Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effect of an instantaneous dependency rate on the social equitability of hybrid PAYG public pension schemes

Abstract The defined convex combination (DCC) pay-as-you-go public pension systems recently introduced in the literature are a form of hybridization between defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) designed to maintain intergenerational social equitability by reacting to demographic shocks in an optimal way. In this paper, we augment DCC schemes with the assumption that the dependency ratio between pensioners and workers is driven by an exogenously modelled instantaneous stochastic rate of change. This assumption enjoys support from the empirical data and allows explicit solutions for the contribution and replacement rate processes which make transparent the nature of the dynamic evolution of a DCC system, as well as the role of the variables involved. The analysis of intergenerational social equitability measures under the assumption of an instantaneous dependency rate confirms the view expressed in previous literature that neither DB nor DC achieves social fairness, and that DCC plans have the potential to improve on both. We perform a calibration test, and our findings seem to indicate that in ageing economies the DC system might indeed be superior to the DB one in terms of intergenerational fairness.
Financial Intermediation and Equity Investment with Costly Monitoring

This paper studies the efficiency of equilibria in a productive OLG economy where the process of financial intermediation is characterized by costly state verification. Both competitive equilibria and Constrained Pareto Optimal allocations are characterized. It is shown that market outcomes can be socially inefficient, even when a weaker notion than Pareto optimality is considered.
Online Appendix for 'Network Motivated Lending Decisions: A Rationale for Forbearance Lending'

This online appendix includes supplemental materials for "Network-motivated Lending Decisions: A Rationale for Forbearance Lending'' by Ogura, Okui, and Saito. Online Appendix 1 contains the proofs of the propositions. Online Appendix 2 presents a numerical example for the theoretical model. Online Appendix 3 derives the bias property of the OLS estimator applied to the spatial autoregressive model. Online Appendix 4 presents the formula for standard errors for the OLS estimator, which are adjusted to address the problem that the demand influence coefficients are estimated regressors. Online Appendix 5 presents additional empirical results to examine the robustness of the empirical results in the main text.
Economic Rents and the Contours of Conflict in the Data-Driven Economy

In the era of continuous and steadily accelerating technological change that started with the industrial revolution, economies and societies were repeatedly transformed in ways that can be linked to ownership of the essential and scarce factor of production of the day and command of the economic rents that flow to that factor. While history allows many narratives to be spun, the contours of conflict, both internal and between states, can be seen as aligned with the contest over rents – from the wars of territorial acquisition of the feudal era when land was the main source rents, to the wars of mercantilist expansion when the economies of scale generated by the machinery of mass production became the main source of rent, to the resource-rent-fuelled oil wars of the modern era, and in recent decades the proliferating conflicts over intellectual property. With the digital transformation we are seeing the emergence of a new type of economy – the data-driven economy, in which data is the essential factor of production. Data generates massive rents, fuels the rise of superstar firms, and generates powerful incentives for strategic trade and investment policy. The emergence of this new economy signals a new era of conflict, on new battlegrounds, with new tools or weapons, between new coalitions within and amongst countries. This conflict is already upon us. The vast rents prospectively at play in the data-driven economy arguably constitute a major (perhaps the major) trigger for the open trade and technology war between the United States and China. They also are at the heart of the brewing conflicts over taxation of digital platform firms. This note describes the contours of the conflicts that are to be expected with the digital transformation as it realigns interests, compares these expectations with actual developments, and comments on the implications for the rules-based system of international commerce.
Exam Scheduling and Student Performance

This paper uses data from a single School of a UK university to estimate the impact of a switch from end‐of‐semester to end‐of‐year final exams on student performance. The identification strategy exploits the fact that while the timing of final exams changed, the timing of mid‐term exams remained the same. Estimates are based on a difference‐in‐differences methodology that compares final and mid‐term exam scores after the switch, with final and mid‐term exam scores before the switch. The empirical findings suggest that the shift of final exams to the end of the academic year had a negative effect on student achievement. Many changes in higher education are often done on the basis of financial, administrative or ideological considerations, underestimating the magnitude of their effect on student learning and student performance.
Scaling Up Firms in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: Fintech and Lawtech Ecosystems Compared

What factors drive the scaling up of firms in entrepreneurial ecosystems? We address this question by investigating whether startup founders’ within-ecosystem social ties explain firms’ relative success. We develop a novel database of startup companies and their founders in two markets (fintech and lawtech) and three locations (London, New York City, and San Francisco Bay Area), resulting in six ecosystems. We find that ecosystems with denser social ties experience faster growth and earlier timing for external funding. Within each ecosystem, startup founders with denser social ties achieve faster growth and earlier external funding. Thus, social ties are key metrics indicative of social capital, that can be captured at the ecosystem and individual levels. We suggest different ways in which these metrics can be computed and may be applied in a robust manner to all startups and ecosystems, with utility for entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers.
Timing of Information Acquisition and Decision Making on New Product Development Under Decentralized Organization

When an investment is in goodwill, a divisional performance measurement based on residual income is subject to what is included in assets, as IFRS requires. Especially in case the project may be shut down on its way, investment base for the calculation of residual income measures is dependent of the continuation decision on such projects. I investigate residual income performance measure and capital charge rate in the situation where there may be continuation decision on a project whose prospect looks bad. In the analysis of this problem, I compare two schemes on continuation decision on such a project in a bad condition: deliberate scheme under which the manager can refer more detailed but delyed information; precommitment scheme under which the manager makes a prompt decision without any further relevant information. Under deliberate scheme, capital charge rate plays a role of controlling a continuation decision but decreases the incentive of additional expenditure. Under precommitment scheme, capital charge rate has neither role nor negative effect but causes any project in a bad condition to be continued. Which scheme is more desirable depends on two parameters: return when a project fails and principal's opportunity loss caused by continuation of a failed project. In an extended model, I investigate influence of noisy signals and show that the validity of conservative accounting system depends on the principal's opportunity loss.
Quantifying insect movement in the field

We describe a method of quantifying insect paths in the field for use in ecological and behavioral studies. First, we discuss how continuous and curvilinear paths traced by moving insects can be approximated with a series of connected straight lines. Next we describe our procedure for following insects under field conditions and for recording their behaviors (and the timing of behavioral events) with a hand-held TRS-80 computer. We discuss how successive positions of a followed insect can be recorded by triangulation and then translated into spatial coordinates. Finally, we illustrate the method with a study of individual movements in a hilltopping butterfly, Euphydryas editha Boisduval.
Believing in Economic Theory: Sex, Lies, Evidence, Trust and Ideology

People's beliefs about how well economic theory predicts outcomes may affect policy through democratic processes. Knowing what determines those beliefs is then important. We investigate how individual attitudes and characteristics correlate with those beliefs using a classroom Double Auction experiment, combined with a survey and ex-ante and ex-post elicitations of student beliefs. We find that Sex is a robust correlate of both ex-ante and ex-post beliefs: women are more skeptical than men in both instances. An index of socially desirable responding is positively related to prior belief in the theory: subjects who manage their image by telling Lies to please others also claim less skepticism on the ex-ante survey about the economic theory's predictive power. Subjects respond to Evidence in a minimally reasonable way: those who saw prediction errors in their experimental demonstration change their beliefs less between the ex-ante and ex-post surveys than those who saw none. While Trust-specifically, trust of authority-strongly correlates with Ideology, it is an insignificant predictor of beliefs. Finally, Ideology has complex effects on beliefs. As expected, the relatively liberal respondents are relatively more skeptical about economic theory in the ex-ante belief elicitation. Surprisingly, however, the relatively conservative respondents update beliefs in response to evidence much less strongly than their more liberal counterparts and, as a result, are actually relatively more skeptical than them in the ex-post belief elicitation. Acknowledgments. We have benefited from comments and help from Sarah Austin, Thilo Bodenstein, Dirk Engelmann, Jan Kmenta, Kathleen Knight, John Matsusaka, Andreas Ortmannand Christopher Wlezien, as well as seminar participants at the Public Choice/Economic Science Association meetings in San Antonio, Economic Science Association meetings in Barcelona and Tucson, the European Economic Association meetings in Venice, the California Institute of Technology, Technische Universität Chemnitz and the Max Planck Institut Strategic Interaction Group in Jena. Of course, none of these people are responsible for remaining errors or ambiguities.
Photosynthetic biocathode enhances the power output of a sediment-type microbial fuel cell

Conventional microbial fuel cells (MFCs) consist of biological anodes and abiotic cathodes separated by a proton-exchange membrane. The abiotic cathode usually catalyses the reduction of oxygen to produce water by means of expensive catalysts such as platinum.1 The cathodic reaction is often limiting in MFCs and researchers are now focusing on efficient, low-cost catalysts to improve oxygen reduction at the cathode. This paper describes a photosynthetic biocathode in a sediment-type MFC constructed without a proton-exchange membrane. The carbon and stainless steel cathode did not contain any catalyst, but was covered in a biofilm composed of a complex community including microalgae and cyanobacteria. Although electroactive species were detected in the cathode biofilm, no biocatalysis of oxygen reduction was observed. Enhancement of the current output was mostly due to the production of pure oxygen near the cathode surface by the photosynthetic biofilm. Photosynthesis could produce dissolved oxygen levels approximately four times higher than oxygen levels obtained by aeration. The MFC was able to generate a maximum power density of 11 mW/m2 (projected anode area) over six months without feeding.
Flight to Safety in Volatility Forecasting

The benefits of using flight-to-safety (FTS) in volatility forecasting are assessed within a multivariate GARCH framework. In particular, we propose realized semi-covariance between falling equity and rising safe haven returns as a proxy of FTS and we use it to model the conditional distribution of asset returns. An empirical application based on US stock market, US bond and gold market data shows that the FTS measure is a statistically significant predictor of future equity volatility. Moreover, when comparing with a benchmark and controlling for data snooping, we find that the proposed model yields superior out-of-sample forecasts of the variance of the asset returns examined. However, the performance can be sensitive to the choice of the safe haven asset with the US Treasuries being the most effective in this regard.
CEO Pay Gap and Bank Risk-taking

The large compensation received by bank executives is among the many factors blamed for the risk-taking that led to the 2008-2009 financial crisis. We test whether and how pay disparities between CEO and non-CEO executives—the so-called CEO pay gap—influenced risk taking at publicly traded commercial banks in the U.S. between 1992 and 2014. Perhaps surprisingly, we find strong evidence that larger CEO pay gaps are associated with lower risk levels, improved financial performance, and greater information transparency. Our results imply that placing absolute limits on bank CEO pay would likely result in increased bank risk-taking.
Can China Harness Globalization to Reap Carbon Savings? Modeling International Technology Diffusion in a Multi-Region Framework

This paper examines the effect of globalization, particularly international technology diffusion (TD), on China’s domestic carbon savings. Building on a multi-region numerical model, this study considers both indigenous R&D and foreign TD as two sources of endogenous TC for domestic carbon savings. The model systematically describes foreign TD through three diffusion channels of trade, foreign direct investment (FDI) and disembodied spillovers, with an elaborate treatment on local knowledge absorptive capacity. Simulation results show that: (1) Foreign TD complements China’s indigenous R&D to help reduce domestic carbon emissions, with the leading diffusion channel being disembodied spillovers in the short run and embodied diffusion (via import and FDI) in the long run; (2) Trade and FDI liberalization (economic globalization) facilitates economic integration and production growth, yet at the cost of higher emissions levels without carbon savings (scale effect); (3) Removal of foreign TD barriers (knowledge globalization) acquires the benefits of domestic carbon savings (technique effect); (4) Domestic climate regulation create the composition effect by inducing indigenous R&D and foreign TD to shift economic composition, hence helping partially mitigate climate compliance cost.
Do some naturalised legumes have the potential to improve pasture production in the Victorian Mallee

Some naturalised (not commercialised or deliberately sown) annual pasture legumes may be valuable pasture components, but their production relative to commercial species is poorly defined. This study aimed to determine the relative productivity, morphology, nutritive value, ecotype variation and sulfonylurea tolerance of some naturalised species in the Victorian Mallee. A series of 3 glasshouse and 2 ungrazed field experiments compared the production of haresfoot clover (Trifolium arvense L.), little woolly burr medic (Medicago minima L.), spineless M. minima, and M. monspeliaca (L.) Trautv. with the commercial species strand medic (M. littoralis Loisel cv. Herald) and barrel medic (M. truncatula Gaertn cv. Paraggio). The crude protein and in vitro digestibility of leaf and stem components were similar among species. The proportion of leaf was associated with species maturity, with later maturing species having a greater proportion of leaf at each harvest. There was a range of 52 days among species for date of first flowering. T. arvense produced similar or more biomass than the commercial species in spring, but had lower winter production. A 38-day range in days to first flower and a 2-fold range in winter biomass production among T. arvense ecotypes indicate potential for selection within this species. T. arvense also appears to have greater tolerance of triasulfuron residues than M. littoralis. Spineless M. minima requires further evaluation for persistence in this environment, but the low production of M. monspeliaca limits its value as a component of pastures. T. arvense, spineless and spiny M. minima all have some characteristics which could enhance pasture production in low-rainfall, low-input mixed farming systems.
National frameworks for marine conservation — a hierarchical geophysical approach

1. Development of environmental protected areas has been driven ‘more by opportunity than design, scenery rather than science’ (Hackman A. 1993. Preface. A protected areas gap analysis methodology: planning for the conservation of biodiversity. World Wildlife Fund Canada Discussion Paper; i–ii). If marine environments are to be protected from the adverse effects of human activities, then identification of types of marine habitats and delineation of their boundaries in a consistent classification is required. Without such a classification system, the extent and significance of representative or distinctive habitats cannot be recognized. Such recognition is a fundamental prerequisite to the determination of location and size of marine areas to be protected. 2. A hierarchical classification has been developed based on enduring/recurrent geophysical (oceanographic and physiographic) features of the marine environment, which identifies habitat types that reflect changes in biological composition. Important oceanographic features include temperature, stratification and exposure; physiographic features include bottom relief and substrate type. 3. Classifications based only on biological data are generally prohibited at larger scales, due to lack of information. Therefore, we are generally obliged to classify habitat types as surrogates for community types. The data necessary for this classification are available from mapped sources and from remote sensing. It is believed they can be used to identify representative and distinctive marine habitats supporting different communities, and will provide an ecological framework for marine conservation planning at the national level. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Why All Researchers Should Report Effect Sizes and Their Confidence Intervals: Paving the Way for Meta-Analysis and Evidence-Based Management Practices

The growing body of empirical entrepreneurship studies and the advent of meta-analytic methodologies create new opportunities to develop evidence-based management practices. To support research on evidence-based practices, empirical studies should report meta-analysis relevant information, such as standardized effect-size measures and their confidence intervals. The corresponding changes in reporting practices are simple and straight-forward – yet, they promise strong contributions to the systematic accumulation of entrepreneurship knowledge over time.
Benchmarking non-performing loans

This paper provides a new perspective to evaluate the economic role played by banks in non-performing loans (NPLs) accumulation. We estimate benchmark NPL levels on the judicial inefficiency dimension, controlling for country- and bank-specific factors. To this aim, we first empirically establish whether judicial inefficiency is a key determinant of NPLs in the European banking system for the period 2006–2017. Using the dynamic-Generalized Method of Moments estimations, we show that higher contract enforcement inefficiency increases NPLs. Then, we estimate NPLs benchmark levels using a dose response function based on judicial inefficiency. Our results show that Norway, Sweden, and Italy performed better than the European countries, while Austria, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Cyprus, and Greece performed worse than the European mean. Our results have several policy implications.
Agency Costs and Firm Productivity

We explore how the separation between ownership and control affects firm productivity. Using Finnish administrative data on the universe of limited liability firms, we document a substantial increase in firm productivity when the CEO obtains majority ownership or when the majority owner becomes the CEO. We exploit plausibly exogenous variations to ownership and control, induced for example by shocks to the CEO spouse's health. Extending the analysis beyond typical samples of large public firms, we show that our effects are stronger in medium-sized private firms. We also investigate possible mechanisms and provide suggestive evidence that increased ownership boosts CEO's effort at work.
The Impact of Firm Characteristics on Corporate Internet Reporting: Evidence from Sri Lankan Listed Companies

Corporate Internet Reporting (CIR) is a significant communication phenomenon in the world. Research indicates that there are several CIR issues in developing countries as well as there is a dearth of the studies in the Sri Lankan context. Accordingly, this study is designed to identify the current level of CIR and what are the significant firm characteristics that impact CIR in the Sri Lankan context using a quantitative research approach using secondary data. The level of corporate internet reporting is measured using a disclosure index on CIR. Multiple ordinary least squares regression, multiple ordinal regression and correlation analyses are used to identify the significant determinants of CIR. The results indicate that of 100 companies examined, despite 83% of Sri Lankan companies have their own corporate websites, the overall level of CIR is only 16.2%. The content disclosure sub-score is on average 12.52% and the level of presentation format disclosure sub-score of CIR is 26.88%. Further, the explanatory analyses suggest that variables, auditor size, market capitalization,and the representation of hotel, travel and service industry are significant firm characteristics that impact the level of CIR. Overall, however, mixed evidence is noted. This study addresses the knowledge gap in identifying levels of CIR and firm characteristics and expected to have significant policy implications.
Adaptive evolution in the Per gene family of vertebrates: neofunctionalization by positive Darwinian selection after two major gene duplications

Gene duplication and subsequent functional divergence of the descendant genes is a primary source for the emergence of evolutionary novelties. Functional divergence after gene duplication, through the operation of positive selection, can result in neofunctionalization, that is, one copy acquires a novel function. Period genes are among the master genes of circadian rhythms that are governed physiologically and behaviorally by the endogenous clock. Gene targeting experiments showed functional divergence among the three clusters of this gene family. Using molecular evolution study tools, we provided strong support for experimental findings regarding functional divergence and we also found that the members of this family have experienced episodes of positive Darwinian selection (adaptive evolution) in their evolutionary history that have resulted in obtaining new functions, that is, they have experienced neofunctionalization. Furthermore, we hypothesized that Per2 genes may be functionally more important than Per1 genes.