Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development of rural-tourism experiences through networking: An example from Gudbrandsdalen, Norway

Tourism has been cited as an economic alternative in rural areas where traditional primary occupations are in decline. The article examines how networking and collaboration between small rural-tourism firms may contribute to the development of rural-tourism experiences. Networking and collaboration may be a means of overcoming lack of resources faced by small firms when it comes to innovation. Interviews were undertaken with four members and the project manager of a network of rural-tourism firms located in Gudbrandsdalen, Norway. The analysis indicates that networking was beneficial for the firms, for several reasons. An economic benefit in the initial phase of the firms and of the network resulted from joint marketing. As the firms increased their market shares, the benefits of friendship and fellowship become more important than the economic benefits of the network.
Earnings Differentials between State and Non-State Enterprises in Urban China

The present paper estimates earnings differentials between state and non-state sectors for Chinese urban residents in 1996 by taking into account differences in non-wage benefits. Household survey data are used to estimate wage differentials while aggregate statistics are utilised in estimating non-wage benefits. We find that state-sector workers earned significantly more than workers in urban collective and domestic private enterprises in 1996. Unskilled workers in foreign invested enterprises (FIE) earned significantly less than those in the state sector but skilled workers earned more in FIE than in the state sector. These findings shed light on the source of labour immobility that state-owned enterprise had experienced until recently.
Seasonality, cointegration and the long-run purchasing power parity: evidence for sterling exchange rates

The long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis is tested for nine bilateral sterling exchange rates, using recently developed techniques on cointegration and seasonal integration. The empirical findings show that none of the exchange rates and relative prices contain seasonal unit roots, but all have an autoregressive unit root. The cointegration tests overwhelmingly reject the PPP hypothesis as a long-run equilibrium condition for all countries concerned.
Economic Integration and Dynamic Location Planning

Abstract : Theories of economic integration are based in part on concepts from location theory. As static models are generally inadequate for the dynamic context of integration, the author formulates a dynamic version of Losch's static location model and examines its implications for economic integration through a dynamic programming approach. Although the potential advantages from integration of expansion and location policies are substantial, marginal returns diminish rapidly as the size of the integrated group is enlarged. (Author)
CONTINUOUSLY CONTROLLED OPTIONS: DERIVATIVES WITH ADDED FLEXIBILITY

The paper introduces special options such that the holder selects dynamically a continuous time process controlling the distribution of the payments (benefits) over time. For instance, the holder can select dynamically the quantity of a commodity purchased or sold by a fixed price given constraints on the cumulative quantity. In a modification of the Asian option, the control process can represent the averaging kernel describing the distribution of the purchases. The pricing of these options requires to solve special stochastic control problems with constraints for the cumulative control similar to a knapsack problem. Some existence results and pricing rules are obtained via modifications of parabolic Bellman equations.
Intrahousehold Resource Allocation and Women’s Bargaining Power: New Evidence from Bangladesh

By using data from a relatively recent nationally representative survey of Bangladesh, this paper investigates the relationship between intrahousehold resource allocation and women's bargaining power. Along with the two regularly used bargaining power indicators, viz. resources brought at marriage and earned incomes by men and women, an index of empowerment has also been constructed using the information on various social, economic and cultural practices under which women operate to find out if their improved position can have any significant influence on household budgetary allocations. Regression results reveal significant differential effects of men‟s and women's incomes and assets on the budget shares of different goods while the women empowerment index also registers statistical significance in most cases. Therefore, in contrast to the so-called common preference or the unitary model of household behavior the evidence seems to suggest that women's bargaining power and improved empowerment do influence intrahousehold resource allocation.
Beliefs about Ecological Impacts Predict Deer Acceptance Capacity and Hunting Support

Ecological impacts of deer overbrowsing often lead resource managers to recommend deer control through hunting, which may be strongly opposed by local residents. Adaptive impact management argues that understanding wildlife impacts of concern to the public can improve wildlife management. However, research on public wildlife acceptance capacity for deer, and on support for hunting, has emphasized concerns about household impacts and deer well-being, general environmental beliefs and attitudes, and beliefs about consequences of hunting, but not public concerns about deer ecological impacts. Our survey of neighbors of urban wetlands shows that beliefs about deer ecological impacts are statistically significant predictors of deer acceptance capacity and of support for hunting, controlling for other factors. Including ecological-impact beliefs adds substantially to the explained variance in deer acceptance capacity, and slightly to the explained variance in support for hunting.
Building an integrated methodology of learning that can optimally support improvements in healthcare

The methods for healthcare reform are strikingly underdeveloped, with much reliance on political power. A methodology that combined methods from sources such as clinical trials, experience-based wisdom, and improvement science could be among the aims of the upcoming work in the USA on comparative effectiveness and on the agenda of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Those working in quality improvement have an unusual opportunity to generate substantial input into these processes through professional organisations such as the Academy for Healthcare Improvement and dominant leadership organisations such as the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
Understanding Active Loyalty Behavior in Hotel Reward Programs Through Customers’ Switching Costs and Perceived Program Value

ABSTRACT Whether loyalty programs have become part of the lexicon of buzzwords or not, the hotel industry continues to adopt loyalty/rewards programs as a major channel to nurture customers’ active loyalty as well as to reap return business. This study examins the structural relationships among perceived program value, switching costs, and active loyalty. The proposed model is supported by an online survey dataset collected from United States (US) tourists. The findings show that perceived program value is less effective in driving active loyalty compared with switching costs. This implies a need for strategic thinking on the part of hoteliers and the industry. Rather than aggressively spending money or copying schemes used by competitors to gear up program value, the value of a defensive tactic of increasing switching costs should be considered.
Random Walks and Market Efficiency Tests of Latin American Emerging Equity Markets: A Revisit

The few existing studies on equity price dynamics and market efficiency for Latin American emerging equity markets show conflicting results, This study uses multiple variance-ratio and auto-regressive fractionally integrated moving-average tests and new data (U.S. dollar-based national equity indices for the 1987-1997 period) to clarify these results. Documented evidence shows that equity prices in major Latin American emerging equity markets--Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico-follow a random walk, and that they are, generally, weak-form efficient. In sum, therefore, the evidence suggests that international investors in these markets cannot use historical information to design systematically profitable trading schemes because future long-term returns are not dependent on past returns. Copyright 1999 by MIT Press.
Strategic tools: an empirical investigation into strategy in practice in the UK

At the core of strategic planning has been the use of strategic tools and frameworks such as the ubiquitous SWOT analysis and a variety of frameworks bearing Michael Porter's moniker. There has been a tendency for generic tools to be developed and disseminated to industry, with a one-type-fits-all approach. Planning and the use of tools have largely been dismissed in much contemporary, particularly European practice-based, strategic literature. This paper argues that the use of strategic tools has a place in contemporary strategic management. However, the traditional prescriptive rationale for strategic frameworks is replaced with a practice-based set of reasons advocating the use of strategic tools. The paper advocates the use of strategic tools in a variety of strategic contexts including planning. However, it is shown that groupings of strategic tool usage can be identified which might indicate that business and business schools should reconsider how they apply, learn and disseminate strategic framework. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Facilitators and benefits of using Mobile Entertainment Services

This study aims to explore the factors affecting Mobile Entertainment Services (MES) use from a process-outcome perspective. The author based the research model on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). Two process facilitators, ease of use and speed, and two outcome benefits, image and enjoyment, were identified and added to the model as the salient external beliefs. The results indicate that: attitude, subjective norms and Perceived Behavioural Control (PBC) shape behavioural intention; image has an effect on attitude and subjective norms; enjoyment on attitude; ease of use on attitude, self-efficacy and controllability; and speed on controllability.
OUTPUT GROWTH AND VARIABILITY OF EXPORT AND IMPORT GROWTH: INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE FROM GRANGER CAUSALITY TESTS

Economic development was from the very beginning the focus of classical political economy and presently retains its original human welfare mission and intellectual attraction through insightful anthropological, sociological, and historical investigations.1 Within the context of complex and constantly evolving sociospheres, the objective of a sustained better life for the masses is enhanced, according to Nobel Prize winner Amartya K. Sen (1983, 1988), by functionings and entitlements which cannot be implemented without a public commitment and a deep government involvement. Notwithstanding the inevitability of semantical differences, the real challenge of development does not lie in eliminating definitional disputes pertaining to the objective of development but in illuminating those pertinent instrumental relations which are relevant in each social milieu, and which, when properly activated, generate an internal development dynamic. Such a dynamic would exhibit characteristics of uniformity in countries with high degrees of similarity in human and natural resources, in institutions and in individual preferences. If advanced industrial countries converge toward similar patterns, the same cannot be observed in developing countries whose differences are more pronounced than their similarities. The task of establishing meaningful patterns of uniformity in the highly differentiated developing world is not easy, but if accomplished, it would guarantee substantial benefits in the formulation of effective strategies and policies. An area in which the search for such patterns goes on unabated is that of international trade and openness. Forces of dependence, autarky, balance of payments, international competition, vulnerability to external shocks affect the objective of developing countries to achieve some degree of balanced growth,2 and most certainly influence their patterns of trade. Although these forces are important, they are beyond the scope of this paper, which focuses on the investigation of possible trade patterns and their impact on growth. In the course of this investigation the paper is organized as follows. In the next section the role of openness is examined along with citations of empirical studies that analyze the impact of export growth and export growth volatility on the growth of GNP. In the third section the rationale of Granger causality, which constitutes the core of the paper, is presented, followed by short sections on unit root tests, cointegration tests, and volatility tests that are accompanied by a brief analysis of the respective statistical results. In the final section the conclusions of the paper are summarized.
Changes in regional keratin polypeptide patterns during phorbol ester-mediated reversible and permanently sustained hyperplasia of mouse epidermis.

The keratin polypeptide pattern of newborn mouse back, ear, and tail epidermis is uniform and consists of eight individual proteins with a molecular weight range of 46,000 to 67,000. In the adult animal, the keratin patterns of the corresponding body sites are both different from the neonatal pattern and different among themselves. Most notably, ear and tail epidermis contains a high-molecular-weight polypeptide ( M r, 70,000), which is absent from neonatal and adult back epidermis. This postnatal specialization of the local program of keratin polypeptide synthesis cannot be related to distinct morphological criteria. We have analyzed the behavior of these regional keratinization phenotypes in the adult mouse under the influence of a reversible or a permanently sustained hyperplasia. Both types of epidermal trauma were induced by either single or repeated treatment of skin with tumor-promoting or nonpromoting hyperplasiogens. Independent of the type of hyperplasiogen used, the initial phase of a reversible hyperplasia (0 to 12 hr) is characterized by only marginal morphological alterations, maintenance of the normal one-dimensional keratin pattern, but pronounced changes in the charge properties of distinct keratin polypeptides, indicating disturbances of the secondary phosphorylation-dephosphorylation process. During the acute phase of reversible hyperplasia (1 to 7 days), the local keratinization phenotypes are quantitatively altered due to the enhanced expression of high-molecular-weight keratin polypeptides. However, the charge properties of the newly synthesized proteins appear normal. A comparison of both the sequential morphological alterations during acute hyperplasia and the temporally corresponding changes in the keratin patterns allows an assignment of the site of synthesis of distinct polypeptides within the epidermis, which is in line with findings of other laboratories. Long-term hyperplasia (2 weeks to 2 months of regular treatment) is not morphologically different from maximum reversible hyperplasia. However, it induces both quantitative and qualitative alterations of the local keratinization phenotypes and causes a reversal of the postnatal divergence of keratin synthesis by generally restoring the neonatal keratin pattern in all three adult epithelia investigated.
Tax-Exempt Debt and the Capital Structure of Nonprofit Organizations: An Application to Hospitals

The availability of tax-exempt financing provides nonprofit (NP) organizations with their own tax-based incentives to issue debt. In this article, we develop a theoretical model in which NPs gain an indirect arbitrage from tax-exempt debt issuance, constrained by: (1) the requirement that fixed investment exceed tax-exempt debt flows (the project financing constraint), and (2) the constraint against share issuance. These constraints cause them to impute tax benefits to projects that afford access to the tax-exempt bond market. Empirical tests indicate that NP hospitals behave as if they have target levels of tax-exempt debt. Debt targeting is constrained by the availability of capital projects, while excess debt capacity stimulates investment. Copyright 1996 by American Finance Association.
Still on the Determinants of, and the Effects of Exchange Rate and Monetary Growth on Inflation: Nigeria in the Policy Debate.

One macro economics goal economist had always had interest in is price stability. This is because it directly affects the standard of living of the people and determines the level of poverty through the purchasing power theory. Such age long interest in developing countries such as Nigeria had been centered on its trend and determining factors, with differing findings, resulting into debate among policy makers. However, those findings mainly ascertained that inflation or price instability is the case in Nigeria and some other developing economies, with exchange rate and money supply playing major roles. This study employs time series econometrics technique, using mainly Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) and Philips Peron (PP) for stationarity and cointergration tests to situate Nigeria in this debate in a dynamic world. It uses quarterly data between 1981 and 2009, and finds that, “as it was in the beginning”, inflation remains the order of the day, and exchange rate devaluation and money supply have positive and significant effects on inflation in Nigeria, but in the long run only money supply matters. It then recommends among others, that until Nigeria is fully able to stimulate production for export in the long run, devaluation of the Naira should be discouraged. The study also recommends a continuous contractionary monetary policy to reduce inflation in Nigeria.
A Defect in Marco Expression Contributes to Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Development via Failure to Clear Apoptotic Cells1

Systemic lupus erythematosus is a multisystem autoimmune disease characterized by the production of numerous antinuclear autoantibodies and inflammatory mediators. The BXSB mouse strain is an excellent model of the disease. Previous work has determined a number of important disease susceptibility intervals that have been isolated in separate congenic strains. Here, we have combined expression data from those strains with functional analyses to demonstrate that reduced expression of the innate scavenger receptor Marco (macrophage receptor with collagenous structure) is a primary event in BXSB mice, that reduced mRNA expression is mirrored at the protein level, and that this results in a significant alteration in function. We have confirmed a role for Marco in the clearance of apoptotic cells and a generalized defect in both endocytosis and phagocytosis. The failure to clear apoptotic cells has previously been linked to the development of systemic lupus erythematosus. However, the use of congenic mice with limited phenotypes in this study has enabled us to propose that in the case of Marco at least, disease results from the production of anti-dsDNA Abs.
Towards a classification of cultural tourists

This paper proposes a model to segment the cultural tourism market according to two dimensions: (i) the importance of cultural motives in the decision to visit a destination and (ii) depth of experience. The model is tested empirically using Hong Kong as a case study. The test identified five discrete cultural tourism market segments that exhibited substantially different behaviour. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Murine Cytomegalovirus Major Immediate-Early Enhancer Region Operating as a Genetic Switch in Bidirectional Gene Pair Transcription

ABSTRACT Enhancers are defined as DNA elements that increase transcription when placed in any orientation relative to a promoter. The major immediate-early (MIE) enhancer region of murine cytomegalovirus is flanked by transcription units ie1/3 and ie2, which are transcribed in opposite directions. We have addressed the fundamental mechanistic question of whether the enhancer synchronizes transcription of the bidirectional gene pair (synchronizer model) or whether it operates as a genetic switch, enhancing transcription of either gene in a stochastic alternation (switch model). Clonal analysis of cytokine-triggered, transcription factor-mediated MIE gene expression from latent viral genomes provided evidence in support of the switch model.
Neuropsychological Functioning in Children with Medium Chain Acyl Coenzyme A Dehydrogenase Deficiency (MCADD): The Impact of Early Diagnosis and Screening on Outcome

Children with medium chain acyl coenzyme A dehydrogenase deficiency (MCADD) have been reported to be at high risk for neurocognitive deficits. However this has not been systematically studied and little is known about the exact nature of neuropsychological sequelae or of the impact of early diagnosis and screening on outcome. We examined cognitive and adaptive outcome in children with MCADD (N = 38, age range: 2 years, 2 months – 10 years, 3 months) diagnosed either through a newborn screening program (tandem mass spectrometry/MSMS) or upon clinical presentation. There was no evidence of overall intellectual impairment in either groups but there was some suggestion of poorer verbal and specific executive functioning (i.e., planning) abilities in the unscreened cohorts. Adaptive functioning was relatively intact with the exception of reduced Daily Living Skills in both our screened and unscreened groups. Early diagnosis and greater number of hospitalizations were related to higher verbal, communication, and socialization skills. Overall, our results highlight the importance of early diagnosis and management for children with MCADD.
Data Watch: The Redesigned Current Population Survey

This section will offer a description of a particular data source that may be of interest to economists. The purpose is to describe what data are available from that source or in that subject area, what questions can be addressed because of the unique features of the data and how an interested researcher can gain access to the data. Suggestions for data sources that might be discussed here (or comments on past columns) should be sent to Greg J. Duncan, Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University, 2040 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois 60208. His e-mail address is greg-duncan@nwu.edu.
A novel multi-layer winding design method for Fractional-Slot Concentrated-Windings Permanent Magnet Machine

Due to the high content of sub- and super- stator MMF components of Fractional-Slot Concentrated-Windings (FSCW) Permanent Magnet Machine, high eddy current losses will be induced inevitably. To diminish the eddy current losses, a simple multi-layer winding design method for FSCW is presented. The proposed method is derived from winding function, and both winding factor and loss factor are considered. Three different multi-layer windings are designed by the proposed method for an 18 slots-16 poles FSCW. Finite element analysis is employed to validate the proposed method.