and viceversa? (3) What factors influence variation in consumption across categories and brands? The study accounts for direct varied behavior due to satiation and satiety, derived varied behavior due to consumption context and aspects of planned consumption. This is another departure from prior work that focused on only one aspect but not on all three. Results show that heavy snackers exhibit greater variation in consumption across brands, but not across categories. Further, there is a significant positive correlation between varied consumption across brands in a category and varied consumption across categories.
The Power of Interaction in Local Differential Privacy

A communication protocol is locally differentially private if the communicated messages reveal little about the data of participants. We survey two papers that show interactive local privacy can be much more powerful than noninteractive local privacy. First, Kasiviswanathan, Lee, Nissim, Raskhodnikova, and Smith [19] prove a general equivalence between locally private learning and statistical query (SQ) learning. They use this equivalence to give a new concept class, masked parity, which is much harder to learn under noninteractive local privacy than interactive local privacy. However, a drawback of this result is that masked parity is a concept class constructed exclusively for separation. Daniely and Feldman [7] extend this line of work by connecting a concept class’ noninteractive SQ learnability with its margin complexity. This is useful because past work has shown that the margin complexity of decision lists is exponential in the dimension of the example space. In conjunction with the local-SQ equivalence given by Kasiviswanathan et al. [19], this yields another separation: noninteractive locally private decision list learning is much harder than interactive locally private decision list learning. ∗University of Pennsylvania CIS Department. This document submitted to fulfill the WPE II Exam requirement.
miR-10a in Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells Is a Biomarker for Sepsis and Has Anti-Inflammatory Function

Background Recent literature has reported the use of circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) as biomarkers for sepsis. Immune cells play an essential role in the pathophysiology of sepsis. The aim of this prospective study was to identify miRNAs in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) that could differentiate between sepsis and infection based on Sepsis-3 definition. Methods A total of 62 patients (41 with sepsis and 21 with infection suffering from pneumonia but without sepsis) and 20 healthy controls were enrolled into the study. PBMC at admission were examined for a panel of 4 miRNAs (miR-10a, miR-17, miR-27a, and miR-125b), which have been documented to participate in inflammatory response in immune cells, via qRT-PCR. Data were validated in a mouse model of sepsis induced via cecal ligation and puncture (CLP) and THP-1 monocytes. Results miR-10a levels in PBMC at admission were significantly lower in sepsis patients compared with patients with infection and healthy controls. miR-10a levels were negatively correlated with disease severity scores as well as levels for c-reactive protein and procalcitonin. In addition, low miR-10a expression had a diagnostic value for sepsis and a prognostic value for 28-day mortality in receiving operating characteristic analysis. Compared with infection patients and healthy controls, PBMC from sepsis patients also had higher levels of mitogen-activated kinase kinase kinase 7 (MAP3K7), a known target protein of miR-10a and an activator of the NF-κB pathway. In the mouse model of CLP-induced sepsis, miR-10a levels in PBMC were significantly decreased as early as 8 h after CLP. Overexpression of miR-10a in THP-1 cells significantly reduced the expression of MAP3K7 and proinflammatory cytokines including IL-6, TNF-α, and MCP-1. Conclusions PBMC miR-10a levels are decreased in sepsis and negatively correlated with the disease severity. Levels of miR-10a could distinguish between sepsis and infection and predict 28-day mortality. miR-10a plays an anti-inflammatory role in the pathogenesis of sepsis.
Hematological Profile of Newborns Hospitalized for Neonatal Bacterial Infection in the Neonatology of the Pediatric Department of Gabriel Toure Teaching Hospital Bamako, Mali

The blood count is an easily achievable routine exam and will it have specifics in the event of a neonatal bacterial infection? Hence, the present study with the objective of determining the profile of the hemogram of newborns hospitalized for early bacterial neonatal infection. Material and methods: This was a cross-sectional study that took place from June 27 to September 03, 2016 in the neonatology department of teaching hospital Gabriel Toure. Included were all neonates hospitalized for early neonatal bacterial infection (ENBI) and who had a blood count. Results: We included 227 patients, 64.8% of whom were premature. The sex ratio was 1.4. The infants were less than 24 hours old in 93.6% of the cases. The mean hemoglobin level was 16.435 g/dl [8.8 - 22.26]. Erythrocytopenia was found in 18.5% of cases. Anemia was present in 17% of newborns. The average leukocyte was 15.228·103/mm3 [1.4 - 72]. Hyperleukocytosis and leukopenia were found in 12.32% and 6.6% respectively. Neutropenia and lymphopenia were present in 14.5% and 30.8%. There was a correlation between leukocytosis of negative blood cultures (23/27) (p = 0.030). For Neutrophils, neutrophilia was more observed in term neonates and neutropenia in premature infants (p = 0.03). Monocytosis was present in 13.6% of cases. One quarter (25.5%) of newborns had thrombocytopenia. Conclusion: Hematological variations did not allow a specific profile of newborns hospitalized for early neonatal bacterial infection to be identified.
Functional Composition Changes of a Subtropical Monsoon Evergreen Broad-Leaved Forest Under Environmental Change

Long-term studies have revealed that forest species composition was shifting under environment change and disturbance induced by loss of large trees. Yet, few studies explicitly analyzed their impacts on composition concurrently. To learn more about impacts of environment change and disturbance on driving forest community, we investigated shifts in functional composition over past 24 years in an old-growth subtropical forest in southern China. We analyzed nine traits that are mainly related to leaf nutrients, photosynthetic capacity, hydraulic conductivity, and drought tolerance of plants and examined hypotheses: (1) The functional composition change over time was directional instead of random fluctuation, (2) drought-tolerant species increased their abundance under soil dryness, (3) both environmental change and disturbance related to changes of functional composition significantly, and (4) initial trait values of quadrats strongly influenced their subsequent change rates in quadrat level (10 × 10 m). We found that species composition had shifted to favor species with high leaf nutrient content, high photosynthesis rate, high hydraulic conductivity, low water-use efficiency, and high drought tolerance traits, which was due to soil dryness and disturbance. These two factors explained 47–58% of quadrats’ trait value changes together. Considering rapidly increasing stem density, this pattern may indicate ecological processes of which disturbance provided numerous recruits of resource-acquisition strategy species and soil dryness conducted a selecting effect on shaping composition in the forest. Additionally, quadrats with initial trait values at the far end of change direction shifted faster in three traits, which also indicated that functional composition changes in quadrats were directional and homogenized. Our results implied that environment change and accompanied disturbance events possibly drove species composition change along a different trajectory in the subtropical forest that experienced high climatic variability.
Shooting the Messenger? Supply and Demand in Markets for Willful Ignorance

We investigate the role of advisers in the transmission of ethically relevant information, a critical aspect of executive decision making in organizations. In our laboratory experiment, advisers are informed about the negative externalities associated with the decision-maker's choices and compete with other advisers. We find that advisers suppress about a quarter of "inconvenient'' information. Suppression is not strategic, but based on the advisers' own preferences in the ethical dilemma. On the demand side, a substantial minority of decision makers avoid advisers who transmit inconvenient information (they "shoot the messenger''). Overall, by facilitating assortative matching, a competitive market for advisers efficiently caters to the demand for both information and information avoidance. Decision-makers are less likely to implement their preferred option when they are randomly matched to advisers and there is no scope for assortative matching.
The Distribution of Cross Sectional Momentum Returns When Underlying Asset Returns Are Student’s t Distributed

In Kwon and Satchell (2018), a theoretical framework was introduced to investigate the distributional properties of the cross-sectional momentum returns under the assumption that the vector of asset returns over the ranking and holding periods were multivariate normal. In this paper, the framework is extended to derive the corresponding results when the asset returns are multivariate Student’s t. In particular, we derive the probability density function and the moments of the cross-sectional momentum returns and examine in detail the special case of two underlying assets to demonstrate that many of the salient features reported in the empirical literature are consistent with the theoretical implications.
Prominence and Engagement: Different Mechanisms Regulating Continuance and Contribution in Online Communities

ABSTRACT Online communities have suffered from their members’ intermittent, dormant, or nonexistent participation. We propose that prominence, which refers to the salience of community members’ psychological proximity to their community, differs from the engagement construct, which denotes a psychological dedication to behave prosaically toward other community members. Whereas engagement has been increasingly examined as a driver of online community behavior, the role of prominence has received a minimal amount of attention in the literature. Drawing on self-determination theory, we developed a framework that proposes the prominence construct as a phenomenon distinctive from engagement in its nature, formation, and behavioral outcomes. Our findings based on two studies indicate that the proposed model with prominence performs considerably better than the existing model with only engagement. Our conceptual model contributes to Information Systems research by laying a strong theoretical foundation to differentiate between the behavioral paths of the autonomous prominence construct and its controlled engagement counterpart.
Investigate the Relationship between Urbanization and Industrialization using a Coordination Model: A Case Study of China

The coordinated development of industrialization and urbanization has become a common goal and concern of developing countries. At the same time, measuring the relationship between them is becoming a research hotspot. With reference to value engineering, we constructed a dynamic coordination model to analyze the degree of coordination between urbanization and industrialization in China. During the study, three primary indicators were used to assess the level of industrialization in China, namely: economic development, industrial structure, industrial enterprise. We also use demographic urbanization rate to evaluate the level of urbanization. Subsequently, a dynamic coordination model was established using panel data of China collected from 1978 to 2017. Through the dynamic coordination degree model, the changes in the degree of coordination between urbanization and industrialization in China from 1978 to 2017 were analyzed, and the reasons for the fluctuation of coordination degree were further explored. The results show that: (1) The coordinated development of urbanization and industrialization can be divided into six phases, which is consistent with the major reforms in China's rural and urban; (2) The degree of coordination fluctuated more obviously during 1991–1995, which reflected the unstable state of China in the process of coordinated development of urbanization and industrialization; (3) Most of the time, industrialization is ahead of urbanization, while with rapid economic development, urbanization, and industrialization, are gradually synchronizing in China. The results are of great significance for promoting the coordinated development of urbanization and industrialization and realizing the sustainable development of the city.
In Silico Identification of QTL-Based Polymorphic Genes as Salt-Responsive Potential Candidates through Mapping with Two Reference Genomes in Rice

Recent advances in next generation sequencing have created opportunities to directly identify genetic loci and candidate genes for abiotic stress responses in plants. With the objective of identifying candidate genes within the previously identified QTL-hotspots, the whole genomes of two divergent cultivars for salt responses, namely At 354 and Bg 352, were re-sequenced using Illumina Hiseq 2500 100PE platform and mapped to Nipponbare and R498 genomes. The sequencing results revealed approximately 2.4 million SNPs and 0.2 million InDels with reference to Nipponbare while 1.3 million and 0.07 million with reference to R498 in two parents. In total, 32,914 genes were reported across all rice chromosomes of this study. Gene mining within QTL hotspots revealed 1236 genes, out of which 106 genes were related to abiotic stress. In addition, 27 abiotic stress-related genes were identified in non-QTL regions. Altogether, 32 genes were identified as potential genes containing polymorphic non-synonymous SNPs or InDels between two parents. Out of 10 genes detected with InDels, tolerant haplotypes of Os01g0581400, Os10g0107000, Os11g0655900, Os12g0622500, and Os12g0624200 were found in the known salinity tolerant donor varieties. Our findings on different haplotypes would be useful in developing resilient rice varieties for abiotic stress by haplotype-based breeding studies.
CAPITAL MOBILITY AND TAX COMPETITION : A SURVEY Abstract

This paper surveys the literature on the implications of international capital mobility for national tax policies. Our main issue for consideration in this survey is whether taxation of income, specifically capital income will survive, how border crossing investment is taxed relative to domestic investment and whether welfare gains can be achieved through international tax coordination. We develop a a “working horse model” of multinational investment which allows to derive many of the key results from the literature on international taxation in a unified framework. Moreover, we put special emphasis on the problem of tax competition and financial arbitrage. JEL Code: H21, H25.