Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect of Banks’ Financial Reporting on Syndicated Loan Structures

We explore how an accounting measure of information asymmetry between lead and participating lenders influences syndication structures by examining whether lead lenders’ commercial and industrial (C&amp;I) loan loss provision validity affects the fraction of loans they retain. Consistent with C&amp;I provision validity reflecting banks’ underlying screening and monitoring effectiveness, we find that this measure reflects lead lender’s past relationship with borrowers and is associated positively with equity market reactions to loan announcements and future loan loss recovery rate and negatively with future large borrower bankruptcies. We then find lead lender’s loan share decreases specifically with C&amp;I provision validity, but not with non-C&amp;I provision validity. Consistent with an information effect, we further find that this association is attenuated by i) alternative information sources, including borrowers’ credit ratings and industry-level accounting debt contracting value and ii) by previous lead/participant relationships and participant/borrower relationships.
Minimally invasive treatment strategy for partially thrombosed anterior inferior cerebellar artery aneurysm: A case report

Background: Partially thrombosed anterior inferior cerebellar artery (AICA) aneurysms are extremely rare; thus, no established therapeutic approach exists. Case Description: We report a large, partially thrombosed AICA aneurysm and discuss its therapeutic nuances. The aneurysm was asymptomatic; therefore, we aimed to treat it through a minimally invasive procedure. The aneurysm was of fusiform type and the proximal neck of the aneurysm was positioned at midline in front of the brainstem. To approach the neck, posterior transpetrosal approach is recommended. However, this approach can be invasive; thus, we performed distal clipping of the aneurysm using transcondylar fossa approach with occipital artery-AICA bypass to avoid ischemia of the AICA territory. Although the size of the aneurysm initially increased, it subsequently decreased. Conclusion: This is a rare case report describing the long-term clinical course after distal clipping in detail. We showed that traditional microsurgical techniques can be applied to treat patients with new, minimally invasive treatment strategies.
AraCust: a Saudi Telecom Tweets corpus for sentiment analysis

Comparing Arabic to other languages, Arabic lacks large corpora for Natural Language Processing (Assiri, Emam & Al-Dossari, 2018; Gamal et al., 2019). A number of scholars depended on translation from one language to another to construct their corpus (Rushdi-Saleh et al., 2011). This paper presents how we have constructed, cleaned, pre-processed, and annotated our 20,0000 Gold Standard Corpus (GSC) AraCust, the first Telecom GSC for Arabic Sentiment Analysis (ASA) for Dialectal Arabic (DA). AraCust contains Saudi dialect tweets, processed from a self-collected Arabic tweets dataset and has been annotated for sentiment analysis, i.e.,manually labelled (k=0.60). In addition, we have illustrated AraCust’s power, by performing an exploratory data analysis, to analyse the features that were sourced from the nature of our corpus, to assist with choosing the right ASA methods for it. To evaluate our Golden Standard corpus AraCust, we have first applied a simple experiment, using a supervised classifier, to offer benchmark outcomes for forthcoming works. In addition, we have applied the same supervised classifier on a publicly available Arabic dataset created from Twitter, ASTD (Nabil, Aly & Atiya, 2015). The result shows that our dataset AraCust outperforms the ASTD result with 91% accuracy and 89% F1avg score. The AraCust corpus will be released, together with code useful for its exploration, via GitHub as a part of this submission.
A Composite Measure of Financial Inclusion in Nigeria (1992 - 2019): A Principal Component Analysis Approach

Owing to gaps in the literature regarding the dearth of a robust and an all-inclusive measurement of Financial Inclusion, this study gauges the level of financial inclusion for Nigeria. Adopting the use of the PCA as an indexing mechanism, the study condenses 22 selected aggregate indicators into a single comprehensive static that can serve as a measurement of financial inclusion for the Nigerian economy. The selected indicators comprises not only indicators germane to the banking sector, which has become traditional in other studies but advances its investigation to include the contribution of previously neglected indicators that captures other sub-sectors (like Insurance and Mortgage) and financial markets (like Stock market) that constitutes the financial system. In a two-stage PCA analysis, the results indicate that the non-bank sectors contribute more to the supply of financial services in Nigeria than the banking sector. The results also suggest that the demand for financial services in urban centres outmatches that of the more populated rural areas. Generally, the results indicate a slow and sluggish rise in Financial Inclusion for the duration of the study scope. Hence, the study recommends that effort be made to collating demand-side data as available data is restrictive. The study also recommends that policies and programmes with the specific aim to increasing available points of service in rural settings be pursued should financial authorities hope to meet stated goals.
Surface-enhanced Raman scattering and theoretical study of the bilichromes biliverdin and bilirubin

ABSTRACT The surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectra of biliverdin and bilirubin were obtained and analyzed; a physical silver ligand interaction was inferred. The structural conformation of biliverdin is practically the same when passing from the dry to solution relative to that observed in Raman solid. However, the surface effect induces a different molecular orientation on the surface in dry and in solution. The conformational structure of bilirubin is modified when passing from dry to solution conditions; the orientation of the analyte on the surface is different in both media. The carboxylate groups interact with the surface more closely in bilirubin than in biliverdin. The unsaturated methine bridge in biliverdin confers an additional stability by delocalizing the π-electronic cloud. Both sides of the molecule could be in the same plane. On contrary, bilirubin with a tetrahedric carbon (methylene bridge) confers the whole system a rather free rotation of each side of the whole molecule. Theoretical model calculations of the biliverdin and bilirubin onto the silver surface predict a nearly coplanar orientation of the whole molecules and non-bonded interaction.
Multidimensional Credibility With Time Effects - An Application to Commercial Business Lines

This paper considers Danish insurance business lines, for which the pricing methodology recently has been dramatically upgraded. A costly affair, but nevertheless the benefits greatly exceed the costs; without a proper pricing mechanism, you are simply not competitive. We show that experience rating improves this sophisticated pricing method as much as it originally improved pricing compared to a trivial flat rate. Hence, it is very important to take advantage of available customer experience. We verify that recent developments in multivariate credibility theory improve the prediction significantly and we contribute to this theory with new robust estimation methods, for time (in-)dependency.
Do Shareholder Tender Agreements Inform or Expropriate Shareholders?

By signing a Shareholder Tender Agreement (STA) a shareholder pre-commits to tender her shares to a particular bidder, forsaking the right to tender to any subsequent bidder. In a representative sample of tender offers between 1995 and 2007, 60% of the offers contain an STA. STA deals are associated with lower premiums, greater ownership concentration, greater management ownership, and greater information asymmetry. The results support the hypothesis that STAs certify value to uninformed shareholders, thereby increasing the efficiency of the tender offer process. The evidence does not support the view that STAs expropriate value from shareholders of target companies.
Incorporating financial news for forecasting Bitcoin prices based on long short-term memory networks

In this paper, we investigate how a deep learning machine learning model can be applied to improve Bitcoin price forecasting and trading by incorporating unstructured information from financial news. The two-stage model we propose that includes financial news significantly outperforms machine learning models without financial news. In the first stage, we leverage long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to extract structured information from financial news. In the second stage, we apply machine learning models with structured input from financial news to the prediction of Bitcoin prices. In addition to the superior performance relative to machine learning models without input from financial news, we find that the out-of-time rate of return attained with the proposed forecasting system is substantially higher than for a buy-and-hold strategy. Our study highlights how combining deep learning and financial news offers investors and traders support for the monetization of unstructured data in finance.
Correlation Breakdowns, Spread Positions, and CCP Margin Models

The default of a participant at Nasdaq Clearing in 2018 and the recent COVID-19 events brought to the attention of risk managers at CCPs the importance of appropriately measuring correlation breakdowns. The sizable price dislocations registered on these occasions suggested that traditional risk models may not be fully equipped to capture the breakdowns. Because correlations are directly impacted by the statistical properties of each variable, any model that lacks the capacity to deal with non-stationarity may inappropriately represent correlation or its alterations. Using a GARCH-DCC approach to accommodate such properties, the objective of the paper is to study the correlation behaviour during adverse market conditions, and the potential subsequent impact to CCP margins. A study case for energy commodities is proposed, with the specific focus on spread positions for the electricity market. The analysis suggests that the correlation breakdowns are more frequent than traditionally expected. When different types of shocks are considered (i.e. September 2018 and March-May 2020), it becomes evident that while the magnitude of the breakdown may differ, its cycle presents a number of similarities. While elevated margin due to correlation breakdown may reduce breaching amount and improve margin coverage rate, this paper also recognizes the potentially increased margin procyclicality, and highlights the challenge of balancing margin responsiveness and stability during correlation breakdown for spread positions, and calls for further study in this area.
Relationship between the sense of coherence, self-directed learning readiness, and academic performance in Malaysian undergraduate dental students

BACKGROUND: Stress and low psychological well-being among students in higher education impact their academic performance. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between SOC, SDLR, and academic performance in year 3, 4, and 5 undergraduate dental students. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Two hundred and ten students completed a validated questionnaire on SOC and SDLR. The percentage of marks obtained by these students in their year-end examination was used as their academic performance. The SOC scores were further divided into three hierarchical clusters using cluster analysis. The data were analyzed to determine the difference in the SDLR scores and academic performance among the three clusters. Furthermore, the relationship between SOC scores, SDLR scores, and academic performance was assessed. RESULTS: The SDLR scores significantly increased from the low SOC cluster to the high SOC cluster (P = 0.026). However, there was no significant change in academic performance. A positive relationship was found between the SOC and the academic performance (R = +0.025; P > 0.05). The SDLR had a significant positive relationship with both SOC and academic performance (R = +0.27; P < 0.001). CONCLUSION: Although SOC may not have a direct influence on academic performance, SDLR can play an intermediary role. Early identification and timely intervention in students with a weak SOC and low SDLR can have a beneficial influence on their academic life.
Dietary Energy Density and Fertility: Results from the Lifestyle and Fertility Study

ABSTRACT Background Diet is a modifiable lifestyle factor linked with fertility in a growing number of studies. Objective The objective of this study was to evaluate the association between dietary energy density (ED), a summary measure of diet quality that estimates the amount of energy per unit food (kcal/g) consumed, and conception and pregnancy outcomes. Methods A prospective cohort study of couples planning their first pregnancy was conducted in the Northeast region of the USA. Dietary data were collected prior to conception via 3 unannounced interviewer-administered 24-h dietary recalls. Multivariable-adjusted logistic regression (ORs and Cox proportional hazards models [RR] and 95% CIs) were estimated for continuous and categorical (tertile [T]) variables of dietary ED. Results The majority of women (n = 80; 61%) achieved clinical pregnancy. Median time to conception of a clincal pregnancy(TTC) for those who conceived was 4.64 mo with an IQR of 4.37 mo. ED modeled as a continuous variable was not associated with clinical pregnancy, live birth, or TTC after controlling for race, physical activity, and male partner's ED. When ED was categorized to consider nonlinear associations, 60%, 73%, and 50% of the participants in the tertiles (from lowest ED to highest) achieved clinical pregnancy. In multivariable logistic analyses with the middle group as the referent (ED = 1.37–1.60), membership in the highest ED group (ED >1.60) was associated with lower odds of clinical pregnancy (OR = 0.30; 95% CI: 0.11, 0.81, P = 0.02). In Cox proportional hazards analyses, membership in the highest ED group was associated with significantly longer TTC compared with the middle category (HR = 0.41; 95% CI: 0.21,0.82, P = 0.01). Conclusions These results suggest that high dietary ED is associated with reduced fertility. This study evaluated associations between dietary energy density and the probability of conceiving clinical pregnancy, having a live birth, and the time to conception among couples planning pregnancy.
The Role of Kidney Allocation Policy in Addressing Kidney Shortages

Compared to policies intended to increase donations, policymakers have largely ignored the role of allocation policies in addressing current kidney shortages. This paper examines the impacts of prioritizing certain types of candidates for deceased-donor kidney allocation. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that increased access to deceased-donor kidneys dramatically decreases mortality rates (by 43 percent relative to baseline), while decreasing the likelihood of receiving a living-donor transplant. Both of these effects vary substantially across race, blood type, and dialysis status. The result implies that prioritizing for transplant candidates, who are less prone to crowd-out, in deceased-donor kidney allocation could make policies, designed to increase the number of deceased donors, more effective.
Interventions to Support International Migrant Women's Reproductive Health in Western-Receiving Countries: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Purpose: The reproductive health outcomes of international migrant women differ in comparison with receiving-country-born women, depending on country of birth and immigrant status. Effective interventions to support the reproductive health of international migrant women are not well known. Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies between 2010 and 2017 evaluating interventions directly or indirectly affecting the reproductive health (as defined by the World Health Organization) of international migrant women in Western-receiving countries. Results: Sixteen studies representing 5080 migrants were identified. Interventions consisted of linguistically (e.g., translated brochures) or culturally adapted (e.g., cultural narratives) routine care or new interventions. Meta-analysis showed that interventions increased rates of preventive reproductive health activities, including mammography, condom use, and Pap test completion, by almost 18% (95% confidence interval 7.61–28.3) compared with usual care or interventions not adapted to migrant women. Conclusion: Culturally and linguistically adapted care practices congruent with target populations of international migrant women are effective in improving their reproductive health outcomes, particularly their participation in preventative reproductive health activities.
Unintended Consequences of the Dodd–Frank Act on Credit Rating Risk and Corporate Finance

Abstract Prior research finds that Dodd–Frank Act’s regulations on credit rating agencies (CRAs) increase rated firms’ risk of rating downgrades, regardless of their credit quality. Our difference-in-difference estimates suggest that after Dodd–Frank, low-rated firms, which face steep costs from a further downgrade, significantly reduce their debt issuance and investments compared to similar unrated firms. Our results are not driven by credit supply or the financial crisis. They reveal an unintended consequence of Dodd–Frank: Greater regulatory pressure on CRAs leads to negative spillover effects on firms concerned about credit ratings, regardless of their credit quality.
Do Critical Audit Matters Matter? An Analysis of Their Association With Earnings Management

Objective: To analyze the relationship between Critical Audit Matters (CAM) and earnings management practices among Brazilian companies. <br><br>Method: This study’s sample was composed of 96 companies listed in IBRX 100, data of which were collected from the Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) and COMDINHEIRO database in 2016 and 2017, using descriptive statistics and panel data regression analysis. <br><br>Results: The most predominant types of CAM were: Assets Recovery, Contingencies, and Recognition of Revenues, which together accounted for 58% and 66% of CAM reported in 2016 and 2017, respectively. A positive and significant association was found between the number of CAM and accruals and discretionary revenues while a negative and significant association was found between the number of CAM and earnings management proxy by operations through discretionary expenses. <br><br>Contributions: These results have implications for the debate regarding this topic, especially, for the practices of accountants, auditors and regulators, as these findings present important insights regarding association between the disclosure of CAM and earnings management proxies by accruals and actual operations, showing the importance of disclosing CAM as red flags signaling the manipulation of accounting data.
Filtering Response Directions

Equity market interactions with their the option markets are modeled using a two state hidden Markov model permitting transitioning between states when the asset market leads and when the option markets lead. Data on S&amp;P 500 returns and returns on the VIX are employed to filter state probabilities and the transition probabilities between the states. The procedures are extended to other assets and their own asset specific VIX markets. Also included is the market for the VIX and options on the VIX as reflected in the VIX of the VIX. Filtered state and transition probabilities are reported on a variety of assets and their asset specific VIX levels.
Tax Aggressiveness and Idiosyncratic Volatility

Abstract This study finds that aggressive tax strategies adopted by a firm affect idiosyncratic stock return volatility. Aggressive tax strategies, which I measure as tax paid by a firm divided by pretax income (adjusted for special items), are associated with higher levels of idiosyncratic stock volatility. Uncertainty associated with tax strategies may result due to several factors, such as penalties, fines, and additional tax payments if particular tax strategies are disallowed by taxation authorities, or if there are changes in tax rules. Such uncertainty affects the future cash flows of a firm and is reflected in more volatile stock returns. Financial constraints, corporate governance mechanisms, and information environments surrounding a firm influence the relation between idiosyncratic volatility and effective tax rates.
THE “ 7 % SOLUTION ” AND IPO ( UNDER )

We investigate the effect of the “7% solution”—the fact that underwriters in the U.S. charge a 7% spread to most IPOs between $20 million and $100 million in size—on the ensuing pricing of the offerings. Our identification exploits the variation in spreads that is due to distinct kinks in the relation between spread and offer size at these two thresholds. We find that the spread positively influences underpricing but also the offer-price adjustment from the filing range’s midpoint. Our evidence indicates that the spread influences the aftermarket price, suggesting that underwriters can shape, not merely discover, investor valuations.
Does Asymmetric Information Hold Up Firms with Banks?

In the panic of the global financial crisis of 2007-09, many depositors in India moved their deposits from private banks to the largest and government owed bank, State Bank of India (SBI). This created need for firms not borrowing from SBI to start a relationship with it. I find that firms that start a new relationship with SBI experience a significant reduction in interest cost and an increase in borrowings and leverage. Large, public, rated, old firms are more likely to start a relationship with SBI. This is consistent with the theory of hold up problem caused by information asymmetry between lending bank and non-lending banks. Furthermore, I find that firms that form a new relationship with SBI have relatively worse future performance and higher chances of bankruptcy which is consistent with non-lending banks facing adverse selection problem.
Recession Forecasting With Big Data

In this paper, a large amount of different financial and macroeconomic variables are used to predict the U.S. recession periods. We propose a new cost-sensitive extension to the gradient boosting model which can take into account the class imbalance problem of the binary response variable. The class imbalance, caused by the scarcity of recession periods in our application, is a problem that is emphasized with high-dimensional datasets. Our empirical results show that the introduced cost-sensitive extension outperforms the traditional gradient boosting model in both in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting. Among the large set of candidate predictors, different types of interest rate spreads turn out to be the most important predictors when forecasting U.S. recession periods.