Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Has the Strengthening of Appraisal Rights Led to an Increase in Takeover Premiums?

Two Delaware appraisal related developments occurred in the summer of 2007. These developments have made it easier for target shareholders to seek appraisal, thus strengthening Delaware appraisal rights. Recent studies have documented empirical patterns that associate stronger appraisal rights with higher overall takeover premiums for all appraisal eligible deals. Meanwhile, the finance literature has long discussed the competitive nature of the market for corporate control. If buyers have already been paying competitive prices, the deal prices are unlikely to experience an overall increase in response to stronger appraisal rights, which protect minority target shareholders when they are under-paid at sub-market rates in M&A transactions. In this paper, we revisit the empirical patterns documented by recent studies and find that, consistent with the finance literature, there is no evidence that the strengthening of appraisal rights has led to an overall increase in takeover premiums across all appraisal eligible deals.
Asset Prices and Pandemics: The Effects of Lockdowns

We examine the impact of pandemics on equilibrium in an integrated epidemic-economy model with production. Two types of technologies are considered: a neo-classical technology and one capturing the notion of time-to-produce. The impact of a shelter-in-place policy with and without layoffs is studied. The paper documents adjustments in interest rate, market price of risk, stock market and real wage as the epidemic propagates. It shows the qualitative effects of a shelter-in-place policy in the model are consistent with the patterns displayed by the stock market and real wage during the COVID-19 outbreak. Puzzles emerging from the analysis are outlined.
Behavioral Benchmarked Investment Management with Expert Forecasts

We propose a continuous-time portfolio selection model that explains the active-passive continuum. Our model illuminates the pivotal role of expert opinions and factors in the asset allocation process. In the model, investors aim to outperform a benchmark. As securities and benchmark's drift depends on unobservable factors, portfolio selection becomes a partial observation risk-sensitive control problem. We find that the optimal investment policy combines Kelly, benchmark-tracking, and intertemporal hedging portfolios. The Kelly portfolio sums two alpha-generating strategies. Our simulation reveals the importance of debiasing expert opinions and shows that factor choice is crucial at every stage of the investment process.
Virtual Ethnography

Current approaches in the ethnographic study of the Internet are diverse; the proliferation of proposals has been numerous in recent years. The methodological approach of virtual ethnography has been broadened and reformulated through new proposals such as digital ethnography, ethnography on/of/through the Internet, connective ethnography, networked ethnography, cyberethnography, etc. Each of these maintains its own dialogue with the established tradition of ethnography and formulates its relation to this tradition in different ways. There are those who consider that virtual ethnography involves a distinctive methodological approach and those who consider that researching the Internet ethnographically forces us to reflect on fundamental assumptions and concepts of ethnography, but that it doesn't mean a distinctive form of ethnography.
‘Stood Up, Grew Rich and Now Is Growing Strong’: An Introduction to the Historical Stages of China’s Foreign Policy

How can one describe China's current foreign policy? Is it entering a new period or is it a continuation of previous policies? In order to answer these questions, one must understand China’ Guiding Principles of Foreign Policy; since they refer to the main sources for understanding China's perception of the world, its identity and the concrete actions to be taken in face of such perceptions. By analysing primary documents, including speeches, white papers and secondary documents, this paper proposes that the contemporary Chinese foreign policy (since 1949) has undergone three distinct stages. Each stage is characterized by an overall view of the world context and China’s strategy to obtain its objectives given this context. The first stage, which covers the period in which Mao Zedong was in power, is characterized by an international activism but also by pure survival pragmatism with the goal of strengthening China. The second stage, which begins with Deng Xiaoping and ends with Hu Jintao, is defined as introverted period, reluctant to draw attention or pursuing leadership with the goal of economic growth. While the last stage which begins with Xi Jinping, it differentiates itself by a greater assertiveness, confidence and willingness to take leadership before the international system, however this period has carry on many of the same Guiding Principles adopted during the previous stage.
Structure of lipid membranes at solid/liquid and liquid/vapor interfaces

STRUCTURE OF LIPID MEMBRANES AT SOLID/LIQUID AND LIQUID/VAPOR INTERFACES C. M. DeCaro, Ph.D. Department of Physics Northern Illinois University, 2012 Laurence Lurio, Director The study of model lipid membranes is one of the most promising and exciting areas of current biophysical research. The physical processes that occur in a cell’s outer membrane regulate all transport in and out of the cell, and play a large role in many other cellular processes as well, including defense and reproduction. While the big-picture effect of these processes has been known for a long time, the membrane mechanisms responsible for those effects are understood only at a basic qualitative level. Although strong efforts have been made recently to quantify membrane structure and processes, the field is still in a new and adventurous state. Many bioengineering applications of membranes are also being explored, particularly in which a membrane is supported by a rigid semiconductor such as a silicon wafer. The goal of this work is to examine the structure of these membranes at planar interfaces. I investigate model membranes at both solid/liquid and liquid/vapor interfaces; relevant membrane compositions and preparations are also considered. I use a novel technique to deposit multiple discrete lipid membranes on planar solid substrates; the structure of the membrane normal to the substrate plane yields information about the interaction between the membrane and substrate. Most importantly, the substrate exerts an attractive force on the membrane, suppressing thermal fluctuations in the membranes near the substrate surface. This substrate confinement effect is important to any potential supported-membrane structure. Membranes free from a rigid support are studied at the liquid/vapor interface, where the effect of lipid composition on domain formation is investigated. NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY DE KALB, ILLINOIS
The Networking Effects of Publishing in Finance

We examine networking effects on financial research based on a rich database of citations for all articles and editorial board membership information from a set of 23 finance journals during 1990-2010. Our findings show that a common characteristic amongst the premier journals (JF, JFE, and RFS) is that both editorial board membership network and coauthor network are significantly higher than other finance journals. In addition, regression results show that non-premier journals do not exhibit any significant network relationship on article’s future citations, which indicate that editors in non-premier journals are less likely to practice favoritism to connected authors on the same editorial board or having coauthor relationship with the editor of the published journal.
The Multiple Hazards of Using Concurring Opinions to Estimate Personality Traits of U.S. Supreme Court Justices

Psychological scholarship on personality is uniting with political science to redefine existing theories. This is clearly the case with research on judicial behavior and the U.S. Supreme Court. But if this new approach is to survive and thrive, it must employ measures equal to the task. We show how the Supreme Court Individual Personality Estimates (SCIPEs), which seek to estimate justices’ personalities by examining their concurring opinions, suffer from a number of critical deficits. Scholars should not employ them. We briefly discuss what kinds of improved personality measures scholars should use instead.
Benchmarking Modelling in the Context of Banking Sector Deepening and Long-Term Economic Growth

This paper identifies a host of key factors that influence the development of the banking sector as well as enhances our understanding of benchmarking modelling as a means of stimulating economic growth. A novel benchmarking method is utilized that assesses the level of banking sector depth in a country against its counterparts in the top quartile countries using mixed effects and system GMM for dynamic panel data models. The results suggest that the development of the banking sector is contingent upon factors that can be traced within the structure of the sector, the macroeconomic environment as well as the governing, institutional, and legal frameworks. The paper presents four benchmarking models that potentially provide policymakers with tools to benchmark the levels of banking sector development against their peers in countries in which the particular sector contributes significantly to economic growth.
Global Diversification

Correlations between the returns of U.S. stocks and international stocks were higher recently than in the past, reaching 0.86 during the 60 months ending in December 2003. Today's investors note the high correlations between U.S. and international stocks and doubt the benefits of global diversification. We argue that the benefits of global diversification remain high and that the correlation between U.S. and international stocks is a misleading measure of the benefits of global diversification. This is for two reasons. First, the benefits of global diversification depend not only on the correlation between the returns of U.S. and international stocks but also on the standard deviations of these returns. Second, we tend to have poor intuition about the link between correlation and the benefits of diversification. A 0.86 correlation seems high enough to eliminate the benefits of diversification, but even correlations much higher than 0.86 are associated with substantial benefits. Dispersion of returns is a better measure of the benefits of diversification because it accounts for the effects of both correlation and standard deviation and because it provides an intuitive measure of the benefits of diversification. We present the relationship between correlation, standard deviation and dispersion.
Information Design for Selling Search Goods and the Effect of Competition

This paper studies a search goods seller's optimal design of consumer pre-search information. Unlike the existing literature, I allow the consumer to have private information on her outside option value, which turns out to be important in shaping the seller's optimal signal. To accommodate this, a relaxed problem approach is developed. When the outside option value has unimodal distribution, I show that the optimal signal would pool all match utilities above a threshold and fully reveal for those below the threshold. Based on this characterization, I provide two comparative statics results. The first shows that higher product quality leads to less accurate pre-search information for consumers. The second shows that allowing the consumer to postpone some search cost leads to lower seller profit and may also (unexpectedly) lead to lower consumer welfare even if the price is fixed. My approach also enables me to consider competition among multiple sellers. In particular, I show that as competition gets increasingly strong, the pre-search information converges to full information, which extends the corresponding result for experience goods. My approach also helps to highlight the key similarity and dissimilarity between information designs for search goods and experience goods, which is discussed throughout the paper.
Research on Robot Object Localization and Grabbing Based on Concontour Matching

In fact, the robot can replace the human to complete a lot of important work, so it has a very important application value. This is significant to study the robot's visual grasp of the target In order to enhance the flexibility of the robot. Base on the related technology of the combination of machine vision and robot, this paper describes the device structure and working principle of the robot in detail, and establishes the computer vision system of target model positioning under the gradient contour. By constructing the spatial position relationship between the robot, the conveyor belt and the industrial camera, the robot is controlled to grasp accurately. Experiments show that the system can identify and locate the workpiece well, and send the position information of the workpiece to the robot through the upper computer, and control the robot to grasp. This electronic document is a "live" template and already defines the components of your paper [title, text, heads, etc.] in its style sheet.
Premium Rating Without Losses: How To Estimate the Loss Frequency of Loss-Free Risks

In insurance and even more in reinsurance it occurs that about a risk you only know that it has suffered no losses in the past e.g. seven years. Some of these risks are furthermore such particular or novel that there are no similar risks to infer the loss frequency from. <br><br>In this paper we propose a loss frequency estimator that copes with such situations, by just relying on the information coming from the risk itself: the “amended sample mean”. It is derived from a number of practice-oriented first principles and turns out to have desirable statistical properties. <br><br>Some variants are possible, which enables insurers to align the method to their preferred business strategy, by trading off between low initial premiums for new business and moderate premium increases for renewal business after a loss. <br><br>We further give examples where it is possible to assess the average loss from some market or portfolio information, such that overall one has an estimator of the risk premium.
Optimal Hedging Strategies for Options in Electricity Futures Markets

In this paper, we derive optimal hedging strategies for options in electricity futures markets. Optimality is measured in terms of minimal variance and the associated minimal variance hedging portfolios are obtained by a stochastic maximum principle. Our explicit results are particularly useful for electricity retailers, who have sold an option to a client, and now want to hedge the payoff of this option by investing into an electricity futures and into the issued option itself. Another innovative aspect of the paper lies in the derivation of the time dynamics of the stochastic option price process by Malliavin calculus methods and the Clark-Ocone formula. We also apply our theoretical results to several practical examples. Our investigations are based upon the popular arithmetic multi-factor electricity spot price model proposed by Benth, Kallsen &amp; Meyer-Brandis (Appl. Math. Finance 14(2):153-169, 2007).
Improved Estimation of Dynamic Models of Conditional Means and Variances

Modelling dynamic conditional heteroscedasticity is the daily routine in time series econometrics. We propose a weighted conditional moment estimation to potentially improve the efficiency of the QMLE (quasi maximum likelihood estimation). The weights of conditional moments are selected based on the analytical form of optimal instruments, and we nominally decide the optimal instrument based on the third and fourth moments of the underlying error term. This approach is motivated by the idea of general estimation equations (GEE). We also provide an analysis of the efficiency of QMLE for the location and variance parameters. Simulations are conducted to show the better performance of our estimators.
Fission Neutron Spectrum Averaged Cross Sections of some Threshold Reactions on Tin: Small Scale Production of 111In in a Nuclear Reactor

measured cross sections of both the processes using natural tin. '"In of high purity cannot be easily produced using a fission neutron spectrum due to the other competing reactions. However, a radiochemical separation of " 'Sn followed by removal of its decay product can lead to high purity '"In. With >95% enriched target the amounts of > 1 MBq per batch could be obtained at a medium flux reactor which are hardly adequate for medical applications.
The Term Structure of Equity Yields - A Bottom-Up Approach

This paper proposes a novel perspective on the term structure of market equity yields. Instead of using market dividend futures, we aggregate equity yields of individual firms to estimate the market equity yield curve. This approach allows studying the aggregation effect that shapes the market equity yield curve. During the period from 1990 to 2019, we find a positive aggregation effect: companies with high equity yields were expected to grow at higher rates than companies with low equity yields. Thus, high-yield companies were expected to generate an increasing share of total market dividends when expanding the investment time horizon. Under the assumption of flat firm risk premia, this implies an upward-sloping term structure of equity risk premia. Together with the concave bond yield curve, the market equity yield curve was upward-sloping.
What Drives Asset Holdings? Commonality in Investor Demand

I empirically show that changes in investor holdings exhibit a low-dimensional factor structure that is economically interpretable. Using an extended version of Instrumented Principal Components Analysis (IPCA), I model changes in a large sample of sector-level investor holdings and recover latent factors and sector-specific loadings on the factors. I find that the recovered factors reflect the state of the macroeconomy and financial constraints of investors. Investor loadings on the factors reveal partially pro-cyclical trading behavior of the banking sector and of mutual funds, while hedge funds and pension funds act partially counter-cyclically. In addition, I document that the set of characteristics relevant for explaining changes in holdings is likely wider than implied by common risk factor models. Finally, using the decomposition of holdings changes implied by IPCA, I demonstrate asset pricing effects consistent with institutional price pressures from banks and mutual funds, as well as market-timing ability of investment advisors that is unrelated to common asset characteristics.
The Effect of Policy Measures on Entrepreneurship Development Analysis of Nigeria’s Experience

This research focus to investigate the impact of policy measures in entrepreneurship development in Nigeria. The research method adopted was mainly secondary sources derived from archival data such as Thesis publications, scientific journals publications, African statistical yearbook, and World Fact-book, among others. Nigeria’s entrepreneurs have experienced difficulties in doing business due to: Managerial challenges, technological problems, lack of credit facilities, lack of basic amenities or infrastructural facilities, lack of power supply; inconsistencies in government policies, political instability (Boko Haram Insurgence), lack of patronizing made in Nigeria products among others. To address entrepreneurship development problems, the government has introduced programs such as; World Bank SMEs 1 and 2 Loan Scheme, National Economic Reconstruction Fund (NERFUND), Peoples and Community Bank, Nigerian Bank of Commerce and Industry<br>(NBCI), Export Processing Zone (EPZ), National Poverty Eradication, Advisory Agencies, few to mention. Findings reveal that these policy measures have played an insignificant role in entrepreneurship development instead they work only on white papers and used by some corrupt government officials to embezzle national treasury. Nigeria being gifted with large reserves of natural resources is expected to build a thriving and vibrant economy, to reduce poverty level, and provide health, education and infrastructure services to meet with the demands of the teeming population and other African countries and the entire world at large. Based on findings, the study recommends that government should borrow a leaf from Giant Asian countries to implement death sentence on corruption practices to serve as a deterrent for individuals to learn their lessons. Again, the government should introduce monitoring unit to oversee activities of entrepreneurship projects development funds and disbursement processes; government should partner with other world agencies to encourage regular, seminars; research and development to boost entrepreneurial capacity and productivity.
Putting Children Into Place: Village Context and Educational Inequality in Rural China

To what extent do heterogeneous village contexts lead to diverging educational opportunities for the children living in them? This study investigates the relationship between residential context and educational inequality in rural China, drawing on data from the most recent, near-nationwide longitudinal survey. The study first shows that total inequality in child educational attainment in rural China is driven as much by inequality among villages as by inequality among households in the same village. Villages matter the most at the compulsory level of education: between living in two villages, population-average probabilities of discontinuing school at primary and lower secondary levels can differ by as much as 16 to 17 percentage points. Second, between the two structural dimensions of village contexts, access to off-farm employment opportunities, but not village resource constraints, is significantly associated with child educational attainment. Third, the study finds opposite associations of village out-migration opportunities with girls’ and boys’ educational attainment. These findings not only highlight the interplay between micro- and macro-level processes in shaping educational inequalities but also call attention to the social consequences of spatial inequality in economic development in rural China and beyond.
The Use and Effects of Accountability and Job Autonomy when Results Controls are Irrelevant: Substitutes or Complements?

While prior work in management accounting has mainly focused on results controls, this study investigates how accountability as an action control and the level of job autonomy are complementarily or substitutively used by supervisors in a setting in which results control are largely irrelevant. We analyze our research question by collecting survey data among nurses from Swiss public hospitals. We predict and find that when task requirements are high (i.e., intensive care units (ICUs) in our hospital setting), job autonomy and accountability are used as substitutes by the supervisor. When task requirements are low (i.e., non-ICUs in our hospital setting), job autonomy and accountability are also used as substitutes but significantly less so compared to departments with high task requirements. Additional analyses show that, consistent with supervisors’ control choices, job autonomy and accountability have substitutive effects on employees’ likelihood to stay in the department and their overtime when task requirements are high. When task requirements are low, job autonomy and accountability are complementarily related with regard to employees’ likelihood to stay in the department and substitutively with respect to overtime. Our study enhances the understanding of the use and effects of action controls in settings in which results controls are irrelevant and contributes to a better understanding of job autonomy as a control practice.