Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stock Price Behavior around Extreme Trading Volumes

The study investigates how the coexistence of extreme returns and volumes predicts future stock returns and how the high-volume return premium is affected by the coexistent extreme returns. It also examines the patterns of returns, volatility, and skewness around extreme trading volumes. We find that stocks exhibit different return and volatility patterns prior to and after extreme volumes. We also find that the high-volume return premium only exists among small size stocks which simultaneously experience extremely low prior returns. The high-volume return premium disappears for larger size stocks experiencing extremely low prior returns. Regardless of the firm size, the high-volume return premium only lasts for a very short time period for stocks simultaneously experiencing extremely high prior returns. The existence of extreme volumes cancels out any potential gains from contrarian or momentum investing strategies.
THE TWO-SECTOR MODEL AND PRODUCTION TECHNIQUE IN THE SHORT RUN AND THE LONG RUN*

The standard two-sector model is generalized to include a slowly adjusting technique of production. The relationship between a short run fixed coefficients production structure and a long run production structure in which factors are substitutable is examined. The Stolper-Samuelson theorem holds both on impact and in the long run. However, adjustment from the impact equilibrium to the long run equilibrium could cause both factor prices to increase, or one to rise while the other falls. Which result occurs depends upon the relative long run substitutability of factors in the two sectors. The path of adjustment taken by factor prices following an exogenous shock is analyzed. It is shown that factor price movements depend upon the costs of adjustment and that a variety of adjustment paths are possible. Copyright 1990 by Royal Economic Society.
Central processing of human ocular torsion analyzed by galvanic vestibular stimulation

&NA; We examined the dynamics of human ocular torsion (OT) responses to sinusoidal galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) (0.005–1.67 Hz). The tonic OT showed a lowpass characteristic with a time constant of 1.74 s and a gain of 0.93 deg/mA. In two subjects, nystagmus dominated the observable OT pattern at frequencies <0.1 Hz. The nystagmus slow phases showed an exponential trajectory with a time constant of 1.49 s. The dynamics of both tonic OT and torsional nystagmus in our study were similar to the dynamics of OT induced by rotation and linear acceleration found in the literature. We propose a model for the central processing of torsional eye movements that is based on a common neural integration of semicircular canal (SC) and utricular inputs as well as nystagmus bursts. The sensitivity of all vestibular afferents to GVS was derived to be 0.76 spikes/s/mA. SC effects on OT are at least 3.5 times higher than utricular effects.
The Influence of Firm Financial Position and Industry Characteristics on Capital Structure Adjustment

We extend Byoun's (2008) modelling of the relationship between deficits and surpluses and adjustment speed, to demonstrate how industry characteristics identified by Kayo and Kimura (2011), including industry concentration, industry munificence and industry dynamism, impact on speed of adjustment. Using New Zealand firms as a case study, we find significant evidence that, as well as firm financial position, industry characteristics also impact on adjustment speed. The firm financial position results are the most robust, and we recommend further research to confirm the nature of the relationship between industry characteristics and the speed at which firms adjust towards target capital structures.
Environment, Market Share, and Market Power

In this paper we develop a process model relating market share to firm profits. In particular, we specify average price and average cost equations as a function of previous year market share position, changes in market share, environmental conditions, and interactions of environmental conditions with the lagged market position and market share change variables. We estimate these equations using PIMS data after controlling for unobservable factors. Our results suggest that firms with high market shares derive no extra market power benefits except if they operate in environments with little buyer power. Instead, environmental factors and changes in market share most strongly influence price and cost. An analysis of the market share associated with maximal firm profits indicates that for the majority of firms in our sample steadily increasing market share does not always associate with increasing profits, giving credence to the proposition that "more market share is not always better. "
Citizens v. Mandarins: Administrative Litigation in China

The Chinese government has, in the last 20 years, devoted enormous political resources and effort to revamping its legal system. The resultant legal reforms, part of the government′s programme of political institutionalization, have been the subject of intense scholarly interest in the West. One of these legal reforms was the Administration Litigation Law (ALL), passed in April 1989 and implemented in October 1990. The theoretical significance of this law can hardly be exaggerated because, if fully enforced, it would afford Chinese citizens an important legal instrument with which to defend themselves against the abuse of state power by government agencies and officials. Like other legal reforms, the ALL has attracted the attention of both Chinese and Western legal scholars. However, most early studies do not offer in-depth empirical analysis of the implementation of the law, its effects on China′s administrative practices and its political implications. A possible exception was a 1992 study by a group of Chinese scholars who used polling data to assess the public perception of the ALL and relied on two case studies to investigate how the law was implemented at the grassroots level. Nevertheless, the 1992 study has its limitations. Apart from the issue of the reliability of polling in China, it contains no national data on the implementation of the law; nor does it provide an in-depth analysis of sample court cases that went to trial according to the provisions of the ALL. Furthermore, it covers only a very brief period following the implementation of the law and relies on insufficient data, especially at the national level. Other works on the ALL suffer from similar problems, as lack of empirical data apparently restricted their authors mostly to a historical review of the evolution of administrative litigation in China, an analysis of the legal provisions of the ALL and speculation about its effectiveness.
Domestic tourism destination choices — a choice modelling analysis

Abstract Tourism destinations compete with each other to attract visitors. Although international tourism has received a lot of attention, domestic tourism remains the mainstay for many destinations. To inform the basis on which destinations compete, an understanding of the determinants of destination choices is required. In this paper, the discrete choice modelling method is applied to investigate the determining factors underlying the short‐break holiday destination choices of prospective tourists from Melbourne, Australia. The results from an estimated nested logit model indicate the relative importance of a number of destination and trip attributes and respondent characteristics. The model results are used to simulate the effects on destinations' market shares resulting from various changes in attributes and tourist characteristics. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Research on the relationship between forward freight agreements and the fuel oil index

Bulk shipping is a globalised industry, and market prices are entirely dependent on the world’s economic climate. The industries contractual arrangements are also rather flexible making it difficult for market participants to understand the trends and fluctuations of market prices and forcing market participants to face greater uncertainty and volatility. Oil and Forward Freight Agreements (FFAs) act as suitable hedging instruments in bulk shipping markets, allowing market participants to hedge their risks in spot markets. This research predominantly applies the vector autoregressive moving-average model (VARMA) and uses variables from one year FFAs and the global oil index to analyse the relationships between the two instruments. This research believes the VARMA (1,3) is the most suitable model, because it demonstrates the existence of a stage one lag effect between Capesize FFAs and the global oil index. This model also has three error correction factors. By using VARMA (1,3) formulas, it is possible to discover the mutual effects of the relationship between the two hedge components. The research result aims to provide market participants with guidance for entering and exiting bulk shipping markets.
Financial Development, Savings and Economic Growth: Evidence from Bahrain Using VAR

This research paper investigates the linkage between the financial development and the economic growth in Bahrain during the period 1981 to 2013. The motivation for kicking off on the Bahrain economy is attributed on account of paradigm shift manifested in moving from hydrocarbons purveyor to being in the financial services and industrial hub. Given the limiting factor embedded with the bivariate causality structure, the paper encompasses savings as an intermittent variable. The paper makes an earnest investigation to gauge the long run and short run relationship among financial development, savings and the economic growth. Time series data are taken for a time span of 33 years (1981- 2013). Data are culled from the World Bank Database. Financial Development measured by M2(broad money)/ GDP is represented by F, Economic growth measured by GDP per capita is represented by Y and Savings measured by Domestic Savings/GDP is represented by S. No long term co-integration is found among the variables under consideration as represented by Johansen test. Through the employment of multiple econometrics tools under Vector Auto Regression (VAR) framework, it is unearthed that the empirical evidence supports neither the supply –leading hypothesis nor the demand –following hypothesis for the Bahrain. While savings and economic growth have bi-directional causality at 10% level of significance. In responding to inexplicit results between the purported variables, the current study recommends that more wide ranges of reforms in the financial services are entailed, so as to escalate further the economic growth in the Bahrain economy.
A guinada territorial da economia global.

Este artigo tem como objetivo desenvolver a afirmacao de que novas estrategias para o desenvolvimento de sistemas produtivos estao emergindo em nivel territorial. De um ponto de vista historico, eles constituem uma forma de organizacao pos-fordista do setor economico para enfrentar as mudancas na era da globalizacao. O autor descreve essas possibilidades e propoe um modelo de desenvolvimento territorial baseado nos conceitos de qualidade e especificidade. Sua proposta e entao relacionada ao modelo produtivo classico.
Angiotensin II receptor blocker prevents increased arterial stiffness in patients with essential hypertension.

BACKGROUND High pulse wave velocity (PWV) is related to cardiovascular risk in essential hypertension (EHT). It is reported that short-term treatment with an angiotensin II receptor blocker (ARB) decreases PWV, as well as blood pressure (BP), and increases the serum adiponectin, known as an adipocytokine, which has an anti-atherosclerotic effect. However, it is not known whether long-term treatment with ARB prevents the increase in PWV independently of the reduction of BP, and whether adiponectin is related to the chronic effect of ARB on PWV. METHODS AND RESULTS In order to examine the short-term effect of ARB on PWV, 9 subjects with EHT had PWV measured before and after treatment with an ARB for 1 month. The treatment significantly reduced PWV and BP. For evaluation of the long-term effect of ARB therapy, 56 consecutive subjects with EHT who were already taking anti-hypertensive drugs other than an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor had their PWV measured. We divided the EHT subjects into 2 groups: (1) the ARB group (EHT treated with an ARB for at least 6 months) and (2) the control group (EHT treated with anti-hypertensive drugs other than an ARB). Although there was no significant difference between the 2 groups in BP, age or body mass index, the PWV value in the ARB group was significantly lower than that in the control group. Moreover, the serum adiponectin concentration in the ARB group was significantly higher than that in the control group. CONCLUSIONS Long-term treatment with ARB inhibits the progression of arterial stiffness independent of BP reduction. One of the mechanisms may be related to the increased serum adiponectin concentration after treatment with an ARB.
Dimensions of publicness and organizational performance: a review of the evidence

Debates about the merits of publicness have dominated the public administration landscape since the foundation of the modern state. The extent of organizational publicness (ownership, funding, and control) has waxed and waned in developed countries: it rose following the postwar settlement and fell under the policies of New Right government and the popularity of the notions of New Public Management. We argue that publicness effects are likely to diminish in the face of organizational and contextual characteristics and that what matters for performance is management and organization. To this end, we examine the evidence base by undertaking a review of academic studies of publicness and organizational performance. The results suggest that publicness makes a difference to efficiency and equity, but the magnitude and direction of this effect varies with the characteristics of the empirical studies. Our findings clearly point toward the need for research that includes all dimensions of publicness, a variety of performance measures, and the moderating effects of management, organization, and external constraints.
A Chinese Words Detection Method in Camera Based Images

Text in camera based image carries important information for visual content understanding and retrieval. Locating text from complex background is a challenge task and complex structure of Chinese words make it harder. In this paper, we develop an application which is targeted toward smart phone with camera. Our goal is to enable the smart phone to detect Chinese words in nature scenes. First of all, we implemente Stroke Width Transform [1] (SWT for short) of images on smart phones. Consequently, we improve the filtering process of detected connected components. Finally, we propose grouping methods of structure analysis to detect Chinese word in nature scenes. We have implemented the algorithm and tested it. Experiments show that our Chinese word detection approach works well.
Assessing sex differentials in under-five mortality in sub-Saharan Africa: A cross-national comparative analysis

This paper investigates and compares country-specific sex differentials in childhood mortality in thirty sub-Saharan African countries. Data from the demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) were analyzed to assess sex differentials in U5M rates before and after adjustment for individual, household, and community-level factors, using multilevel discrete-time hazard models. The findings show a systematically higher mortality for male children compared to female in all countries except Sierra Leone and Swaziland. The relationship is significant in nineteen of the thirty countries. Across the region, males have 17–54 per cent higher odds of dying before age five. These patterns remained when controls were added for individual and community-level factors, as well as unobserved community-level effects.
Enhancement of experimental fracture-healing by systemic administration of recombinant human parathyroid hormone (PTH 1-34).

BACKGROUND Recombinant human parathyroid hormone (PTH [1-34]; teriparatide) is a new treatment for postmenopausal osteoporosis that can be systemically administered for the primary purpose of increasing bone formation. Because several studies have described the enhancement of fracture-healing and osteointegration in animals after use of PTH, we sought to critically analyze this skeletal effect. METHODS Two hundred and seventy male Sprague-Dawley rats underwent standard, closed femoral fractures and were divided into three groups that were administered daily subcutaneous injections of 5 or 30 mug/kg of PTH (1-34) or vehicle (control). The dosing was administered for up to thirty-five days. Groups were further divided into three subgroups and were killed on day 21, 35, or 84 after the fracture. The bones were subjected to mechanical torsion testing, histomorphometric analysis, or microquantitative computed tomography. RESULTS By day 21, calluses from the group treated with 30 mug of PTH showed significant increases over the controls with respect to torsional strength, stiffness, bone mineral content, bone mineral density, and cartilage volume. By day 35, both groups treated with PTH showed significant increases in bone mineral content and density and total osseous tissue volume, and they demonstrated significant decreases in void space and cartilage volume (p < 0.05). Torsional strength was significantly increased at this time-point in the group treated with 30 mug of PTH (p < 0.05). While dosing was discontinued on day 35, analyses performed after eighty-four days in the group treated with 30 mug of PTH showed sustained increases over the controls with respect to torsional strength and bone mineral density. No change was noted in osteoclast density at the time-points measured, suggesting that treatment with PTH enhanced bone formation but did not induce bone resorption. CONCLUSIONS These data show that daily systemic administration of PTH (1-34) enhances fracture-healing by increasing bone mineral content and density and strength, and it produces a sustained anabolic effect throughout the remodeling phase of fracture-healing.
Inference-Based Similarity Search in Randomized Montgomery Domains for Privacy-Preserving Biometric Identification

Similarity search is essential to many important applications and often involves searching at scale on high-dimensional data based on their similarity to a query. In biometric applications, recent vulnerability studies have shown that adversarial machine learning can compromise biometric recognition systems by exploiting the biometric similarity information. Existing methods for biometric privacy protection are in general based on pairwise matching of secured biometric templates and have inherent limitations in search efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we propose an inference-based framework for privacy-preserving similarity search in Hamming space. Our approach builds on an obfuscated distance measure that can conceal Hamming distance in a dynamic interval. Such a mechanism enables us to systematically design statistically reliable methods for retrieving most likely candidates without knowing the exact distance values. We further propose to apply Montgomery multiplication for generating search indexes that can withstand adversarial similarity analysis, and show that information leakage in randomized Montgomery domains can be made negligibly small. Our experiments on public biometric datasets demonstrate that the inference-based approach can achieve a search accuracy close to the best performance possible with secure computation methods, but the associated cost is reduced by orders of magnitude compared to cryptographic primitives.
The Longer Tail: The Changing Shape of Amazon’s Sales Distribution Curve

Internet consumers derive significant surplus from increased product variety, and in particular, the “Long Tail” of niche products that can be found on the Internet at retailers like Amazon.com. In this paper we analyze how the shape of Amazon’s sales distribution curve has changed from 2000 to 2008, and how this impacts the resulting consumer surplus gains from increased product variety in the online book market. Specifically, in 2008 we collected sales and sales rank data on a broad sample of books sold through Amazon.com and compare it to similar data we gathered in 2000. We then develop a new methodology for fitting the relationship between sales and sales rank and apply it to our data. We find that the Long Tail has grown longer over time, with niche books accounting for a larger share of total sales. Our analyses suggest that by 2008, niche books account for 36.7% of Amazon’s sales and the consumer surplus generated by niche books has increased at least five fold from 2000 to 2008. We argue that this increase is consistent with the presence of “secondary” supply- and demand- side effects driving the growth of the Long Tail online. In addition, our new methodology finds that, while power laws are a good first approximation for the rank-sales relationship, the slope is not constant for all book ranks, becoming progressively steeper for more obscure books.
Elements of an Undergraduate Agricultural Leadership Program: A Delphi Study

Programs in agricultural leadership are continuing to enjoy success in institutions around the country. To this point, there has been a lack of research conducted to (a) identify objectives for these programs, (b) identify courses that should be taught in these programs, (c) identify the need for and objectives of an internship requirement, or (d) determine future placements of program graduates. This study sought the opinions of 15 agricultural leadership experts from across the nation to address these questions. Although the panel came to consensus on these areas it Journal of Leadership Education Volume 12, Issue 1 – Winter 2013 141 was apparent that the experts in agricultural leadership must continue to work toward national goals and standards for agricultural leadership programs.
Consistent Coding Scheme for Single-Image Super-Resolution Via Independent Dictionaries

In this paper, we present a unified frame based on collaborative representation (CR) for single-image super-resolution (SR), which learns low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) dictionaries independently in the training stage and adopts a consistent coding scheme (CCS) to guarantee the prediction accuracy of HR coding coefficients during SR reconstruction. The independent LR and HR dictionaries are learned based on CR with l2-norm regularization, which can well describe the corresponding LR and HR patch space, respectively. Furthermore, a mapping function is learned to map LR coding coefficients onto the corresponding HR coding coefficients. Propagation filtering can achieve smoothing over an image while preserving image context like edges or textural regions. Moreover, to preserve the edge structures of a super-resolved image and suppress artifacts, a propagation filtering-based constraint and image nonlocal self-similarity regularization are introduced into the SR reconstruction framework. Experimental comparison with state-of-the-art single image SR algorithms validates the effectiveness of proposed approach.