Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does Improving a Firm's Environmental Management System and Environmental Performance Result in a Higher Stock Price?

We believe that sound environmental management leads to reduced risk to the firm, and that this risk reduction is valued by financial markets. Investments in environmental management lead to better short-term environmental performance as well as the prospect of further improvements in the future. These improvements confer a reduction in the firm’s risk, which is the key factor that investors consider when deciding upon the return that they will require for making a particular investment. Lower risks mean lower required returns, and therefore, lower costs for financing the activities of the firm. We have developed a conceptual model that links together the environmental activities and performance of the firm, the ways in which these are communicated to investors and others, the firm’s riskiness, and its cost of equity capital. This model provides a framework for understanding how corporate environmental activities ultimately are translated into changes in the market value of the firm.
Profiling Elderly and Younger Patients Attending Health Care Facilities: Implications for Health Care Planning

The Objective of this paper is to profile elderly and younger patients who attend health care facilities in Saudi Arabia and to identify health facilities used by these groups of patients. The data were collected by a self-administered questionnaire from elderly and younger patients during July 2008. One-thousand patients were selected randomly during their attendance at five primary health care centers in Riyadh City, of which 854 (85.4%) successfully completed the questionnaire. The data were collected on selected characteristics, including predisposing, enabling and need characteristics relevant to the study. Chi-square and t-test were used to present the results. Approximately three quarters (77.6%) of elderly patients and half (48.9%) of younger patients used health services during the past 12 months. The results indicate that elderly people had significantly higher mean scores of visits to primary health care centers, emergency departments and were more likely to be hospitalized than younger patients. On the contrary younger patients were more likely to refer themselves to private pharmacy for self-treatment. The study identified the profile of patients using these facilities. Elderly people constitute a unique subset of health services users. This vulnerable group of people tends to make an increase use of the health resources which should prompt policy makers in the Kingdom to consider their characteristics and propose plans to provide them with relevant health services. Saad Abdullah Al-Ghanim 244
Corporate Reporting, Stakeholders and the Internet: Mapping the New Corporate Landscape

The paper considers the way in which the development of the Internet and the increasing access to it by individuals have provided such individuals with increasing power to make their respective voices heard. It also considers the way in which corporations, through their use of the Internet to present themselves and their activities and to communicate with individuals, have affected the use of the Internet. Through a construction of the archaeology of corporate reporting, this is shown to be a natural extension of this reporting. An examination of such Internet reporting is undertaken to demonstrate that the Internet is more liberating for corporations than for individuals and that the role of the Internet for individuals remains as a mechanism for protest rather than for the acquisition of a more equal power relationship with the dominant forms of organisation within society.
THE AGRICULTURAL INPUT INDUSTRY AND THE COMPETITIVENESS OF SOUTH AFRICAN AGRICULTURE

It is now generally accepted that the future surviv.u and growth of the South African agricultural sector will largely depend on its ability to compete on the world market. Increased agricultJ.ual exports, especially of -high value agricultural commodities and value-added products, are considered to provide the growth impetus for South African agriculture. This reality and the number of studies being commissioned by government and producer organisations on aspects of the competitiveness of the South African agricultural sector, ensured that the issue of competitiveness has risen to the top of the agenda of the current agricultural debate.
International Conflict

This article explores the impact of international conflict on public opinion. The case under scrutiny is New Zealand, which, through its recent ban on nuclear ship visits, has become entangled in a controversy with its ANZUS treaty partners—Australia and the United States. Public opinion on nuclear issues has been collected in New Zealand since before the ban went into effect; data from the period encompassing 1983 through 1986 are analyzed. Immediately after the conflict began, New Zealanders rallied to the support of their government's policy. Feelings about the United States' position on this issue hardened. Support for the ban has, however, weakened and become structured along social and political lines of cleavage. A model which estimates the sources of nuclear opinion in New Zealand is presented.
Opportunistic link scheduling for multihop wireless networks

This paper studies throughput improvement for TCP traffic in IEEE 802.11-based multihop ad hoc wireless networks. Due to the incompatibility between TCP and the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) protocols, the reaction of TCP in case of packet losses can significantly reduce TCP end-to-end throughput. In this paper, we propose an opportunistic link scheduling (OLS), which is a simple enhancement to the IEEE 802.11 DCF protocol and intends to improve the compatibility between TCP and MAC layer protocols in multihop ad hoc networks. With OLS, a link with a good channel condition is allowed to transmit multiple packets consecutively as a burst, while the burst size depends on both physical channel fading and MAC layer collisions. The protocol also includes a mechanism to prevent starvation of nodes with poor channel conditions. An analytical model is developed for a four-hop chain to study the effect of the burst size and TCP congestion window size on the end-to-end transmission throughput in opportunistic link scheduling. Our results show that OLS can significantly improve the end-to-end transmission throughput, while keeping reasonably low transmission delay. The protocol is easy to implement and requires only slight modifications to the IEEE 802.11 protocol.
tRNA genes as transcriptional repressor elements

Eukaryotic genomes frequently contain large numbers of repetitive RNA polymerase III (pol III) promoter elements interspersed between and within RNA pol II transcription units, and in several instances a regulatory relationship between the two types of promoter has been postulated. In the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, tRNA genes are the only known interspersed pol III promoter-containing repetitive elements, and we find that they strongly inhibit transcription from adjacent pol II promoters in vivo. This inhibition requires active transcription of the upstream tRNA gene but is independent of its orientation and appears not to involve simple steric blockage of the pol II upstream activator sites. Evidence is presented that different pol II promoters can be repressed by different tRNA genes placed upstream at varied distances in both orientations. To test whether this phenomenon functions in naturally occurring instances in which tRNA genes and pol II promoters are juxtaposed, we examined the sigma and Ty3 elements. This class of retrotransposons is always found integrated immediately upstream of different tRNA genes. Weakening tRNA gene transcription by means of a temperature-sensitive mutation in RNA pol III increases the pheromone-inducible expression of sigma and Ty3 elements up to 60-fold.
THREE ESSAYS IN ESTIMATING INTERTEMPORAL SUBSTITUTION ELASTICITIES OF HOME PRODUCTION

This dissertation contains three essays that estimate the intertemporal substitution elasticities of a life cycle model that includes home production. The first essay studies the impact of including home work hours in the estimated intertemporal substitution elasticity of labor supply. We use the employment information of employed males obtained from Panel Study in Income Dynamics and Canadian Time Use datasets. We then estimate the elasticities using a two-stage estimation strategy. Our results suggest that the estimated inter-temporal substitution elasticity in the extended home production life cycle model is lower than the one in standard life cycle model without including home production. Our results are in contrast to the results obtained by Rupert et al. (2000), where they report the estimated inter-temporal substitution elasticity in the home production model to be higher than the one in standard life cycle model. The second essay critically evaluates the estimated results obtained by Rupert et al. (2000). We investigate the estimated employed male labor supply elasticities of the home production function by using the Three Time Use datasets that are employed by Rupert et al. By utilizing the two-stage estimation strategy and the generalized least square estimating method, we find that there is no evidence indicating that the estimated inter-temporal labor elasticities of employed male with home production are higher than the ones without home production. The final essay measures the inter-temporal labor supply elasticities with home production using various employed female datasets as well as different estimation methods. Using the same methodology and datasets as the previous two essays, we find that the empirical results do not provide any conclusive evidence to support the hypothesis that the home production function has increased the estimated intertemporal substitution elasticity of employed female compared to the previous results estimated without home production. Overall, the estimated results of all three essays indicate that there seems to be some willingness to substitute total (market and home) hours over the life cycle for both the employed male group and the employed female group, but it is most likely smaller than the willingness to substitute market hours over the life cycle in response to wage changes. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Hedge Portfolios in Markets with Price Discontinuities

We consider a market consisting of multiple assets under jump-diffusion dynamics with European style options written on these assets. It is well-known that such markets are incomplete in the Harrison and Pliska sense. We derive a pricing relation by adopting a Radon-Nikodym derivative based on the exponential martingale of a correlated Brownian motion process and a multivariate compound Poisson process. The parameters in the Radon-Nikodym derivative define a family of equivalent martingale measures in the model, and we derive the corresponding integro-partial differential equation for the option price. We also derive the pricing relation by setting up a hedge portfolio containing an appropriate number of options to "complete" the market. The market prices of jump-risks are priced in the hedge portfolio and we relate these to the choice of the parameters in the Radon-Nikodym derivative used in the alternative derivation of the integro-partial differential equation.
An investigation of long-run dynamic relationship of Korean and Indian futures indexes

We investigate the nature of the long-term dynamic relationship between the futures indexes of Korea and India. Both the Kospi 200 futures index and Nifty futures index are found to be non-stationary and cointegrated, meaning thereby that a long-term dynamic equilibrium relationship exists between them along with a Granger cause bidirectional relationship. The VECM results indicate that a lagged relationship exists between the two indexes. While lag 1 and lag 3 are statistically significant for Kospi 200 futures – Nifty futures, lag 4 and lag 6 are significant for Nifty futures – Kospi 200 futures. It is suggested that while information on Kospi 200 futures is more instantaneously discounted by the Nifty futures, the information on Nifty futures is relatively slowly discounted by the Kospi 200 futures index. The impulse response analysis suggests that the price discovery process is more efficient for Kospi 200 futures index than for Nifty futures index.
Inhibitory activity of selenium nanoparticles functionalized with oseltamivir on H1N1 influenza virus

As an effective antiviral agent, the clinical application of oseltamivir (OTV) is limited by the appearance of drug-resistant viruses. Due to their low toxicity and excellent activity, the antiviral capabilities of selenium nanoparticles (SeNPs) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. To overcome the limitation of drug resistance, the use of modified NPs with biologics to explore novel anti-influenza drugs is developing rapidly. In this study, OTV surface-modified SeNPs with superior antiviral properties and restriction on drug resistance were synthesized. OTV decoration of SeNPs (Se@OTV) obviously inhibited H1N1 infection and had less toxicity. Se@OTV interfered with the H1N1 influenza virus to host cells through inhibiting the activity of hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. The mechanism was that Se@OTV was able to prevent H1N1 from infecting MDCK cells and block chromatin condensation and DNA fragmentation. Furthermore, Se@OTV inhibited the generation of reactive oxygen species and activation of p53 phosphorylation and Akt. These results demonstrate that Se@OTV is a promising efficient antiviral pharmaceutical for H1N1.
National and Subnational Patterns of Cause of Death in Iran 1990-2015: Applied Methods.

BACKGROUND Causes of death statistics provide crucial health intelligence in national and international communities. An efficient death registration system provides reliable information for health policy system. In many developing countries, death registration systems face a degree of misclassification and incompleteness. There are many impediments to putting an estimate of cause-specific death rates. Addressing those challenges could prevent misleading results. METHODS Our data was collected by Ministry of Health and Medical Education, Tehran and Isfahan cemeteries from 1995 to 2010. After converting ICD codes of Iran's death registration into GBD codes, 170 underlying causes of deaths were recognized in the available data. A wide range of methods were applied for preparing the data. We used several statistical models to estimate mortality rates in age-sex-province groups for all causes of deaths. The considerable number of combinations for age, sex, cause of death, year, and province variables made further complicated model selection and evaluation of the results. RESULTS Totally, 58.91% of deaths were related to males. The majority of cases of death were classified as NCDs (77.83%) and injuries (14.80%). We extrapolated 71.76% and 14.71% of causes of death by mixed effect model, spline model with parameter 0.9 and 0.6, respectively. CONCLUSION A comprehensive and unique registration system is able to solve many DRS issues. It is necessary to assess the quality and validity of cause of death data. Scientific methods like analyzing mortality level and cause-of-death data are used to provide an overview for better decisions.
The story‐driven organization

The old metaphors for business—war, science, the machine—are distancing and constrain an organization's ability to envision possibilities for action. Understanding motivation and behavior in terms of story—character, objective, and conflict—enables leaders to better engage both the minds and hearts of employees and manage change. The authors explain the elements of story and present six guidelines for tapping its power. Applications include connecting employees to the organization's mission; understanding and managing the cultural implications of system and process change; and marshalling the tension inherent in conflicting objectives, such as product performance and environmental stewardship, as a source of energy and innovation. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Mind the Gap: State Capacity and the Implementation of Human Rights Treaties

Abstract According to recent studies, international human rights treaties are ineffective, counterproductive, or else beneficial for only those countries that tend to respect human rights regardless of treaty membership. Analysts often attribute gaps between human rights principles and practices to willful disobedience, self-interested defection, and ineffective enforcement. Using two-stage regression models to analyze compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, I examine whether countries' inability (as opposed to unwillingness) to implement treaty terms is also responsible for the gap between commitment and compliance. I find that one dimension of state capacity in particular—bureaucratic efficacy—enhances levels of compliance with civil, political, and physical integrity rights provisions. These findings lend credence to an important aspect of the managerial approach—that noncompliance is often inadvertent and conditioned by a state's ability to implement treaty terms.
Towards a theory of effective cross-cultural capacity development: the experiences of Australian international NGO expatriates in Vietnam

Abstract Capacity development (CD) partnerships between highly qualified expatriates and host-country counterparts are a commonly used tool by non-government organisations (NGOs) working in international development. This article reports on an empirical investigation of the factors contributing to the effectiveness of these interpersonal cross-cultural CD relationships. Using a variant of the critical incident technique, we explored 40 such relationships (20 effective and 20 ineffective) reported by 20 expatriates from an Australian international NGO who were embedded in international and domestic NGOs and government organisations in Vietnam. From our analysis, we propose a theoretical model that identifies the features of effective cross-cultural CD relationships. The model is intended to lay the foundation for future research as well as strategic action by organisations. It identifies shared trust between expatriate and counterpart as central to effective CD, supported by five enabling conditions relating to the perceptions, abilities and attitudes of participants, the way the work roles are structured, and the way that leaders in the host organisations manage the context of the relationship.
An Investigation of Spanish SME Innovation during Different Economic Conditions

This study investigates product, process, and management innovation among a sample of Spanish manufacturing small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) during the current economic downturn and a period of economic growth. Tobit analyses examined whether the level of process, product, and management innovation changed during the recessionary period relative to the expansionary period; and MCO estimations were used to show whether the recession affected the relationship between SME innovation and performance. Three main findings are: (1) innovation among Spanish manufacturing SMEs declined during the recent economic crisis; (2) the type of innovation at Spanish manufacturing SMEs changed during different economic conditions; and (3) innovation was positively associated with firm performance during the economic expansion and recession years. The results demonstrate the importance of adopting innovation into SME strategy over the business cycle. The findings have relevance to SMEs, government policymakers, and providers of consulting services.
General Equilibrium Effects of Unemployment Compensation with Labor Force Participation

This article examines the effects of unemployment compensation when the size of the labor force depends on unemployment benefits. The analysis is based on an aggregate model with search and matching in which unemployment compensation affects the wage determination process and the number of jobs and workers. As with partial equilibrium models, unemployment compensation raises the unemployment rate and the ratio of unemployed to vacancies. However, wages may go up or down and firms may be better off. Generally, employed workers are worse off. Unemployment compensation transfers income from employed factors to unemployed factors, leading to greater input levels.
Electroencephalographic Burst Suppression Versus Loss of Reflexes Anesthesia with Propofol or Thiopental: Differences of Variance in the Catecholamine and Cardiovascular Response to Tracheal Intubation

The electroencephalographic burst suppression pattern (BSP) might indicate the brain’s effect-site concentration of anesthetics more precisely than clinical signs and thus eliminate bias from studies on the reaction to tracheal intubation after different induction drugs. To test this hypothesis, we compared the catecholamine and cardiovascular responses and their variances to tracheal intubation when either BSP was induced by infusion of propofol (30 mg · kg−1 · h−1; n = 14) or thiopental (75 mg · kg−1 · h−1; n = 14) or anesthesia by repeated bolus doses until loss of reflexes (LR), initially of propofol 2.5 mg/kg (n = 15) or thiopental 5 mg/kg (n = 15). The standard deviations were more often smaller in the BSP than in the LR groups, but the results of Levene’s test for differences of variance were insignificant. At the LR level, propofol attenuated catecholamine, arterial blood pressure, and heart rate responses to intubation better than thiopental, but at the BSP level, only the norepinephrine response was better attenuated. Cp50 concentrations of propofol and thiopental at the onset of BSP were 9.65 and 31.60 &mgr;g/mL, respectively.
The Limiting Distribution of Extremal Exchange Rate Returns

Several nonnested fat-tailed distributions have been advocated for modeling exchange rate reurns. Instead of directly estimating these nonnested distributions the authors investigate the extremal distribution of the returns. The advantage is that the parameter which characterizes the amount of tail fatness can be estimated without maintaining a specific distribution, and hence enables one to test hypotheses. The parameter of the limit law is estimated by employing nonparametric procedures based on order statistics. The appropriateness of these procedures is assessed. Given this estimate one can derive bounds on the returns for very low probabilities on an excess. Such information is useful in evaluating the volatility of exchange rates. Copyright 1991 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.