Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Self-fulfilling Currency Crises and Central Bank Independence*

We develop a model of a fixed exchange rate peg arrangement derived from the Barro-Gordon model of rules versus discretion. It is shown that the fixed peg is vulnerable to self-fulfilling currency crises in which the unemployment rate increases, the credibility of the rule decreases, but, paradoxically, the reputation of the policy-maker improves. Delegating monetary policy to an independent central banker does not prevent this type of crisis from arising, and can even make it more costly. Copyright 2000 by The editors of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics.
A Behavioral-Institutional Model of Endogenous Growth and Induced Technical Change

Technological change is modeled as endogenous in the sense that it is affected by economic, behavioral, and institutional variables. Technological change is especially affected by changes in relative input prices and their level, of which the price of labor is particularly important. Input prices are affected by institutional variables. Such prices also impact on the firm's efficiency, which in turn affects growth rates as well as the rate of technical change. As relative factor prices or their level increase, firms are induced to innovate or adopt extant technology to remain competitive or to maintain current profit rates. High wage firms can be expected to engage in such induced technological change, leading the growth process thereby yielding lower unit costs and increasing the level of material welfare. Relatively low wage economies can be locked into a state of economic inefficiency and laggard technological progress, especially in the long run.
Unifying features in protein-folding mechanisms

We compare the folding of representative members of a protein superfamily by experiment and simulation to investigate common features in folding mechanisms. The homeodomain superfamily of three-helical, single-domain proteins exhibits a spectrum of folding processes that spans the complete transition from concurrent secondary and tertiary structure formation (nucleation-condensation mechanism) to sequential secondary and tertiary formation (framework mechanism). The unifying factor in their mechanisms is that the transition state for (un)folding is expanded and very native-like, with the proportion and degree of formation of secondary and tertiary interactions varying. There is a transition, or slide, from the framework to nucleation-condensation mechanism with decreasing stability of the secondary structure. Thus, framework and nucleation-condensation are different manifestations of an underlying common mechanism.
Female labor Impact on Industrial Value Added in Iran Autoregressive Distributed Lag Modeling Approach

A discussion about sustainable development is not complete without a conversation on gender equality. Since women account for half of any country’s talent base, empowering their participation in the workforce greatly enhances productivity and fosters economic growth. In fact, World Bank studies show that development strategies focusing on gender equality see stronger economic growth than gender-neutral strategies. The labor force has a significant effect on economic growth because of their contribution to the value added process. This concept brings up the value of female labor force as a source of factor accumulation and human capital. In present study researcher would try to explore the women labor in industrial sector as a factor which affects on value added of industries which is directly related to effectiveness of women in industrial`s labor on GDP.
The Theory of Capital Asset Pricing

A respectable theory which accounts for investor behaviour needs to start from a statement of investor objectives. The objective may be generally stated as the maximisation of utility (von Neumann & Morgenstern 1953), though of itself utility is difficult to measure. In order to operationalise the theory utility may be broken down into more readily measurable elements, risk and return. From an investor's point of view, it also becomes necessary to specify a scale whereon various combinations of risk and return may be compared. This latter exercise is a very personal one; indeed it may be unique to each investor. It is beyond the scope of this paper to follow this line of argument. Instead we shall concentrate on describing the measurement of risk and return, in particular by using the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). We recognise, however, that in using this model, we are simplifying the investment behaviour process, in particular we posit the choice of portfolios to be based on single period return/risk with investors having identical estimates (subjective) of these returns.
A Survey of Life Cycle Assessment Practitioners with a Focus on the Agri‐Food Sector

Five years have passed since the survey of life-cycle assessment (LCA) practitioners in North America was conducted by Cooper and Fava (2006). During this period, new methodologies have become mainstream (e.g. consequential LCA for goal and scope definition; hybrid LCA using input-output tables) (Finnveden et al., 2009), while LCA business applications are also becoming commonplace, as shown by recent product labeling initiatives by retailers (Clare and Little, 2011) and the labeling program set by the French government (ADEME, 2011). There is also a sense that more events with high attendance are taking place, more LCA and industrial ecology courses are being offered, and more LCA tools are available. This rapid evolution suggests the need for an update of the survey. This paper compiles the results and conclusions of a new informal survey for LCA practitioners, adapted from the questions by Cooper and Fava’s survey (2006). The survey was conducted using the web platform SurveyMonkey TM
Locus of supply and global manufacturing

Interest in supply chain management has been escalating during the last decade. Using a large sample of durable goods firms located in all major regions of the world, we extend two theoretical perspectives, namely the resource‐based view and the transaction cost economics view of the firm, to better understand the issues behind global sourcing. Both theory extensions were supported in separate by statistically significant regression results. Then, pooling predictors to represent both models together, these measures independently increase the odds of predicting global sourcing. For example, building of a firm’s technological capabilities that was captured through the levels of its RD length of frozen schedules, directly related) also emerged as a significant predictor of the level of global sourcing undertaken by a firm. This suggests that firms have two alternative ways to globalize operations supply, and raises the interesting question of whether or not these two strategies might operate simultaneously.
AdaBatch: Efficient Gradient Aggregation Rules for Sequential and Parallel Stochastic Gradient Methods

We study a new aggregation operator for gradients coming from a mini-batch for stochastic gradient (SG) methods that allows a significant speed-up in the case of sparse optimization problems. We call this method AdaBatch and it only requires a few lines of code change compared to regular mini-batch SGD algorithms. We provide a theoretical insight to understand how this new class of algorithms is performing and show that it is equivalent to an implicit per-coordinate rescaling of the gradients, similarly to what Adagrad methods can do. In theory and in practice, this new aggregation allows to keep the same sample efficiency of SG methods while increasing the batch size. Experimentally, we also show that in the case of smooth convex optimization, our procedure can even obtain a better loss when increasing the batch size for a fixed number of samples. We then apply this new algorithm to obtain a parallelizable stochastic gradient method that is synchronous but allows speed-up on par with Hogwild! methods as convergence does not deteriorate with the increase of the batch size. The same approach can be used to make mini-batch provably efficient for variance-reduced SG methods such as SVRG.
Imaging Small PEC Spheres by a Linear $\delta$  Approach

The problem of localizing small inhomogeneities from the knowledge of their scattered field is dealt with. In particular, the case of small perfect electric conducting spheres is of concern, with the scattered field data collected under multistatic/multifrequency/single-view or multistatic/single-frequency/multiview far zone configurations. The multiple scattering between the spheres is neglected, and their locations are represented as the supports of the Dirac delta functions. This allows one to cast the problem as the inversion of a linear integral operator, with the delta functions being the unknowns of the problem. The inversion of this linear integral operator is achieved by means of the truncated singular value decomposition. The performance of the linear inversion algorithm against the model error (i.e., for situations where the multiple scattering is not negligible) is investigated by numerical simulations. Furthermore, the effect of noise is also analyzed by corrupting the data by an uncorrelated additive white Gaussian process.
Determination of Unknown Parameters of Photovoltaic Module Using Genetic Algorithm

In this paper, the unknown parameters of the photovoltaic (PV) module are determined using Genetic Algorithm (GA) method. This algorithm based on minimizing the absolute difference between the maximum power obtained from module datasheet and the maximum power obtained from the mathematical model of the PV module, at different operating conditions. This method does not need to initial values, so these parameters of the PV module are easily obtained with high accuracy. To validate the proposed method, the results obtained from it are compared with the experimental results obtained from the PV module datasheet for different operating conditions. The results obtained from the proposed model are found to be very close compared to the results given in the datasheet of the PV module. Full Text: PDF DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.11591/ijeecs.v4. i2.pp271-278
How new venture initial public offerings benefit from international operations: a study of human resource value

When internationalization goes beyond simply having international sales to having international operations, organizations can benefit from diversity of ideas and knowledge. Our study focuses on a special class of companies called new venture firms. As younger organizations, they may be well equipped to embrace the unique benefits of international diversity. However, new ventures may not be equal in this regard; therefore, our study also explores the moderating effect of human resource value for these firms.
Modeling the influence of snow cover on low Arctic net ecosystem exchange

The Arctic net ecosystem exchange (NEE) of CO2 between the land surface and the atmosphere is influenced by the timing of snow onset and melt. The objective of this study was to examine whether uncertainty in model estimates of NEE could be reduced by representing the influence of snow on NEE using remote sensing observations of snow cover area (SCA). Observations of NEE and time-lapse images of SCA were collected over four locations at a low Arctic site (Daring Lake, NWT) in May–June 2010. Analysis of these observations indicated that SCA influences NEE, and that good agreement exists between SCA derived from time-lapse images, Landsat and MODIS. MODIS SCA was therefore incorporated into the vegetation photosynthesis respiration model (VPRM). VPRM was calibrated using observations collected in 2005 at Daring Lake. Estimates of NEE were then generated over Daring Lake and Ivotuk, Alaska (2004–2007) using VPRM formulations with and without explicit representations of the influence of SCA on respiration and/or photosynthesis. Model performance was assessed by comparing VPRM output against unfilled eddy covariance observations from Daring Lake and Ivotuk (2004–2007). The uncertainty in VPRM estimates of NEE was reduced when respiration was estimated as a function of air temperature when SCA ≤ 50% and as a function of soil temperature when SCA > 50%.
Aggregate Dynamics and Staggered Contracts

Staggered wage contracts as short as 1 year are shown to be capable of generating the type of unemployment persistence which has been observed during postwar business cycles in the United States. A contract multiplier causes business cycles to persist beyond the length of the longest contract, and a diffusion of shocks across contracts causes the persistence to increase for several periods before diminishing. A persistence of inflation is also generated by the contracts. This persistence is represented as a reduced-form distributed-lag wage equation in which the lag coefficients have a pure-expectations component and an inertia component due to the overhang of outstanding contracts. Using rational expectations to separate these components suggests that aggregate demand may have a greater impact on inflation than the simple reduced-form estimates would indicate.
Participation of rural women in sustainable development – demographical and socio‐economic determinants

Empowering women is a top priority in the pre-accession process that is going on between the EU and Turkey. The accession partnership with the EU calls for identification of the challenges women face and specific priorities to promote the role of women in society. A gender-based disadvantageous socio-economic situation is more critical in rural communities. In this sense, studying, analyzing and understanding socio-demographic and socio-economic aspects of rural women's lives is the first step in formulating training and other services for empowering them. The status of rural women in Mersin (Turkey), where 46 per cent of inhabitants live in a rural area, was investigated and analyzed to provide the necessary quantitative and qualitative data for decision makers and public authorities to contribute to improvement of the status of rural women in the region. Chi-square analysis and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) were used to investigate the relationships between several socio-demographic and socio-economic variables. Findings of this study reveal that the young population is better educated and that most women desire their daughters to obtain a better education and an occupation. Rather than age, education is emerging as an important factor determining the participation of rural women in decision-making processes, and the regularity and amount of monthly income seems to be an important determinant of the number of children per household. In this context the traditional perceptions and norms seem to be changing. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
Crack cocaine use and sexual behavior among people with AIDS.

To the Editor. —Crack cocaine use, because of its association with risky sexual behaviors,1-3may play an important role in the acquisition and transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection.4,5Because of their addiction, crack users may not discontinue high-risk sexual behaviors, eg, prostitution, even if they are aware of their HIV status. To examine this possibility, we analyzed data collected from interviews of 3927 persons at least 18 years of age reported to health departments with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) or HIV infection between June 1, 1990, and January 31, 1993. This special surveillance project is currently being conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in collaboration with 11 state and local health departments. We elicited detailed information on drug use and sexual activities within the past 5 years. Among men, those who used crack but did not inject drugs were more likely to have
A qualitative framework for evaluating buffer overflow protection mechanisms

In the last decade, a large number of buffer overflow protection mechanisms have been proposed in the literature. The exponential growth of the Internet has greatly enhanced the chances of a large scale cyber attack. In the absence of a quantitative model to answer the fundamental question in security 'how secure is secure enough? ', we propose a qualitative framework based on which we review existing buffer overflow protection mechanisms to better understand their ability to prevent/slowdown a large scale cyber-attack. We use the proposed qualitative framework to evaluate 24 different buffer overflow protection mechanisms and finally conclude with a report card to summarise the security gaps in each of these mechanisms. We believe that this work at the least would serve as a reference to the research community and security practitioners in the software industry.
The missing link to an effective corporate governance system

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach to designing enterprise systems (ES). The goal is to create an information system that can be more efficient and able to contribute to a more stable and efficient corporate governance system.Design/methodology/approach – The new design approach is based on a retrospective analysis of the evolution of enterprise systems and the emerging business requirements.Findings – The new ES (Holistic Information System) does not diminish the problem of Corporate Governance (CG). The design and implementation of ES, according to modern CG principles and guidelines, can help all parties make rational decisions (through the power of logic and not through the logic of power), facilitate the market for corporate control, the flow of information and hence the efficiency of the CG system.Practical implications – The new framework can help information systems designers to understand and create a more holistic system. Also, it can help stakeholders understand th.
Association Between Smoking and Cholinergic Basal Forebrain Volume in Healthy Aging and Prodromal and Dementia Stages of Alzheimer's Disease.

BACKGROUND Smoking has been found associated with decreased cerebral volumes in healthy adults and in various neuropsychiatric disorders. OBJECTIVE We aimed to determine whether chronic nicotine exposure through smoking is associated with reduced volume of cortically projecting cholinergic basal forebrain nuclei in healthy aging, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and dementia stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). METHODS We retrieved cross-sectional data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database including 179 cognitively normal elderly subjects, 270 subjects with early stage MCI, 136 subjects in later, more advanced, stage of MCI, and 86 subjects in dementia stages of AD. We determined the association between past or current smoking versus lifetime non-smoker status on the volumes of the basal forebrain determined from volumetric MRI scans. Hippocampus volume was used as a control region. Significant effects were controlled for mediating or moderating effects of respiratory and cardiovascular morbidity. RESULTS In cognitively healthy individuals and early MCI, past or current smoking was significantly associated with smaller basal forebrain volume. This effect was independent from age, sex, or cardiovascular or respiratory morbidity. Hippocampus volume was not associated with smoking. In late MCI and AD dementia, smoking was not associated with basal forebrain or hippocampus volumes. CONCLUSIONS Our findings suggest that chronic nicotine exposure through smoking may lead to atrophy of cholinergic input areas of the basal forebrain. This effect may account for an increased risk of AD dementia onset with smoking by exhausting the cholinergic system reserve capacity.
Empirical performance of models for barrier option valuation

In this paper the empirical performance of ve dierent models for barrier option valuation is investigated: the Black-Scholes model, the constant elasticity of variance model, the Heston stochastic volatility model, the Merton jump-diusion model, and the innite activity Variance Gamma model. We use time-series data from the USD/EUR exchange rate market: standard put and call (plain vanilla) option prices and a unique set of observed market values of barrier options. The models are calibrated to plain vanilla option prices, and prediction errors at different horizons for plain vanilla and barrier option values are investigated. For plain vanilla options, the Heston and Merton models have similar and superior performance for prediction horizons up to one week. For barrier options, the continuous-path models (Black-Scholes, constant elasticity of variance, and Heston) do almost equally well, while both models with jumps (Merton and Variance Gamma) perform markedly worse.
The Globalisation of High Technology Production

1. A New Mode of Industrialisation 2. The International Division of Labour, Industrial Change and Territorial Development: Theoretical and Methodological Issues 3. Semi-conductor Production: Labour Processes, Markets and the Determinants of Globalisation 4. East Asia: The Emergent Regional Division of Labour 5. Hong Kong: The Making of a Regional Core 6. Scotland: The European Connection 7. Prospects for Globalisation and Development 8. Semi-conductors, Development and the Changing International Division of Labour.
Extensive traumatic anterior skull base fractures with cerebrospinal fluid leak: classification and repair techniques using combined vascularized tissue flaps.

OBJECTIVE This article introduces a classification scheme for extensive traumatic anterior skull base fracture to help stratify surgical treatment options. The authors describe their multilayer repair technique for cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leak resulting from extensive anterior skull base fracture using a combination of laterally pediculated temporalis fascial-pericranial, nasoseptal-pericranial, and anterior pericranial flaps. METHODS Retrospective chart review identified patients treated surgically between January 2004 and May 2014 for anterior skull base fractures with CSF fistulas. All patients were treated with bifrontal craniotomy and received pedicled tissue flaps. Cases were classified according to the extent of fracture: Class I (frontal bone/sinus involvement only); Class II (extent of involvement to ethmoid cribriform plate); and Class III (extent of involvement to sphenoid bone/sinus). Surgical repair techniques were tailored to the types of fractures. Patients were assessed for CSF leak at follow-up. The Fisher exact test was applied to investigate whether the repair techniques were associated with persistent postoperative CSF leak. RESULTS Forty-three patients were identified in this series. Thirty-seven (86%) were male. The patients' mean age was 33 years (range 11-79 years). The mean overall length of follow-up was 14 months (range 5-45 months). Six fractures were classified as Class I, 8 as Class II, and 29 as Class III. The anterior pericranial flap alone was used in 33 patients (77%). Multiple flaps were used in 10 patients (3 salvage) (28%)--1 with Class II and 9 with Class III fractures. Five (17%) of the 30 patients with Class II or III fractures who received only a single anterior pericranial flap had persistent CSF leak (p < 0.31). No CSF leak was found in patients who received multiple flaps. Although postoperative CSF leak occurred only in high-grade fractures with single anterior flap repair, this finding was not significant. CONCLUSIONS Extensive anterior skull base fractures often require aggressive treatment to provide the greatest long-term functional and cosmetic benefits. Several vascularized tissue flaps can be used, either alone or in combination. Vascularized flaps are an ideal substrate for cranial base repair. Dual and triple flap techniques that combine the use of various anterior, lateral, and nasoseptal flaps allow for a comprehensive arsenal in multilayered skull base repair and salvage therapy for extensive and severe fractures.