Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Age-Wealth Relationship: A Cross-Section and Cohort Analysis

THE age profile of individual asset holdings is frequently supposed to follow a hump pattern, increasing during the working lifetime and declining in later years. The theoretical explanation of such a relationship is firmly established, since it is a characteristic feature of life-cycle saving models. However, the empirical evidence has never been critically examined. A number of studies based on sample survey information have been regarded as confirming this hump pattern, but on closer examination the evidence is far from conclusive. Moreover the survey results conflict fundamentally with alternative estimates of the age-wealth relationship derived from estate tax data. This paper begins in section II by examining this basic conflict. In the following section the relevance of cross-section studies is questioned, and a cohort is identified whose lifetime wealth characteristics can be studied. The sequence of observed wealth distributions for this cohort is obtained by selecting successive ten years age groups from the Estate duty statistics at intervals of a decade. Section IV is devoted to an analysis of the variation in the composition of any cohort as it ages. These composition changes arise from the fact that wealthier individuals have a lower mortality rate and therefore tend to become a larger proportion of the surviving cohort independently of accumulation behaviour. In these circumstances the characteristics of the representative individual will not necessarily correspond to the representative behaviour of the group. It is, however, possible to correct for this change in composition so that the empirical estimates can be compared with the predictions of economic theory.
The European Union and Economic Freedom

This paper integrates two growing strains of literature. The first strain looks at the effect of economic and political unions on outcomes such as bond ratings and economic convergence. The second strain looks at the determinants of economic freedom across countries. Building from these two literatures, we investigate the impact of joining the European Union on a countrys economic freedom. Using a panel of countries from 1970 to 2007, we find evidence that joining the European Union increases a countrys economic freedom. Empirically, however, the impact of joining the union on economic freedom is small.
Sell‐Side Analysts' Reports and the Current External Reporting Model

This study explores the nature of the information (financial, nonfinancial, and other) that is disseminated by quarterly recommendation reports of sell‐side financial analysts. We content‐analyzed nearly 7,000 elements contained in 64 analysts' quarterly recommendation reports for companies in four different industries: two intangible‐asset‐intensive industries and two tangible‐asset‐intensive industries. The results indicate that analysts' recommendation reports provide a significantly higher proportion of financial information and lower proportion of nonfinancial information for tangible‐asset‐intensive companies than intangible‐asset‐intensive companies. We also identify the number of financial and nonfinancial information elements that are traced to SEC filings. We find that a high percentage of this information, especially nonfinancial information, is not provided in these filings. This finding raises significant concerns about the completeness of the current reporting model.
How to make democracy self-enforcing after civil war: Enabling credible yet adaptable elite pacts

While many recommend electoral democracy as a way to avoid or resolve civil conflict, the empirical record of electoral democracy as an alternative to civil conflict is decidedly mixed. We apply recent work from new organizational economics on the nature of elite pacts to add to both sides of the debate. On the one hand, we argue that we should be more pessimistic about the ability of existing electoral institutions to help rather than hurt the prospects for a stable peace. We argue that the new organizational economics reveals a design dilemma—a forced trade-off between the credible commitment to an elite pact in the short term and the adaptability of an elite pact in the long term—that plagues the most commonly considered alternatives. On the other hand, we tentatively argue for optimism if institutional designers work with criteria that explicitly take the dilemma into account. We propose novel design criteria that would allow a polity to address the design dilemma.
Learning from the Gurus: Managers' Responses to The Unwritten Rules of the Game

Pop management books are selling by the truck-load and top-of-the-pops management authors are hailed as gurus. In this article, Patrick McGovern assesses managers' responses to one such book: Peter Scott-Morgan's The Unwritten Rules of the Game. The responses were collected after “unwritten rules” appraisals had been conducted within the managers' organisations.
Supply management contribution to channel performance: a top management perspective

Purpose – This study serve aims to fill a gap in the supply management literature with respect to supply management contribution to channel members' performance and its antecedents: strategic supply management skills and supplier integration. The resource‐based theory of the firm is used to establish the tested theoretical framework.Design/methodology/approach – The sample used consists of 152 firms represented by highly ranked supply management professionals. The conceptual model and the hypothesized relationships are tested using structural equation modeling.Findings – Support was found for the causal relationships among: strategic supply management skills and supply management contribution to channel members' performance; supplier integration and supply management contribution to channel members' performance; and for supply management strategic skills and supplier integration. Additionally, strategic supply management skills were found to have a significant mediated effect on supply management channel .
Determining Output and Inflation Variability: Are the Phillips Curve and the Monetary Policy Reaction Function Responsible?

This study analyzes the policy parameters in a Taylor monetary policy reaction function and a Phillips curve equation to determine the variability of inflation and output. The theoretical and empirical investigations yield two key results. First, countries with large parameters in the monetary policy reaction function have low and stable inflation. Second, countries with flatter Phillips curves (i.e., those with a higher degree of price stickiness) have larger output variability. This article also examines the determinants of inflation and output variability as well as determinants of the slope of the Phillips curve. (JEL E32, E52)
Kalman filter carrier synchronization algorithm

A new Kalman carrier synchronization algorithm was developed for high-order QAM modulated signals which showed fast acquisition times and good frequency tracking performances. The proposed solution relies on a Decision Directed Kalman filter combined with a lock detector which determines the status of the synchronization process, modifying consequently the filter parameters. Simulation results show that, compared to the performance of a basic Kalman synchronization system, a tenfold improvement or better is achieved in terms of acquisition speed, while keeping a low residual phase noise.
Greater activation in left hemisphere language-related regions during simple judgment tasks among substance-dependent patients in treatment for alcoholism.

BACKGROUND Alcoholism is often associated with impaired emotional control. Alcoholics have also been found to have deficits in frontal lobe executive functions. Recent functional imaging studies have suggested that alcoholics show greater activation than nonalcoholics in circuits involving frontal lobes, as well as more posterior brain regions, when engaged in executive-type tasks. In this study, we compared brain activations of alcohol-dependent patients and healthy nonalcoholics while they performed 2 simple judgment tasks designed to activate frontal circuits involved in a basic form of decision making. Participants completed 1 judgment task that required an emotional judgment and 1 task that did not, which enabled us to study whether alcoholics had greater brain activation while performing executive tasks, and to determine if emotional tasks elicited even greater activation than nonemotional tasks. METHODS We performed functional magnetic resonance imaging scans while alcoholic patients and nonalcoholic controls viewed pictures from the International Affective Picture System. In 3 separate runs, participants viewed the images without making a judgment, determined whether the images were indoor or outdoor scenes, or decided if they liked or disliked the images. RESULTS There was little difference in brain activation between alcoholics and controls when no judgment was required. When participants made judgments about either the location or whether they liked or disliked an image, however, we observed significantly increased activation in frontal, limbic, and temporal regions in the patients relative to the controls. Increases were particularly robust in the frontal lobe and in areas of the brain associated with language. When we compared the emotional to the nonemotional judgment, the alcoholics, but not the controls, showed greater activation in the ventral mesial frontal cortex. CONCLUSIONS Alcoholic patients appear to use brain language areas more than nonalcoholics while making judgments about the setting or liking of emotionally arousing visual images. This increased activation may reflect a compensatory recruitment of brain regions to perform simple decision-making tasks.
The Group Participation Index: A Measure of Work Group Autonomy

This paper discusses the development and application ofa questionnaire designed to measure the degree ofparticipation experienced by a work group. It relies on the conceptual framework of socio-technical systems the ory and is based on studies of Australian organisations. It offers prac titioners a valid and reliable method of indexing changes in autonomy at the level of the work group. It can thus be of use in situations where struc tural, technological or other organisational change is taking place, as it allows measurement of 'before' and 'after'conditions ofautonomy and glo bal job satisfaction.
Implicit state-tying for support vector machines based speech recognition

In this article we take a step forward towards the application of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to continuous speech recognition. As in previous work, we use SVMs to estimate emission probabilities in the context of an SVM/HMM system. However, training pairwise classiﬁers to discriminate between some of the HMM-states of very close phonetic classes produce unsatisfac-tory results. We propose a data-driven approach for selecting the HMM-states for which SVMs are trained and those ones that are implicitly tied. Additionally we introduce an algorithm that is incorporated into the decoder for dynamically selecting the subset of SVMs used to estimate the emission probabilities. This algorithm reduces the number of SVMs evaluated at the frame level dramati-cally while preserving recognition accuracy. We present results in a very challenging corpora composed of children’s speech. Our approach not only outperforms comparable GMM/HMM based systems but other SVM/HMM systems proposed to date.
NOD2 variants and antibody response to microbial antigens in Crohn's disease patients and their unaffected relatives.

BACKGROUND & AIMS The Cdcs1 locus of the C3Bir mouse confers severe colitis associated with a decrease in innate immune function and an increase in adaptive T-cell responses to commensal bacterial products. The aim of our study was to determine if defects in innate immunity are similarly associated with increased adaptive immune responses to microbial antigens in Crohn's disease patients. METHODS Sera from 732 patients, 220 unaffected relatives, and 200 healthy controls were tested for antibodies to oligomannan, the Pseudomonas fluorescens-related protein, Escherichia coli outer membrane porin C, CBir1 flagellin, and DNA from the same subjects was tested for 3 Crohn's disease-associated variants of the NOD2 gene, and 5 toll-like receptor (TLR) 2, 2 TLR4, and 2 TLR9 variants. The magnitude of responses to microbial antigens was examined according to variant status. RESULTS NOD2 variant carriage increased in frequency with increasing number of positive antibodies and increasing cumulative quantitative response as measured by quartile sum (P for trend, .0008 and .0003, respectively). Mean antibody and quartile sums were higher for patients carrying any NOD2 variant versus those carrying none (2.24 vs 1.92 and 10.60 vs 9.72; P = .0008 and P = 0.0003, respectively). The mean quartile sum was higher for unaffected relatives carrying any NOD2 variant versus those carrying none (10.67 vs 9.75, respectively; P = .02). No association was found between any TLR variant and the magnitude of response. CONCLUSIONS Patients with Crohn's disease and unaffected relatives carrying variants of the NOD2 gene have increased adaptive immune responses to microbial antigens.
Adjuvant Arthritis Induces Down-Regulation of G Protein-Coupled Receptor Kinases in the Immune System1

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) play a crucial role in the regulation of the immune response by, e.g., chemokines, PGs, and β2-adrenergic agonists. The responsiveness of these GPCRs is turned off by the family of G protein-coupled receptor kinases (GRK1–6). These kinases act by phosphorylating the GPCR in an agonist-dependent manner, resulting in homologous desensitization of the receptor. Although GRKs are widely expressed throughout the body, leukocytes express relatively high levels of GRKs, in particular GRK2, -3, and -6. We investigated whether in vivo the inflammatory disease adjuvant arthritis (AA) induces changes in GRK expression and function in the immune system. In addition, we analyzed whether the systemic effects of AA also involve changes in GRKs in nonimmune organs. At the peak of the inflammatory process, we observed a profound down-regulation of GRK2, -3, and -6 in splenocytes and mesenteric lymph node cells from AA rats. Interestingly, no changes in GRK were observed in thymocytes and in nonimmune organs such as heart and pituitary. During the remission phase of AA, GRK levels in spleen and mesenteric lymph nodes are returning to baseline levels. The decrease in GRK2 at the peak of AA is restricted to CD45RA+ B cells and CD4+ T cells, and was not observed in CD8+ T cells. In conclusion, we demonstrate in this study, for the first time, that an inflammatory process in vivo induces a tissue-specific down-regulation of GRKs in the immune system.
Distance Problems for Hermitian Matrix Pencils with Eigenvalues of Definite Type

Given a Hermitian matrix pencil $L(z) = zA - B$ with only real eigenvalues that are either of positive or negative type, the distance to a nearest Hermitian pencil outside the class is considered with respect to a specified norm. These problems are considered in the setting of the Hermitian $\epsilon$-pseudospectra of $L(z)$ with a proposed homogeneous form of the definition of eigenvalue type playing an important role in the investigations. A significant outcome of this analysis is a bisection-type algorithm for computing the Crawford number of a definite pencil and a nearest Hermitian pencil that is not definite. Each step of the algorithm requires the computation of the smallest eigenvalue(s) of a positive definite matrix of the same size as the original definite pencil and corresponding eigenvector(s). The results may also be extended to compute the distance from a definitizable pencil to a nearest Hermitian pencil that is not definitizable and a smallest Hermitian perturbation that attains this dista.
Sampling properties of criteria for evaluating GARCH volatility forecasts

There is considerable evidence that GARCH models do not forecast financial volatility well out of sample when evaluated by the R 2 from the Mincer and Zarnowitz (1969) regression. Andersen and Bollerslev (1998) argued that although the R 2s tend to be small, they are consistent with the population value of the criterion for a correctly specified GARCH model. We extend the Andersen and Bollerslev result and derive the population moments of the mean squared error, the mean absolute error and a heteroscedasticity adjusted mean square error for the GARCH volatility forecasts. We state existence conditions for the moments. The criteria and their population values are illustrated with empirical examples. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we analyse the sampling properties of these criteria. When volatility is highly persistent, we find that the sampling distribution of the R 2 is highly skewed to the right, which indicates that the majority of the realized R 2s lie below the population R 2. Among the accuracy criteria, we find the heteroscedasticity adjusted mean-squared error is preferable because it has the weakest existence condition and its sampling distribution is reflective of the population value. ‘A Good Volatility Model Forecasts Volatility’ Engle and Patton (2001)
Optimal Load Balancing in Millimeter Wave Cellular Heterogeneous Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel and effective approach to optimizing the load balancing in a millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular heterogeneous network (HetNet) with a macro-tier and a micro-tier. The unique characteristics of mmWave transmission are incorporated into the network by adopting the Poisson point process (PPP) for base station (BS) location, the line-of-sight (LoS) ball model for mmWave links, the sectored antenna model for key antenna array characteristics, and Nakagami-$m$ fading for wireless channels. To reduce the load of macro-tier BSs, we consider a bias factor $A_{s}$ in the network for offloading user equipments (UEs) to micro-tier BSs. For this network, we first analyze the loads of macro- and micro-tier BSs. Then we derive a new expression for the rate coverage probability of the network, based on which the optimal $A_{s}$ maximizing the rate coverage probability is found. Through numerical results, we demonstrate the correctness of our analysis and the validity of the optimal $A_{s}$. Importantly, the optimal $A_{s}$ can bring a profound improvement in the rate coverage probability relative to a fixed $A_{s}$. Furthermore, we evaluate the impact of various network parameters, e.g., the densities and the beamwidths of BSs, on the rate coverage probability and the optimal $A_{s}$, offering valuable guidelines into practical mmWave HetNet design.
Can SNOMED CT Changes Be Used as a Surrogate Standard for Evaluating the Performance of Its Auditing Methods?

We introduce RGT, Retrospective Ground-Truthing, as a surrogate reference standard for evaluating the performance of automated Ontology Quality Assurance (OQA) methods. The key idea of RGT is to use cumulative SNOMED CT changes derived from its regular longitudinal distributions by the official SNOMED CT editorial board as a partial, surrogate reference standard. The contributions of this paper are twofold: (1) to construct an RGT reference set for SNOMED CT relational changes; and (2) to perform a comparative evaluation of the performances of lattice, non-lattice, and randomized relational error detection methods using the standard precision, recall, and geometric measures. An RGT relational-change reference set of 32, 241 IS-A changes were constructed from 5 U.S. editions of SNOMED CT from September 2014 to September 2016, with reversals and changes due to deletion or addition of new concepts excluded. 68, 849 independent non-lattice fragments, 118, 587 independent lattice fragments, and 446, 603 relations were extracted from the SNOMED CT March 2014 distribution. Comparative performance analysis of smaller (less than 15) lattice vs. non-lattice fragments was also given to approach the more realistic setting in which such methods may be applied. Among the 32, 241 IS-A changes, independent non-lattice fragments covered 52.8% changes with 26.4% precision with a G-score of 0.373. Even though this G-score is significantly lower in comparison to those in information retrieval, it breaks new ground in that such evaluations have never performed before in the highly discovery-oriented setting of OQA.
The Variance Risk Premium: Components, Term Structures, and Stock Return Predictability

This article examines the properties of the variance risk premium (VRP). We propose a flexible asset pricing model that captures co-jumps in prices and volatility, and self-exciting jump clustering. We estimate the model on equity returns and variance swap rates at different horizons. The total VRP is negative and has a downward-sloping term structure, while its jump component displays an upward-sloping term structure. The abrupt and persistent response of the short-term jump VRP to extreme events makes this specific premium a proxy for investors’ fear of a market crash. Furthermore, the use of the VRP level and slope, and of its components, helps improve the short-run predictability of equity excess returns.
Use of Ultrasound Contrast Agents in Relation to Percutaneous Interventional Procedures: A Systematic Review and Pictorial Essay

The aim of this article is to provide an inventory of the use of contrast‐enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) in relation to percutaneous interventional procedures. The article is structured into a systematic literature review followed by a clinical part relating to percutaneous CEUS‐guided procedures. A literature search identified 3109 records. After abstract screening, 55 articles were analyzed and supplemented with pictorial material to explain the techniques. In conclusion, the best‐evidenced indications for CEUS‐guided interventions are biopsy and ablation of inconspicuous or B‐mode–invisible tumors, intraprocedural ablation control and follow‐up, as well as percutaneous transhepatic cholangiography and drainage procedures.
Contemporary issues in financial institutions and markets

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. This book showcases recent academic work on contemporary issues in financial institutions and markets. It covers a broad range of topics, highlighting the diverse nature of academic research in banking and finance. As a consequence the contributions cover a wide range of issues across a broad spectrum, including: capital structure arbitrage, credit rating agencies, credit default swap spreads, market power in the banking industry and stock returns. This timely collection offers fresh insights and understandings into the ongoing debates within and between the academic and professional finance communities. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Finance.