Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
International accounting standard setting: lobbying and the development of financial instruments accounting

With the establishment of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) one of the first projects that were added to its agenda was the financial instruments project. The controversy surrounding the standards, and their heavy Anglo-American nature, have led to widespread concerns regarding the IASB granting undue influence to certain lobbying parties in developing these standards. The thesis examines whether these concerns are warranted. The IASB standard setting is characterised by varying degrees of constituent support and opposition for the organisation’s proposed changes to accounting standards. A robust methodology, grounded in ideology theory of regulation, is therefore developed to identify the impact of special interest lobbying on the IASB’s decisions during the development of standards for financial instruments from 2001-2012. Textual analysis is applied to a large sample of comment letters in order to derive a continuous measure of negativity for the analysis of overt lobbying, as well as identifying cases of explicit opinion in the responses. The findings show that the IASB takes account of lobbying in its standard development. Lobbyists are found to be more likely to be successful in blocking proposed changes by expressing negativity in their discussion of a proposal, as opposed to explicitly disagreeing. Further, the results of the analysis show that, in general, all major constituent groups are influential in the development, but that only the business community is influential when it comes to disclosure requirements. Moreover, opposing American constituents are more likely to block proposed changes than are lobbyists from elsewhere. In sum, the thesis investigates and finds that the IASB’s standard setting process allows special interest lobbying to shape the standards for financial instruments accounting and that the business community and American constituents are particularly influential in the process, thus reinforcing the Anglo-American nature of the standards.
National Asthma Education and Prevention Program severity classification as a measure of disease burden in children with acute asthma.

OBJECTIVE To examine the association between the National Asthma Education and Prevention Program (NAEPP) severity classification and other measures of burden of disease in children with acute asthma. METHODS We performed a cross-sectional study of 750 children <18 years of age with a physician diagnosis of asthma and treated in an emergency department (ED) for acute asthma exacerbation. Subjects were assigned to 1 of 4 levels of severity (mild intermittent, mild persistent, moderate persistent, or severe persistent). Assignments followed 3 methods: the report of symptom frequency alone (standard method); symptom frequency and reported controller-medication use (modified method); or the additive modified method in which the symptom frequency and reported controller-medication use were assigned numeric values and a score was calculated. An asthma-specific quality-of-life score was calculated by using the Integrated Therapeutics Group Child Asthma Short Form (ITG-CASF). The number of ED visits and hospital admissions for asthma over the previous 12 months was collected also. Differences between severity groups were compared with analysis of variance, and the proportion of variance explained (r2) was calculated. RESULTS Using the standard classification method, 55% of subjects had mild intermittent asthma, 21% had mild persistent asthma, 14% had moderate persistent asthma, and 10% had severe persistent asthma. Among those classified as having mild intermittent asthma by symptoms alone, 22% were reclassified as having persistent asthma when controller medications were accounted for. With all 3 scoring methods, mean ITG-CASF scores decreased significantly with each increasing level of severity. However, the magnitude of this association was modest. There was a significant but limited association between severity level and mean number of ED visits and hospitalizations. CONCLUSION NAEPP severity classification alone provides an incomplete picture of the burden of disease in children with asthma.
Accountability measures--using measurement to promote quality improvement.

Measuring the quality of health care and using those measurements to promote improvements in the delivery of care, to influence payment for services, and to increase transparency are now commonplace. These activities, which now involve virtually all U.S. hospitals, are migrating to ambulatory and other care settings and are increasingly evident in health care systems worldwide. Many constituencies are pressing for continued expansion of programs that rely on quality measurement and reporting. In this article, we review the origins of contemporary standardized quality measurement, with a focus on hospitals, where such programs have reached their most highly developed state. We discuss some lessons learned from recent experience and propose a conceptual framework to guide future developments in this fast-moving field. Although many of the points we make are relevant to all kinds of quality measurement, including outcome measures, we focus our comments on process measures, both because these account for most of the measures in current use and because outcome measures have additional scientific challenges surrounding the need for case-mix adjustment. We write not as representatives of the Joint Commission articulating a specific new position of that group, but rather as individuals who have worked in the fields of quality measurement and improvement in a variety of roles and settings over many years.
Where constructivism meets resource constraints: the politics of oil, renewables, and a US energy transition

Debates about policies affecting the consumption of oil, and on how to support development of substitutes, often represent environmental politics at its most polarizing. How can we explain the serial reversals in energy policy that result from changing perceptions about the availability of renewable versus non-renewable energy supplies? Application of a range of theories to the case of the United States since 1973 suggests that two distinct types of explanation interact to play crucial roles: socially constructed deliberation takes place over the purposes of energy policy; meanwhile, physical constraints in natural resources are also observed and processed into updated perceptions of relative feasibility among policy choices. Over time, different policy priorities – varying in emphases on economic growth, sustainability, scarcity, or innovation – rise and fall as market conditions test how policies correspond with reality. Opportunities to develop successful policy strategies for managing this century's energy transition – in any of the four directions described – will depend similarly on the absence or presence of political will, a condition shaped by perceptions of material feasibility.
LifeFlow: visualizing an overview of event sequences (video preview)

Event sequence analysis is an important task in many domains: medical researchers may study the patterns of transfers within the hospital for quality control; transportation experts may study accident response logs to identify best practices. In many cases they deal with thousands of records. While previous research has focused on searching and browsing, overview tasks are often overlooked. We introduce a novel interactive visual overview of event sequences called LifeFlow. LifeFlow is scalable, can summarize all possible sequences, and represents the temporal spacing of the events within sequences. In this video, we show an example of patient transfer data and briefly demonstrate how to analyze them with LifeFlow. Please see [11] or visit http:www.cs. umd.eduhcillifeflow for more detail.
Insights on International Franchising: Entry Mode Decision

ABSTRACT Despite the substantive importance of Latin America for foreign investors, the academic attention paid to this region continues to be limited. To cover this gap, this study examines how a number of franchise chain characteristics and market conditions may have an influence on the entry options that global franchisors have when seeking to expand their business in Latin America. Results conclude that the level of a host's country uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, economic development, economic potential, corruption, and the efficiency of contract enforcement are all drivers of the entry mode. The franchisor's international experience also determines the above choice.
In pursuit of environmental excellence: A stakeholder analysis of the environmental management strategies and performance of an Australian energy company

Purpose - This paper aims to provide a stakeholder analysis of the environmental management strategies and a two-dimensional (economic and environmental) performance of an Australian energy company that seeks environmental excellence. Unlike the dominant largely positivistic studies which seek an association between environmental and financial performance, the paper aims to use the richness of a case study methodology to gain a deeper understanding of how environmental concerns are handled and what outcomes in terms of environmental and economic performance are achieved. Design/methodology/approach - An in-depth case study approach involving interviews, archival material and site visits is used in this paper. It starts with a brief engagement with the largely positivistic literature, highlighting the major deficiencies of this scholarship and then presents a more interpretive empirical analysis using an Australian energy company. Findings - The paper finds that there are socio-political processes that are enlisted to control, monitor, and instil discipline in the organization's pursuit of its social initiatives, which help to improve both its financial and environmental performance. Practical implications - The paper provides evidence that environmental and economic performance are not always mutually exclusive, and corporate entities can excel in both simultaneously. The paper also provides evidence that the environmental strategies may be overt attempts at pushing the socio-political agenda of the dominant stakeholder group. What seems like a win-win situation may only represent a political-ethical attempt to promote environmentalism in the Australian energy sector. Originality/value - This paper uses a two-stage investigation process to extend one's understanding of the relationship between corporate environmental and financial performance. First, evidence of improving environmental and financial performance of an energy company is provided, and then the paper explores why and how this relationship exists in the second stage of the analysis. The mainstream and critical accounting literature is bridged by focusing on issues that are largely the domain of one sub-literature with a differentiated case study that is largely encouraged in the other.
Intraday Variations in Trading Activity, Price Variability, and the Bid-Ask Spread

In this paper intraday variations in trading activity and the bid-ask spread are examined. Intraday variations in volume and price variability demonstrate a U-shaped pattern as in previous studies. However, the author finds a U-shaped pattern for a measure of the spread component that is related to the degree of information asymmetry between the specialist and informed traders and an inverted U-shaped pattern for the other spread component related to inventory and order costs. Two alternative explanations are given.
Identification of activated cytokine pathways in the blood of systemic lupus erythematosus, myositis, rheumatoid arthritis, and scleroderma patients

Aim: To develop genomic signatures of seven cytokines involved in the pathogenesis of rheumatic diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), dermatomyositis (DM), polymyositis (PM), rheumatoid arthritis (RA), or systemic scleroderma (SSc) that could potentially help identify patients likely to respond to therapies that target these individual cytokines.
[Transferrin receptor expression of human mesenchymal stem cells and in vitro tracking by autoradiography after transplantation in spinal cord].

OBJECTIVE To determine transferrin receptor (TfR) expression of human mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in vitro and after transplantation in rabbit spinal cord,and to detect implanted MSCs by in vitro autoradiography. METHODS Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) were isolated from fetal blood. Flow cytometry assay, immuno-fluorescent staining and receptor binding assay were used to determine TfR expression of hMSCs. Radioiodinated transferrin saturated with iron [(125)I-Tf(Fe)(2)] was used as tracer. The hMSCs transplanted in rabbit spinal cord was tracked by in vitro autoradiography. Diffusion of (125)I-Tf(Fe)(2) in spinal cord was examined with autoradiography. RESULTS TfR expression of MSCs was demonstrated by flow cytometry assay, immuno-fluorescent staining and receptor binding assay in vitro. (125)I-Tf(Fe)(2) bound to hMSCs with a equilibrium dissociation constant (KD) of (0.98+/-0.12) nmol/L and a maximal density of binding sites (B(max)) of (107 702+/-6 226) sites per cell. Immuno-fluorescent staining showed that TfRs were expressed on hMSCs on the 2nd day but not be expressed on the 10th day post transplantation. Autoradiography showed distinct accumulation of (125)I-Tf(Fe)(2) but not (125)I-HSA at hMSCs implantation sites of spinal cord sections on the 2nd day post transplantation. (125)I-Tf(Fe)(2) had diffused into spinal cord 16 hours after incubation. CONCLUSION Implanted hMSCs could be detected by in vitro autoradiography with (125)I-Tf(Fe)(2) on the 2nd day after being transplanted in spinal cord. To track implanted hMSCs with radionuclide imaging techniques in vivo, TfR was a suitable target for imaging and radioiodinated Tf(Fe)(2) was a feasible tracer.
Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean

Over the past decade, faster growth and smarter social policy have reversed the trend in Latin America's poverty. Too slowly and insufficiently, but undeniably, the percentage of Latinos who are poor has at long last begun to fall. This has shifted the political and policy debates from poverty toward inequality, something to be expected in a region that exhibits the world's most regressive distribution of development outcomes such as income, land ownership, and educational achievement. This book is a breakthrough in the measurement of human opportunity. It builds sophisticated formulas to answer a rather simple question: how much influence do personal circumstances have on the access that children get to the basic services that are necessary for a productive life? Needless to say, producing a methodology to measure human opportunity, and applying it across countries in one region, is just a first step. On the one hand, technical discussions and scientific vetting will continue, and refinements will surely follow. On the other, applying the new tool to a single country will allow for adjustments that make the findings much more useful to its policy realities. And fascinating comparative lessons could be learned by measuring human opportunity in developed countries across, say, the states of the United States or the nations of Europe. But the main message this book delivers remains a powerful one: it is possible to make equity a central purpose, if not the very definition, of development. That is, perhaps, it's most important contribution.
Results on the CEV Process, Past and Present

We consider the Constant Elasticity of Variance (CEV) process, carefully re- visiting the relationships between its transition density and that of the non-central chi-squared distribution, and establish a symmetry principle which readily explains many classical results. The principle also sheds light on the cases in which the CEV parameter exceeds one and the forward price process is a strictly local martingale. An analysis of this parameter regime shows that the widely-quoted formula for the price of a plain vanilla European call option requires a correction term to achieve an arbitrage free price. We discuss Monte Carlo simulation of the CEV process, the specifics of which depend on the parameter regime, and compare the results against the analytic expressions for plain vanilla European option prices. We find good agreement. Using these techniques, we also verify that the expected forward price is a strictly local martingale when the CEV parameter is greater than one.
PRODUCTION MODEL WITH SELLING PRICE DEPENDENT DEMAND AND PARTIAL BACKLOGGING UNDER INFLATION

We developed an inventory model for decaying items with selling price dependent demand in inflationary environment. Deterioration rate is taken as two parameter Weibull distribution. Shortages in inventory are allowed with partial backlogging. Backlogging rate is taken as exponential decreasing function of time. Profit maximization technique is used in this study.
Did asymmetric monetary preferences for the output gap disappear during recent economic times?

Surico (2007) showed that the Federal Reserve Bank (FED) asymmetric preferences for the output gap disappeared during recent times. We show that this result is sensitive to the starting date chosen for the regressions. Using a starting date of 1984:01 or later, we find that the hypothesis of the FED exhibiting symmetric preferences is consistently rejected.
An Asymmetric Chromosome Pair Undergoes Synaptic Adjustment and Crossover Redistribution During Caenorhabditis elegans Meiosis: Implications for Sex Chromosome Evolution

Heteromorphic sex chromosomes, such as the X/Y pair in mammals, differ in size and DNA sequence yet function as homologs during meiosis; this bivalent asymmetry presents special challenges for meiotic completion. In Caenorhabditis elegans males carrying mnT12, an X;IV fusion chromosome, mnT12 and IV form an asymmetric bivalent: chromosome IV sequences are capable of pairing and synapsis, while the contiguous X portion of mnT12 lacks a homologous pairing partner. Here, we investigate the meiotic behavior of this asymmetric neo-X/Y chromosome pair in C. elegans. Through immunolocalization of the axis component HIM-3, we demonstrate that the unpaired X axis has a distinct, coiled morphology while synapsed axes are linear and extended. By showing that loci at the fusion-proximal end of IV become unpaired while remaining synapsed as pachytene progresses, we directly demonstrate the occurrence of synaptic adjustment in this organism. We further demonstrate that meiotic crossover distribution is markedly altered in males with the asymmetric mnT12/+ bivalent relative to controls, resulting in greatly reduced crossover formation near the X;IV fusion point and elevated crossovers at the distal end of the bivalent. In effect, the distal end of the bivalent acts as a neo-pseudoautosomal region in these males. We discuss implications of these findings for mechanisms that ensure crossover formation during meiosis. Furthermore, we propose that redistribution of crossovers triggered by bivalent asymmetry may be an important driving force in sex chromosome evolution.
DEBT PROBLEMS: The Real Feel of Mortgage Payments

The author points out that home buyers today no longer have the advantage of inflation as they pay back their mortgages over time. Thus their incomes will not rise as rapidly as their debt service. Moreover, the ratios of income to debt we rely on were developed in a time of higher inflation. He produces a "real feel" indicator that gives a more realistic idea about the future burden of mortgage payments.
Captures and Host Strains of Fall Armyworm (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) Males in Traps Baited with Different Commercial Pheromone Blends

ABSTRACT Traps baited with 4 different commercial sex pheromone lures that contained 2, 3, or 4 components were used to capture male fall armyworm [Spodoptera frugiperda (J. E. Smith)] in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Texas from 2006–2009. A subset of the moths collected was analyzed for their host strain to determine if there was a difference in attraction to these lures. Chemical analysis of the lures was completed to identify the pheromone components released. Each lure released the number of components expected, but the Trécé lure released relatively higher amounts of the minor component Z7-12:Ac and at a higher percentage of its blend, than the other lures. The 4 lures attracted similar numbers of moths in Alabama, Georgia, and Texas, and there was only a difference among lures in the Florida 2006 trial. More moths were captured in fall 2007 than fall 2008 in Alabama and Georgia. The southern region in Alabama and Georgia averaged more than 13 moths per night, compared to 8.5 in the central region, and 1.9 in the northern region. Lures attracted both host strains of moths, but across years and locations (n = 4546), all lures attracted more corn strain than rice strain males (>55% of moths analyzed were corn strain). However, traps baited with Trécé lures captured a 5% lower percentage of corn strain moths than Scenturion-baited lures. Geographic location and time of season appeared to be much more important in determining host strain identity than the specific commercial lure used. Results from these trials suggest that any of the commercial lures tested will attract the numbers of fall armyworm moths necessary for genetic and migration analysis, and that site location (away from trees and in open areas) and periodic trap maintenance (removal of spiders and frogs from clogging the funnel or eating trap catch) are also important in capturing the highest number of moths.
Reciprocity in the Principal–Multiple Agent Model

Abstract This paper studies how incentives are affected by intention-based reciprocity preferences when the principal hires many agents. Our results describe the set of agents’ sensitivities to reciprocity required to sustain a given strategy profile. We also show that hiring reciprocal agents to implement a first- or a second-best contract will always benefit the principal if the strategy profile is symmetric. Instead, when the profile (first or second best) is asymmetric the principal’s interest might be better served by self-interested agents. We conclude the paper by clarifying when symmetric profiles are most likely to arise.