Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Technology Transfer in Clean Development Mechanism (CDM): A Survey

The basic concept of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is that both the developed and developing countries benefit from this mechanism. Contributing two objectives; sustainable development to developing countries and emission reduction credit to developed countries, CDM is also expected to contribute to the developing countries’ national development goals. In addition, CDM has potential to support “technological leapfrogging” for the developing countries to bypass the inefficient technological choices, adopted by the developed countries during their industrial period (Philbert, 2004). Hence beyond its primary objectives, CDM is considered as a Technology Transfer (TT) tool to boost technology transfer and diffusion between the developed and developing countries. However, with the increase in the number of CDM projects in developing countries, there are increasing concerns on the geographic distribution of CDM projects (e.g. Nelwamondo 2008, Dechezlepretre et al. 2008) , the benefits between the countries (Ellis et al. 2007), and the perceived lack of technology transfer within the CDM (Nelwamondo 2008). This paper begins with description of the CDM as a TT tool with some contemporary scenarios in present CDM projects and analyses some factors affecting TT among different developing countries. Some issues as sustainability and distributive issues of the CDM projects are also dealt to find whether there are some gaps or limitations in present CDM scenario with respect to the technology transfer. Finally the paper tends to make some conclusions and recommendations for improving the technology performance of the CDM projects. <br><br>This study has used mainly the UNEP Risoe Center CDM Pipeline database and some literatures as the main information sources. Since searching data from the Project Design Documents (PDDs) would be time consuming, and also the required data for the analysis were already synthesized in some literatures as Coninck et al. 2007, Dechezlepretre et al. 2007 and Dechezlepretre et al. 2008; the analyzed data are used for the study of the section – CDM as a technology transfer tool. For the sections – factors affecting technology transfer and emerging concept in CDM, literature review was conducted to arrive to the conclusion.
Machine Learning Methods for Network Intrusion Detection: International conference on Recent Trends in Artificial Intelligence, IOT, Smart Cities & Applications (ICAISC-2020)

Cyber security has been very important in recent years due to the huge growth in the use of the computer network and our society is highly dependent on computer systems for its daily activities, such as finance, industry, medicine and others. One of the most important aspects of cyber security is the Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). NIDS helps to find successful security vulnerabilities outside the organization or within the organization.This paper focuses on the different approaches to data mining and machine learning in recent years and its importance in detecting successful network breaches. This paper also focuses on the various network intrusion detection software used in the industry and its relevant data set. <br>
Influence de différents facteurs opérationnels sur la structure des communautés microbiennes impliquées dans le processus de digestion anaérobie

Le processus de digestion anaerobie conduit a la production de biomethane, un vecteur flexible d’energie renouvelable. L’amelioration du rendement de ce processus est souvent evoquee comme dependante de la comprehension approfondie de la structure et de la dynamique des communautes microbiennes qui y sont impliquees. L’objectif de la these a ete de caracteriser les communautes microbiennes impliquees dans le processus de digestion anaerobie et de determiner l’influence de facteurs operationnels sur leurs dynamiques. Nous nous sommes en particulier interesses a l’augmentation du taux de charge organique, le type de digesteurs anaerobies (reacteur continu perpetuellement melange vs reacteur anaerobie a chicane), mais aussi a la phase de demarrage d’un digesteur de ferme avec une montee en temperature. En absence de conditions contraignantes, nous avons observe l’installation de populations methanogenes les mieux adaptees a la production de biogaz dans les reacteurs etudies et la mise en place de communautes microbiennes similaires entre reacteurs replicats. Cependant, des changements au niveau operationnel ont conduit au developpement de communautes divergentes en termes de structure. En effet, en presence d’un environnement deterministe, la plupart des bacteries et archees impliquees en digestion anaerobie ont montre une redondance fonctionnelle a la perturbation. Toutefois, certaines populations bacteriennes dominantes ont egalement pu montrer des phenomenes de resistance, en termes de presence et d’abondance, a l’evolution des conditions environnementales. Au cours de nos etudes, les differentes communautes s’installant dans les digesteurs etudies ont egalement montre des aptitudes variables pour la production de biogaz. De plus, des correlations entre les communautes bacteriennes, archees et eucaryotes ont aussi ete demontrees, soulignant le role non negligeable des eucaryotes dans le processus de digestion anaerobie et l’installation de communautes microbiennes dominantes et specifiques a la production de biogaz. Ainsi, les changements au sein de la communaute microbienne resultant de la modification progressive de facteurs operationnels, et ce bien avant l’apparition des premiers symptomes d’inhibition de la production de biogaz, pourraient permettre le developpement d’indicateurs microbiens de l’etat du processus de digestion anaerobie et donc la mise en place d’une gestion microbiologique raisonnee des digesteurs anaerobies
Sovereign Wealth Funds, Institutional Environments, and Corporate Governance

We investigate whether and how sovereign wealth funds’ (SWFs) investment affects target firms’ corporate governance. Using a sample of 2,082 unique firms across 43 countries from 2002 through 2015, and applying a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach, we find that corporate governance of target firms decreases after equity purchases by SWFs. This evidence holds when we use propensity score matching, instrumental variable regressions, placebo tests, dynamic effects analyses, and alternative control samples and measures of corporate governance. Reinforcing our main evidence, we also show that SWFs’ equity investment is positively associated with target firms’ earnings management and corporate investment, but negatively associated with investment efficiency. Moreover, the negative effect of SWFs on target firms’ corporate governance is more pronounced when SWF home countries have a lower quality of investor protection, corruption control, governmental effectiveness, and law enforcement than the host countries. Target firm value is also found to decrease after SWF equity investment. Overall, these results are consistent with the view that SWFs, as passive investors, do not provide the same monitoring benefits as other institutional investors.
Fifty Shades of QE: Comparing Findings of Central Bankers and Academics

Central banks sometimes evaluate their own policies. To assess the inherent conflict of interest, we compare the research findings of central bank researchers and academic economists regarding the macroeconomic effects of quantitative easing (QE). We find that central bank papers report larger effects of QE on output and inflation. Central bankers are also more likely to report significant effects of QE on output and to use more positive language in the abstract. Central bankers who report larger QE effects on output experience more favorable career outcomes. A survey of central banks reveals substantial involvement of bank management in research production.
Comment Letters and Large Asset Transactions: Evidence From an Emerging Market

This paper investigates how communications between regulators and firms affect the outcomes of large asset transactions (“restructurings”) in China. Examining stock exchange-issued comment letters that target individual restructuring filings, I find that characteristics indicating controlling shareholders’ expropriation of minority shareholders are associated with the severity of comment letters (“Severity”). The market reacts negatively to Severity. Severity predicts voluntary deal cancellation by management, and indirectly increases the probability of deal withdrawal and lengthens the processing time for equity-funded deals through affecting the approving body’s scrutiny level. Severity is also associated with lower post-letter disclosure quality rating. Textual analysis reveals that more concerns about a disguised reverse takeover, appraisal valuation and target assets quality are the most impactful, and demand for more disclosures is associated with larger revisions to restructuring filings. These findings are opposite to those of studies on comment letters and mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. (Liu et al., 2020; Johnson et al., 2020), reflecting the different role of comment letters under different institutions.
Regulatory Examinations and Life Insurance Development

Purpose Solvency and market conduct regulations play a crucial role in supporting life insurance development by boosting consumer confidence and securing a stable environment for insurers to write business. The regulation encapsulates not only the legal framework but also its enforcement. This study aims to focus on the latter and investigate the impact of solvency and market conduct examinations on life insurance development within a homogenous legal environment in the USA. Design/methodology/approach To test the relationship between the regulatory examinations and life insurance development, this study uses annual data for 51 US states over the period 2013–2018 and uses fixed and random effects panel regressions controlling for the possible omitted variables bias and serial correlation. This study constructs two groups of indicators to measure the robustness and ability of regulators to prevent insolvencies and opportunistic market practices and estimate their effects on market development. Findings The results show that more stringent regulators with respect to solvency examinations deter life insurers from their markets and channel to those markets with lenient examiners, hurting the development of life insurance in the stringent states. Additionally, regulators boost consumer confidence by providing robust market conduct practices, which results in higher life insurance demand. Originality/value This study contributes to the debates about the pros and cons of the current state-led regulation in the USA and the general benefits/costs of regulation for insurance market development.
The Political Economy of Central Bank Effectiveness: The Case of National Bank of Rwanda

In a survey conducted in Rwanda by the Pockets of Effectiveness project, the Central Bank was listed as among the top-performing government organisations in the country. This paper examines the political determinants of the portrayal of the National Bank of Rwanda’s (BNR) achievement of its mandate: promoting price and financial stability. The paper uses the political settlements framework to highlight the political determinants of financial sector reforms in the country. Rwanda’s underlying political economy – and particularly the government’s evolving relationships with domestic capital vis-à-vis foreign capital – has contributing to shaping the Rwandan financial sector’s trajectory. In particular, the Rwandan government has prioritised a strategy of being a financial sector hub, which is based on increased global financial integration and portraying the achievement of ‘best practice’ reforms. These goals have come at the cost of traditional developmentalists goals for central banks, including direct lending for structural transformation. BNR has achieved success in its mandate. However, achieving success in its market-led mandate reduces the policy tools at its disposal to promote structural transformation. The paper argues that reforming BNR along neoliberal lines has mirrored the broader macro-strategy of the country, with the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) choosing to rely increasingly on legitimacy with external actors, rather than supporting the growth of strengthening domestic state– business relationships to support economic transformation.
Strengthening Consumer Loyalty: The Role of Brand Personality and Consumer Involvement

The aim of this paper was to investigate the role of brand personality and consumer involvement in strengthening consumer loyalty towards brands. The study also identified the moderating role of gender in the relationship between brand personality and loyalty and consumer involvement and loyalty. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 118 respondents from the consumers of three super shop i.e. Agora, Meena Bazar and Shwapno. The Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was followed in data analysis. The study identified brand personality and consumer involvement was the predictors of consumer loyalty whereas moderating role of gender was found non-significant. The study is significant for the marketers as they can identify the factors influencing consumers’ loyalty towards the brands in Bangladesh. The study could have been done on large number of respondents including different divisional cities. However, this empirical investigation found ways how consumer loyalty could be enhanced.
Common Mutual Fund Ownership and Systemic Risk

We examine whether bank connections via common mutual fund ownership serve as a contagion channel affecting the systemic risk of the banking system. We first document that the extent of a bank’s connection with other banks via common ownership increases its contribution to systemic risk. We further find that this association is primarily driven by passive mutual funds. We provide evidence that common passive ownership results in higher systemic risk through two mechanisms: non-discretionary sell-offs of bank stocks and a common pattern of voting. Our findings are also robust to two alternate instrumental variable analyses. This study contributes to the literature by documenting an unintended, macro-level consequence of common mutual fund ownership.
Housing Affordability and Transaction Tax Subsidies

House prices have increased faster than average income in many countries over the last decade, raising concerns on the affordability of housing. We study the impact of transaction taxes on the real estate market and the effectiveness of tax subsidies to make housing more affordable. We show how the demand and supply elasticities for housing determine the price impact of tax subsidies and the distribution of gains between buyers and sellers. We then use data on all real estate transactions in Luxembourg from 2007 to 2018 to estimate the elasticity of housing supply and demand. For identification, we exploit discontinuities in the transaction tax schedule as well as rules on tax subsidies for new constructions. Our estimates suggest that the elasticity of house prices to transaction taxes is 0.27, so buyers capture a large part of the surplus from the subsidies.
Implied Asset Return Profiles, Firm Fundamentals, and Stock Returns

We introduce a novel approach to ascertain firms’ unobserved asset return distribution implied by the joint pricing of equity and credit securities within a structural framework. Motivated by Q-theory, we propose a two-factor model that captures asset growth and risk-shifting effects on stock returns. We show that strong asset returns representing systematic growth options predict higher stock returns, whereas shifting risk from equity to credit forecasts lower stock returns. We also find that the performance of many popular stock market factors (that overlook the optionality of equity) are significantly improved after controlling for asset-level risk-shifting exposure.
A Practical Guide to Interest Rate Curve Building Validations (W/ Excel Replica of Bloomberg Libor @ GitHub)

Curve building is an information extraction process defined by a set of bootstrapping instruments B, bootstrapping procedures P, interpolation technique I, and extrapolation technique E. The bootstrapping procedures allow one to deduce/bootstrap information about risk factors (such as future Libor rates) that can be used to derive a fair value of a financial instrument with payoff function dependent on these risk factors (such as interest rate swap). The bootstrapping procedures deduce information about either expected values of the risk factors (such as forward rate curve) or their distributions (such as volatility surface). The curve building process involves a number of steps that include instrument selection, market data prioritization, bootstrapping, interpolation, and extrapolation. The paper provides information about market conventions, common curve building issues, validation techniques, standard tests, and validation criteria. We will focus on the bootstrapping of the expected values of interest rates (such as future forward rates). Some of the validation techniques described in this paper (such as round-trip testing) can be extended onto other markets and other types of the risk factors (including volatility surfaces). The paper has a reference to the published Excel spreadsheet that demonstrates how to replicate Bloomberg Libor curve. The spreadsheet can be downloaded from GitHub repository.
The Long-Run Performance of Indonesian Initial Public Offerings (IPOs)

Previous studies found that long-run share price performance of Indonesian initial public offerings (IPOs) underperformed. My research gives new evidence that the long-run performance depends on the methods used. In this study, I examine the long-run performance for up to three years after listing of a sample of 101 firms that made initial public offerings during the period 1999 to 2005 in Jakarta Stock Exchange . Insignificant underperformance is found for equal-weighted cumulative abnormal returns (EWCARs) and value-weighted cumulative abnormal returns (VWCARs). Significant underperformance is found for equal-weighted buy-and-hold abnormal returns (EWBHARs). Significant outperformance is found for value-weighted buy-and-hold abnormal returns (VWBHARs). As I attempt to explain the long-run performance of Indonesian IPOs, I find that initial returns, post-IPO institutional ownership, and age of the firm are long-run performance-related.
Match Length Realization and Cooperation in Indefinitely Repeated Games

Experimental studies of infinitely repeated games typically consist of several indefinitely repeated games ("matches'') played in sequence with different partners each time, whereby match length, i.e. the number of stages of each game is randomly determined. Using a large meta data set on indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma games (Dal Bo &amp; Frechette, 2018) we demonstrate that the realized length of early matches has a substantial impact on cooperation rates in subsequent matches. We estimate simple learning models displaying the "power law of practice'' and show that participants do learn from match length realization. We then study three cases from the literature where realized match length has a strong impact on treatment comparisons, both in terms of the size and the direction of the treatment effect. These results have important implications for our understanding of how people learn in infinitely repeated games as well as for experimental design.
Financial Reporting under Economic Policy Uncertainty

Purpose This paper aims to discuss financial reporting under economic policy uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses discourse analysis to examine financial reporting under economic policy uncertainty. Findings The paper identifies the link between economic policy uncertainty and financial reporting, in terms of earnings management and fair value accounting. It argues that high economic policy uncertainty will transmit fewer new information to firms which can motivate managers to influence accounting numbers in the direction of the desired financial reporting outcome. Originality/value The relationship between economic policy uncertainty and financial reporting has not been studied. This paper is one of the first papers to relate economic policy uncertainty to financial reporting behavior.
Corporate Governance

Corporate governance is a recent concept that encompasses the costs caused by managerial misbehavior. Corporate governance is concerned with how organizations in general, and corporations in particular, produce value and how that value is distributed among the members of the corporation, its stakeholders. The interrelation of value production and value distribution links the ubiquitous technological aspect (the production of value) with the moral and ethical dimension (the distribution of value). Corporate governance is concerned with this link in general, but more specifically with the moral and ethical dimensions of distributing the generated value among the stakeholders. Value in firms is created by firm-specific investments, and the motivation and coordination of value enhancing activities and investment is protected by the power concentrated at the pyramidal top of the organization. In modern companies, it is the CEO and the top management deciding how to create value and how to distribute it among the relevant stakeholders. Due to asymmetric information and the imperfect nature of markets and contracts, adverse selection and moral hazard problems occur, where delegated (selected) managers could act in their own interest at the costs of other relevant stakeholders. <br><br>Corporate governance is a two-tailed concept. The first aspect is about identifying the (most) relevant stakeholder(s), separating theory and practice into two different and conflicting streams: the stakeholder value approach and the shareholder value approach. The second aspect of the concept is about providing and analyzing different mechanisms, reducing the costs induced by moral hazard and adverse selection effects, and to balance out the motivation and coordination problems of the relevant stakeholders. Corporate governance is an interdisciplinary concept encompassing academic fields like finance, economics, accounting, law, taxation and psychology, among others. <br><br>Like countries differ according to their institutions (i.e. legal and political systems, norms, and rules), firms differ according to their size, age, dominant shareholders or industries. Thus concepts in corporate governance differ along these dimensions as well. And while the underlying characteristics vary in time, continuously or as an exogenous shock, concepts in corporate governance are dynamic and static, offering a challenging field of interest for academics, policy makers and firm managers. <br>