Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Disparate Impacts: Balancing the Need for Safe Schools With Racial Equity in Discipline

Policy responses to gun violence within K-12 school systems have not stopped the increasing frequency of their occurrence, but have instead increased racial and ethnic disparities in multiple forms of discipline. The crisis prevention policies that follow school shootings tend to exacerbate racial and ethnic discipline disparities (a) within schools as practitioners enact policies with discretion and bias, (b) between schools where policy is complicated by racial segregation, and (c) indirectly where academic consequences accrue to those who are not disciplined but attend schools with elevated school rates of discipline. Among the most promising policy alternatives to punitive disciplinary policy is restorative justice.
Essays on imperfect competition in the labor market

This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine the impact of imperfect competition in the labor market on wage growth and wage inequality. Chapter 1, coauthored with Nikolaj Harmon, investigates the link between an individual’s wages and her outside labor market opportunities. To overcome the fact that many factors that shift an individual’s outside opportunities also impact her productivity at her current job, we develop a novel identification strategy that generates within-individual (and within-firm-by-occupation) variation in workers’ information about their outside options. This strategy, which we implement using monthly employer-employee data from Denmark, exploits the fact that individuals often learn about job opportunities through their social networks. Using this strategy we find that changes in workers’ outside labor market opportunities are reflected in both mobility and wage growth, even for individuals who do not switch firms.
Corporate social responsibility learning in mergers and acquisitions

ABSTRACT Using a large sample of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the U.S., we examine whether and how corporate social responsibility (CSR) spread between the target and acquirer affects firm value. We find that the stronger the target’s CSR performance relative to the acquirer’s, the higher the acquirer gains as well as synergy gains created by the acquisition. We also document acquirer’s improvements in CSR performance and market performance following the acquisition of a target with higher CSR. Moreover, the positive effect of CSR spread on the acquirer is more pronounced when the target has stronger operating performance. Overall, we attribute the source of the value creation to acquirer’s learning from the target’s CSR practices and experiences.
International Evidence on the Determinants of Banks’ Home Sovereign Bond Holdings

In this paper, we examine the determinants of domestic sovereign debt bank holdings with a panel dataset of 295 banks in 35 countries between 2002 and 2013. The findings indicate that the structure of bank ownership (domestic, foreign, or government ownership), the quality of governance, and the level of financial development of the countries in which banks operate all determine the level of home bias. Specifically, we find that domestic banks tend to hold more domestic sovereign debt relative to their foreign counterparts. We also provide evidence that home bias is even stronger when the domestic bank is controlled by its government. Moreover, home bias increases when government bonds are more risky, home governments are less effective, and when banking systems are less financially developed. Overall, we find that banks’ home bias in holding sovereign debt is an international phenomenon that is determined by both bank- and country-specific factors.
Corporate organizational structure, tax havens and analyst forecast properties

ABSTRACT This study investigates how corporate organizational complexity affects analyst forecast behavior and the information environment of the firm. Using a unique sample of publicly traded Taiwan companies which are required to disclose information on all of their affiliates, we capture the feature of organizational complexity by measuring the number of investment layers connecting the parent firm and the lowest-tiered subsidiary. We argue that long chains of investment layers, which are associated with higher information asymmetry and agency costs, are likely to reduce the quality of financial reporting and complicate analysts’ forecast tasks. We find that, after controlling for other determinants of forecasting behavior, analysts experience greater difficulty in predicting the earnings of firms with more investment layers than in predicting the earnings of firms with fewer layers. In addition, we find that a long chain of investment layers influences analyst forecast accuracy and dispersion more if firms also have a larger number of investees in tax havens and if firms have a higher deviation between controlling rights and cash flow rights. Overall, we document that organizational complexity exacerbates the agency costs between investors and managers, which in turn complicates analyst forecast tasks.
NEETs: young people not in employment, education or training: characteristics, costs and policy responses in Europe

The economic crisis has severely damaged the employment prospects of young people in Europe, and their employment rate is now at the lowest level ever. To better capture the extent of economic inactivity among the young, the concept of NEET - not in employment, education or training - has been developed. This report analyses the labour market situation of young people in Europe, with a specific focus on the NEET group. It examines the determinants of belonging to the NEET group, and measures the economic and social costs of NEETs. It also assesses how member states through policies and interventions have sought to support young people to gain a foothold in the labour market. It shows that successful policy initiatives address specific, disadvantaged subgroups in the NEET population. They are client-centred in their efforts to set young people on a pathway to long-term, sustainable employment and they are innovative, adopting new ways of reaching a target group.
The Corporate Performance Measurement and Its Importance for the Pricing in a Transport Enterprise

Due to the specificity of transport services that are being performed with an unambiguous impact on the environment and society, all activities of transport enterprises oriented towards the achievement of the sustainability goals are more visible than in the case of other enterprises. Consequently, the growing need for sustainability increases not only the costs of individual transport services but also the total costs of a transport enterprise. Indisputably, the costs affect the pricing, which leads to the final market prices. On the one hand, they can increase the prices, but on the other hand, they decrease the enterprise’s competitiveness and its success in the market at the same time. Even though the cost-based pricing is essential, it is not sufficient under these circumstances. Based on the objectives stated above, the primary aim of this paper is to emphasize that the creation of prices in a transport enterprise must consider the global aspects of the enterprise’s performance as a prerequisite for its competitiveness. The results include proposing several variants of corporate performance measurement that are relevant and supported by a literature review of the current knowledge on the topic, an analysis of internal documents from a particular freight-transport enterprise, and structured interviews with the managers. Subsequently, the model proposed can be used by managers of transport enterprises in their decision-making process.
Policy articulation and paradigm transformation: the bureaucratic origin of China’s industrial policy

Abstract Existing studies of state-led industrial development argue that state autonomy is essential for formulating consistent and coherent industrial policies. This article shows that autonomous bureaucracy, while useful for fending off the politics of interest groups, is not free of politics in itself. Using Chinese industrial policy-making as a strategic case study, this article uncovers the competitive dimension of bureaucratic decision-making and the extent to which it serves as a driving force for industrial policy paradigm change in China. Equipped with a theory of policy articulation, this article details the strategies used by multiple superagencies and groups of career bureaucrats to vie for industrial policy authority within the Chinese state. In sum, this article seeks to expose the role of intrabureaucracy competition in mediating international political economic environment and national policy outcomes. Looking forward, this article proposes that the renewed focus on industrial policy by many national governments compels an analytical re-engagement with the role of large bureaucracies in economic decision-making and the kind of organizational and cognitive frameworks by which bureaucrats mobilize to chart our industrial landscapes.
Does a complex environment affect police efficiency: an examination on municipal police in Mexico

ABSTRACT Research on police organizations argues that the external environment in which they operate have a negative effect on their performance. We tested these assumptions on a sample of 1,634 municipal police forces in Mexico, We used a conditional order-m model to examine how the environment in which police operate affects their performance. Our results indicate that not all socioeconomic, demographic and institutional factors have a negative influence on police performance.
A Systemic and Contextual Framework to Define a Country’s 2030 Agenda from a Foresight Perspective

A fundamental issue in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda at the national level refers to the systemic analysis of interactions of global targets, considering the context-specific understanding of these interactions within a long-term vision. Another critical issue is how to apply and combine different approaches and tools to provide a consistent analysis for evidence-based decision-making on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and global targets. Consistent with both concerns, a systemic and contextual framework to prioritize SDG targets for a country’s 2030 Agenda is proposed, by integrating fuzzy multicriteria decision-making methods, prospective structural analysis, and network theory tools. The applicability of the proposed framework could be demonstrated through a socio-technical experiment carried out during 2018 for the definition of the 2030 Agenda in Brazil. The experiment is especially designed to bring methodological insights to this decision-making process, and empirical results highlight the targets that will drive the Brazilian 2030 Agenda. Although the empirical results presented in this paper are exclusive to Brazil, we believe that the proposed framework can be replicated in other countries, especially those that are going to prioritize the global targets to be included in their respective Agendas.
The Impact of Grants on Homeowner Decisions to Retrofit to Reduce Hurricane-Induced Wind and Flood Damage

An increasing number of national, state, and local programs have offered grants or other monetary incentives to encourage homeowners to retrofit their homes to reduce damage from natural hazard events. Despite this fact, little is known about how these offerings influence a homeowner’s decision to carry out such structural retrofits. This paper studies the impact that different grant program designs in particular have on the decision to undertake different types of retrofits to mitigate against hurricane damage. Using data from a survey of homeowners in the eastern half of North Carolina, we implement a mixed logit model that allows for the combination of both revealed-preference and stated-preference data available from the survey. Our findings show that offering a grant results in households being, on average, 3 times as likely to retrofit as when a grant is not offered. In addition, both the percentage of retrofit cost and the maximum dollar amount covered by the grant have a substantial impact on the probability that households choose to retrofit. Living closer to the coastline also has a significant impact on the probability that households will choose to retrofit. Counter to some previous research, we find that households who have experienced two or more hurricanes are less likely to choose to retrofit their homes. From our research, we find that the percentage of retrofit cost covered by the grant and the total cost are both important factors when deciding on the best grant program configuration.
Does forced solidarity hinder adaptation to climate change? Evidence from the Burkinabe cotton sector

In semi-arid lands, resilience of farmers facing climate change is far from complete. The main objective of this paper is to explore whether sharing norms within a group of cotton producers imply adverse effects for the adoption of risk-mitigating strategies. These strategies can involve efforts to make existing forms of production more resilient to climate change (incremental adaptation), or endeavours to move across sectors and space to reduce vulnerability (transformational adaptation). I investigate the case of Burkina Faso where producers collectively purchase inputs from the cotton companies and pay back their loan under the constraint of joint liability. Specifically, I try to understand whether forced solidarity is correlated with the adoption of strategies that reduce exposure to climatic risks. From a sample of 668 smallholders, I proxied social pressure by the size of the network and find it to be associated with reduced investments in both incremental and transformational selfprotection against weather shocks.
Decommodification and stratification effects on social trust

This paper studies the outcome effect of social policy, which forms the outcome dimension. The first sub-chapter provides arguments in favor of the introduction of an outcome spectrum in the social trust analysis. The analysis is conducted by relating the level of decommodification and stratification in the selected 18 OECD countries to interpersonal and institutional trust indexes among their populations. The aggregated level of analysis advocates that the integration and institutional arguments are valid in explaining the effects of welfare state development on social trust formation. The results obtained at the individual level of analysis provide mixed evidence. First, welfare regimes’ dummies show that both forms of trust are lowest in liberal welfare regimes, highest in Scandinavian countries, and moderate in continental Europe. When directly assessing the impact of decommodification on trust levels, we find evidence of crowding-in for both forms of social trust. It should be noted however that the impact of decommodification contains an explicit functional dimension, which assumes that its effects differ across social provisions. As the analysis confirms, the effects of welfare states on social trust are policy specific and should be studied for each social provision separately. Stratification affects social trust elements in a different way. The preserving of the existing class structure, which is inherent to conservative welfare regimes, negatively influences institutional trust but positively affects interpersonal trust. The stigmatizing approach of liberal welfare states erodes interpersonal trust but boosts institutional trust. Finally, socialism’s universal approach leads to crowding-in effects in both forms of social trust.
Noisy Information, Risk Sharing, and International Business Cycles

We introduce a noisy information structure into an otherwise standard international real business cycle model with two countries. When domestic firms observe current foreign technology with some noise, predictions of the model on international correlation can be very different from those of a standard perfect information model. We show that the model can explain: (a) positive output correlation both in complete and incomplete market models, (b) consumption correlation smaller than output correlation with an introduction of information&#8208;constrained consumers, and (c) observation of both positive and negative productivity&#8211;hours correlation in two countries.
Lijphart's Democracy Idea dan Turkey

This paper tries to apply Lijphart’s way of description with ten factors for the two models of democracy to the Republic of Turkey. Turkey, with her important location, which is a country with a different political structure and social structure, can be added to Lijphart example. This research mainly analysis Turkish political system with Lijphart’s majoritarian and consensus democracy idea. In this study, while examining the case of Turkey, the World Bank, IMF, and IV project, Freedom House reports and data were used.
Assessing present and future coastal moderation of extreme heat in the Eastern United States

Climate models suggest a rapid increase of extremely hot days in coming decades. Cool marine air currently ventilates extreme heat in populous coastal regions, diminishing its impacts, but how well climate models capture this effect is uncertain. Here we conduct a comprehensive observational analysis of coastal extreme-heat ventilation—its length scale, magnitude, and regional patterns—and evaluate two ensembles of downscaled global climate models along the eastern US coast. We find that coastal areas are 2 °C–4 °C cooler than ∼60 km inland, resulting in reductions near 50% in population exposure to temperatures above 35 °C. Large seasonal and inter-regional variations are closely linked with land-sea temperature contrasts. High-resolution models underestimate coastal cooling by 50%–75%, implying that substantial and spatiotemporally varying model bias correction is necessary to create accurate projections of coastal extreme heat, which is expected to rise considerably with anthropogenic forcing. Our results underline the importance of regionally- and observationally-based perspectives for assessing future extreme heat and its impacts, and for positioning effective heat-risk management for communities and jurisdictions that span coast-to-inland areas.
Female contribution to grassroots innovation for climate change adaptation in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT This paper reports a mixed-method study from 2016 in Gabura, Bangladesh examining female contribution to climate change adaptation in the period post-cyclone Aila in 2009. Out of 110 households studied, male household members were absent in 66 cases because they had migrated to nearby towns and regional centres for alternative livelihood options. Male members’ absence created opportunities for Gabura women to develop a range of novel adaptation strategies through engagement with aid agencies, changed gender roles, leveraging social capital and utilizing local knowledge. For example, women are increasingly contributing to income through works within and outside of the house in agricultural innovations and handmade productions. These adaptations are built on social capital and trust between community women and the NGOs through mobilization and sharing of local knowledge. Based on the findings, a framework for informed autonomous adaptation is proposed. The generalization of coastal women in developing contexts as passive victims of climate change due to social norms and instead highlights women’s active agencies in adaptation is challenged. There is a need for a critical understanding of gender-specific dynamics in post-cyclone aid interventions towards in-situ climate change adaptation.
Identifying Oral Bacterial Microflora Associated with Canine Dental Plaque A Study of 53 Canines

A total of 1594 dogs were screened and 53 dogs were found positive for dental affections. Recorded prevalence was 27 (50.94%) in Spitz cross, 5 (9.43%) in Doberman, 5 (9.43%) in Labrador, 8 (15.09%) in German shepherd, 1 (1.8%) in Great Dane, 1 (1.8%) in Saint Bernard and 6 (11.3%) in non-descript. Bacteria were isolated from the dental plaques and identified by Gram's staining. Among 27 samples, 8 bacterial genera were identified and those were of Neisseria (11.11%), Staphylococcus (29.62%), Bacillus (22.22%), Escherichia (14.81%), Moraxella (11.11%), Pseudomonas (3.73%), Streptococcus (11.11%) and Corynebacterium (3.73%).
Changed and unchanged : the transformation of educational policies on assessment and evaluation in China

Chinese basic education has undergone profound changes since China introduced the market-oriented economy in the 1980s. All the social changes in the past four decades can be traced to the very first reform and opening-up policy in 1978, which were a historical turning point marking a new era in China. This Ph.D. dissertation investigates the transformation of Chinese basic education through educational reforms focused on quality evaluation and assessment. This dissertation was prepared during a consortium comparative project, funded by the Academy of Finland from 2014 to 2017, which investigated how the rise of quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) as an influential force has reshaped educational politics in three countries: Brazil, Russia and China (BCR). This dissertation focuses on one of these countries—China—and analyses how Chinese educational development has changed in interaction with its historical, cultural, political and global contexts. During educational development over the past four decades, the Chinese state has undertaken several rounds of reforms to improve basic education, first from a quantitative perspective and then from a qualitative perspective. The many reforms since the late 2000s have included the establishment of large-scale assessment. This dissertation locates educational changes at the interface of the global–local, the traditional–nonconventional and the political–apolitical to analyse the characteristics of the politics of change. The transformation of education evaluation and assessment has occurred within a changing, contested context fused with contests between multiculturalism and nationalism, internationalism and regionalism, elitism and populism, and many other -isms, such as neoliberalism, postmodernism and universalism. This dissertation takes a critical but constructive stance towards political studies of education and socio-cultural studies of China and re-assesses their strengths, limitations and applicability to analyse the politics of change in China. This article-based doctoral dissertation is grounded in three publications with three main themes: institutional changes, changes in political discourse, and changes in actors’ positions in policy-making. The data were collected in China during 2015 and 2016 using semi-structured interviews and snowball sampling. Qualitative thematic and discourse analysis were applied to analyse the data.
An assessment of port and shipping line relationships: the value of relationship marketing

ABSTRACT Intense competition and continuously changing variables in macro and micro environments compel ports to reinvent themselves and seek ways to gain a competitive advantage. One way to do so is to obtain and retain loyal customers by creating strong bonds and customer satisfaction. This study examined relationship marketing as a tool for developing and sustaining relationships in port businesses. The aim was to investigate if it is worth investing in and conducting a relationship marketing strategy in the port industry, specifically for affiliations between container terminals and shipping lines, by measuring the effects on customer relationship performance indicators. The findings indicate that ports can achieve positive impacts on customer loyalty, satisfaction, and word-of-mouth promotion by using social, structural, and financial relationship marketing tactics.