Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Examining the relationship between stock return volatility and trading volume: new evidence from an emerging economy

Using daily stock return data for individual stocks from an emerging economy, this article examines the relationship between return volatility and trading volume under the theoretical postulate of the mixture of distributions hypothesis. The results suggest that the contemporaneous trading volume as a proxy for latent information arrival to the market did not contribute to the removal of significant ARCH or Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity effects that are found in stocks at the first stage of the investigation. The same holds for the lagged volume except for one case. This, perhaps, suggests that the trading volume (contemporaneous or lagged) is not adequately conveying information to induce traders’ views of the desirability of trade and, therefore, points to the need for searching for other micro and macro variables to be used as potential proxy for information arrival to the stock market of the emerging economy.
Public Capital and Total Factor Productivity

This paper examines the impact of the stock of public capital on output levels and productivity growth rates in the United States. The analysis is based on the estimation of parameters in a translog profit function. Prices of intermediate goods are introduced into a quasiproduction function for value-added. Recently developed econometric techniques for dealing with nonstationary time series are used in the estimation. The authors find that the services of public capital are an important part of the production process and that about 40 percent of the productivity decline is explained by a fall in the public capital-labor ratio. Copyright 1993 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.
Revision of the genus Placospongia (Porifera, Demospongiae, Hadromerida, Placospongiidae) in the Indo-West Pacific

Abstract Species of the genus Placospongia are common within the tropical Indo-West Pacific, demonstrating a wide variety of colors and either branching or encrusting growth forms. A revision of Indo-West Pacific Placospongia was undertaken based on a redescription of the holotypes of species of Placospongia from the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific and an examination of an additional 103 specimens of Placospongia ssp. collected from Indonesia (including Vosmaer and Vernhout 1902 material), Seychelles, India, Singapore and Micronesia. One mitochondrial (COI) and one nuclear (ITS) marker were subsequently used to differentiate species. All Placospongia species are characterized by selenasters and tylostyles in two size classes. The combination of microsclere diversity and morphology as well as megasclere size were shown to be informative morphometric characters, supported by molecular evidence. Live coloration and growth form is shown to be unreliable for diagnoses. The study of holotypes found that Placospongia mixta is a valid species and that two genus transfers are necessary: Geodinella anthosigma is a Placospongia and Placospongia labyrinthica is a Geodia. A new species is also described from an anchialine pool in Indonesia, Placospongia santodomingoae sp. n. ; bringing the total fauna of Placospongia species in the Indo-West Pacific to five: Placospongia anthosigma, Placospongia carinata, Placospongia mixta, Placospongia melobesioides, and Placospongia santodomingoae sp. n. An identification key is given. Two additional species, possibly morphologically cryptic, have been identified by molecular markers.
Did William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd Write Edward III?

William Shakespeare is believed to be a significant author in the anonymous play, The Reign of King Edward III, published in 1596. However, recently, Thomas Kyd, has been suggested as the primary author. Using a neurolinguistics approach to authorship identification we use a four-feature technique, RPAS, to convert the 19 scenes in Edward III into a multi-dimensional vector. Three complementary analytical techniques are applied to cluster the data and reduce single technique bias before an alternate method, seriation, is used to measure the distances between clusters and test the strength of the connections. We find the multivariate techniques robust and are able to allocate up to 14 scenes to Thomas Kyd, and further question if scenes long believed to be Shakespeare's are not his.
The see-through medaka: A fish model that is transparent throughout life

The see-through medaka is a vertebrate model with a transparent body in the adult stage, as well as during the embryonic stages, that was generated from a small laboratory fish, medaka (Oryzias latipes). In this fish model, most of the pigments are genetically removed from the entire body by a combination of recessive alleles at four loci. The main internal organs, namely, heart, spleen, blood vessels, liver, gut, gonads, kidney, brain, spinal cord, lens, air bladder, and gills, in living adult fish are visible to the naked eye or with a simple stereoscopic microscope. This fish is healthy and fertile. A transgenic see-through medaka was produced by using the green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene fused to the regulatory regions of the medaka vasa gene, in which germ cell-specific expression of GFP was visualized. The fluorescent tag also efficiently improved visibility of gonadal tissues. The process of oocyte maturation in the ovary was monitored by repeated observations from the outside of the body during one spawning cycle in the same living females of the transgenic see-through stock. The see-through medaka will provide an opportunity for noninvasive studies of morphological and molecular events that occur in internal organs in the later stages of life.
Cointegration, Error Correction and the Demand for Money in Saudi Arabia

This study investigates the determinants of the money demand function in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi economy was instable during the period 1977-1997 because of its dependence on the production of oil. This dependence affects sharply the rates of growth and the rates of inflation. The integration and cointegration proprieties of the data are analyzed and the model of error correction is used to estimate the demand for money. This paper concludes that even in the period of high instability in the economy, there exists a stationarity in the long run demand for narrow money (Ml) in Saudi Arabia.
Coping with Mandated Public Participation: The Case of Implementing the EU Water Framework Directive in the Netherlands

An important aspect of contemporary European policy-making is public participation. The European Commission increasingly mandates its member states to involve the general public in policy-making through public participation. Public participation is generally considered to improve the legitimacy and democracy of the policy-making process and its outcomes. However, mandated public participation creates severe difficulties for member states whose policy-making process may be characterized as a (neo)corporatist system of interest representation. This paper presents the case of the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive in the Netherlands, aiming to highlight these difficulties, to provide an example of how a member state may cope with forced public participation in a (neo)corporatist environment, and to question whether and, if so, how mandated public participation actually results in a more democratic and legitimate policy-making process.
Qualification of Standard Membrane-Feeding Assay with Plasmodium falciparum Malaria and Potential Improvements for Future Assays

Vaccines that interrupt malaria transmission are of increasing interest and a robust functional assay to measure this activity would promote their development by providing a biologically relevant means of evaluating potential vaccine candidates. Therefore, we aimed to qualify the standard membrane-feeding assay (SMFA). The assay measures the transmission-blocking activity of antibodies by feeding cultured P. falciparum gametocytes to Anopheles mosquitoes in the presence of the test antibodies and measuring subsequent mosquito infection. The International Conference on Harmonisation (ICH) Harmonised Tripartite Guideline Q2(R1) details characteristics considered in assay validation. Of these characteristics, we decided to qualify the SMFA for Precision, Linearity, Range and Specificity. The transmission-blocking 4B7 monoclonal antibody was tested over 6 feeding experiments at several concentrations to determine four suitable concentrations that were tested in triplicate in the qualification experiments (3 additional feeds) to evaluate Precision, Linearity and Range. For Specificity, 4B7 was tested in the presence of normal mouse IgG. We determined intra- and inter-assay variability of % inhibition of mean oocyst intensity at each concentration of 4B7 (lower concentrations showed higher variability). We also showed that % inhibition was dependent on 4B7 concentration and the activity is specific to 4B7. Since obtaining empirical data is time-consuming, we generated a model using data from all 9 feeds and simulated the effects of different parameters on final readouts to improve the assay procedure and analytical methods for future studies. For example, we estimated the effect of number of mosquitoes dissected on variability of % inhibition, and simulated the relationship between % inhibition in oocyst intensity and % inhibition of prevalence of infected mosquitos at different mean oocysts in the control. SMFA is one of the few biological assays used in preclinical and early clinical development of transmission-blocking vaccines, and this study strongly supports its further development and application.
A Modified Pole-Zero Technique for the Synthesis of Waveguide Leaky-Wave Antennas Loaded With Dipole-Based FSS

An extension of the pole-zero matching method proposed by Stefano Maci for the analysis of electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structures composed by lossless dipole-based frequency selective surfaces (FSS) printed on stratified dielectric media, is presented in this paper. With this novel expansion, the dipoles length appears as a variable in the analytical dispersion equation. Thus, modal dispersion curves as a function of the dipoles length can be easily obtained with the only restriction of single Floquet mode propagation. These geometry-dispersion curves are essential for the efficient analysis and design of practical EBG structures, such as waveguides loaded with artificial magnetic conductors (AMC) for miniaturization, or leaky-wave antennas (LWA) using partially reflective surfaces (PRS). These two practical examples are examined in this paper. Results are compared with full-wave 2D and 3D simulations showing excellent agreement, thus validating the proposed technique and illustrating its utility for practical designs.
The Theory of the Multinational Enterprise: An Application to Multinational Office Location

The forces that affect growth, location, and distribution in the service sector will have elements in common with those at work in manufacturing, but equally will exhibit certain unique features. This paper examines such forces in the specific context of location choices made by offices of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Such enterprises emerge in response to particular market imperfections and to exploit particular ‘ownership specific’ advantages. The nature of such ownership specific advantages is discussed with specific reference to MNE office location, and tested using data drawn from a survey of European offices of mainly US-based MNEs. It is shown that a distinction must be drawn between offices that provide a service for final consumption and those that provide a mainly coordinating role. The former types of office are shown to be heavily market oriented and to act in ways consistent with theory. The latter types of office are more complex, but again locate in ways consistent with theory; in particular they are influenced more by accessibility and by environment than by cost and geography.
The Payoff Period and the Rate of Profit

The major conclusions reached by the analysis may be summarized as follows: First, the reciprocal of the payoff period is in fact an estimate of a proposal's rate of profit. Second, when a proposal's life is greater than its postlax payoff period , the reciprocal of the payoff period provides the best short-cut estimate of its rate of profit; and, when a proposal's life is less than its postlax payoff period , the average investment formula provides the better short-cut estimate of its rate of profit. The error in the two formulas is found by comparing them with present-value formula, which provides a proposal's true rate of profit. The third conclusion is that the Terborgh formula provides an index of the profitability of an investment proposal that has serious limitations in the purpose for which it is intended.
Studies on the Mechanism of Ring Hydrolysis in Phenylacetate Degradation

The widespread, long sought-after bacterial aerobic phenylalanine/phenylacetate catabolic pathway has recently been elucidated. It proceeds via coenzyme A (CoA) thioesters and involves the epoxidation of the aromatic ring of phenylacetyl-CoA, subsequent isomerization to an uncommon seven-membered C-O-heterocycle (oxepin-CoA), and non-oxygenolytic ring cleavage. Here we characterize the hydrolytic oxepin-CoA ring cleavage catalyzed by the bifunctional fusion protein PaaZ. The enzyme consists of a C-terminal (R)-specific enoyl-CoA hydratase domain (formerly MaoC) that cleaves the ring and produces a highly reactive aldehyde and an N-terminal NADP+-dependent aldehyde dehydrogenase domain that oxidizes the aldehyde to 3-oxo-5,6-dehydrosuberyl-CoA. In many phenylacetate-utilizing bacteria, the genes for the pathway exist in a cluster that contains an NAD+-dependent aldehyde dehydrogenase in place of PaaZ, whereas the aldehyde-producing hydratase is encoded outside of the cluster. If not oxidized immediately, the reactive aldehyde condenses intramolecularly to a stable cyclic derivative that is largely prevented by PaaZ fusion in vivo. Interestingly, the derivative likely serves as the starting material for the synthesis of antibiotics (e.g. tropodithietic acid) and other tropone/tropolone related compounds as well as for ω-cycloheptyl fatty acids. Apparently, bacteria made a virtue out of the necessity of disposing the dead-end product with ring hydrolysis as a metabolic branching point.
Active Memory Processor for Network-on-Chip-Based Architecture

Memory-intensive operations and their memory access latency are often the performance bottleneck in parallel applications. In this paper, we investigate the concept of active memory operation which is an active data processing operation performed on the memory side. Utilizing the active memory operation, we can replace multiple transactions of memory accesses over the on-chip network and related computations on the processor side with a smaller number of high-level transactions and computations on the memory side. To realize the concept, we have designed a special-purpose processor called active memory processor which is tightly coupled with the memory and executes the active memory operations. In our case studies, we have applied the concept to five real-world applications (parallelized JPEG, FFT, text indexing for data mining, histogram, and eikonal equation solver) running on a 36--tile architecture with 64 cores and four memory tiles and found that the proposed approach can improve performance by 20.5~ 259.3 percent.
Price Setting in France: New Evidence from Survey Data

This paper reports the results of a survey conducted by the Banque de France during winter 2003-2004 to investigate the price-setting behavior of French manufacturing companies. Prices are found to adjust infrequently; the median firm modifies its price only once a year. Price reviews are more frequent than price changes; the median firm reviews its price quarterly. Firms are found to follow either time-dependent, state-dependent or both pricing rules. Moreover, the chosen interval of price reviews depends on the probability that changes in the firms' environment occur. Coordination failure and nominal contracts (either written or implicit) are the most important sources of price stickiness, while pricing thresholds and physical menu costs appear to be totally unimportant. Asymmetries in price stickiness are found to be different for cost shocks compared to demand shocks: prices are more rigid downward than upward for cost shocks, while the reverse is true for demand shocks.
Does EMU Promote Labor-Market Reforms?

This paper discusses whether European Monetary Union (EMU) will promote labor-market reforms. Labor-market reforms carry a double dividend: not only structural unemployment but also equilibrium inflation is decreased. However, with labor-market reforms being implemented nationally, the latter effect is not present in EMU so that EMU does not work in favor of labor-market reforms. This result is reinforced by the existence of nominal rigidities. A contrary effect arises if EMU itself increases structural unemployment. Yet, this positive effect of EMU on labor-market reforms is compromised if it is caused by the possibility for participating countries to produce negative fiscal externalities. Copyright 1998 by WWZ and Helbing & Lichtenhahn Verlag AG
Low molecular weight PTP–IL‐4RA interaction in atopy predisposition

We recently described a protective effect of the low molecular weight protein tyrosine phosphatase (LMPTP) BC genotype, associated with the highest total enzymatic activity, against high serum IgE levels both in the English and the Italian populations. Here we test the hypothesis of a role of LMPTP in the negative modulation of IL‐4 signal transduction checking for genetic interaction between interleukin‐4 receptor alpha chain (IL‐4RA) genetic polymorphisms and LMPTP polymorphism in the predisposition to high total IgE levels in the English population. We find a significant interaction between LMPTP polymorphism and the intracellular Gln/Arg polymorphism in position 551 of IL‐4RA. Our data support the hypothesis of a direct or indirect biochemical interaction between LMPTP and IL‐4RA resulting in different modulation of IL‐4 signal transduction among joint genotypes.
An Empirical-Investigation Of The Relative Performance Evaluation Hypothesis

The principal-agent framework has become a widely used paradigm in accounting and economics for analyzing issues in performance evaluation, management control, and the design of incentive systems. While recent work in experimental economics has begun to examine empirically some of the underlying assumptions and implications of agency theory (see Baiman and Lewis [1989] and Kirby [forthcoming]), few precise hypotheses have been tested using real-world or naturally-occurring data. One exception has been the empirical investigation of the relative performance evaluation (RPE) hypothesis. Agency theory suggests that there are benefits associated with evaluating agents on the basis of their relative performances when the agents' performances are affected by a common "shock" term (e.g., see Diamond and Verrecchia [1982] and Holmstrom [1979; 1982]). Specifically, a relative performance-based contract can remove the common shock term from an agent's performance, which enables a better evaluation of the agent's actions.
Differences Across Cohorts in Finnish Intergenerational Income Mobility

Trends in intergenerational economic mobility in Finland are analyzed using panel data from 1950 through 1999 on more than 250,000 sons and daughters born between 1930 and 1970. A significant decline is estimated in the intergenerational transmission elasticity from the 1930 birth cohort until the baby boom cohorts of the early 1950s. After that we observed no increase in the extent of mobility for 1950s and 1960s birth cohorts, but rather the reverse. The result holds both for sons and daughters. A decomposition of the intergenerational transmission elasticities across cohorts shows that most of the early decline in transmission reflected a drop in the influence of parental income on the children's earnings that operated through investments in the child's schooling. This early pattern is postulated to reflect the phases of secondary educational expansion at the time. Throughout, a rise is estimated in the intergenerational transmission elasticity with age at which sons and daughters are observed. This has also been noted in prior U.S. studies and, at least in this Finnish context, this seems to result almost entirely from rising estimated returns to education with age.
How to compare the performance of two SMT microarchitectures

In this paper we discuss methods and metrics for comparing the performance of two simultaneous multithreading microarchitectures. We identify conditions under which the instructions-per-cycle metric may be misleading for comparing two simultaneous multithreading microarchitectures for the same amount of work. Part of the problem is isolated to the definition of what is same work. When simulating a mix of independent programs under the same initial conditions on two different simultaneous multithreading microarchitectures there are two approaches to ensure the work of the two runs is same: constant-work-per-thread or variablework-per-thread. For both approaches the total number of instructions in the run is constant, however, for the first, the instructions from each thread is also constant, whereas for the second is not. We claim that: (a) when simulating two microarchitectures with the constant-work-per-thread approach, the instructions-percycle is sufficient to compare them to establish the microarchitecture with the best performance, (b) when variable-work-per-thread approach is used the instruction-per-cycle may be inadequate for comparing performance. We attribute this to the inability of the instructions-per-cycle metric to account for differences in the load-balance of the two runs. A new performance metric,SMT-speedup, is proposed that enables accurate comparison of the performance of two simultaneous multithreading microarchitectures for runs with different load-balance. The new metric considers the loadbalance in terms of the size and performance of each thread. In light of the insight gain in this paper we contend that a simultaneous multithreading microarchitecture may need to trade-off throughput and load-balance to achieve the best performance.
An Empirical Investigation into the Influence of Knowledge Sharing Barriers on Knowledge Sharing and Individual Innovation Behaviour

Knowledge sharing barriers reduce the propensity of individuals to share knowledge and produce innovation behaviour. Thus, identifying barriers and their impact on knowledge sharing and individual innovation behaviour is a potential research area to study. Considering lack of studies in the literature, this study provides further evidence regarding the implications of knowledge sharing barriers in the workplace. Data was collected from eighty three academic staff in a higher education institution and analysed with Smart PLS. The results showed that organisation related knowledge sharing barriers are negatively related to knowledge collecting and knowledge donating. The result also indicates that individual knowledge sharing barriers have negative effect on individual innovation behaviours. There was no link found in this study between knowledge sharing and individual innovation behaviour. These findings provide empirical evidence to the further development of knowledge management and innovation research, and insights regarding how to better implement knowledge sharing and foster innovation behaviour in organisations.