Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A pan-South-America assessment of avoided exposure to dangerous extreme precipitation by limiting to 1.5 °C warming

This study investigates the future changes in dangerous extreme precipitation event in South America, using the multi-model ensemble simulations from the HAPPI experiments. The risks of dangerous extreme precipitation events occurrence, and changes in area and population exposure are quantified. Our results show that the likelihood of dangerous extreme precipitation increases in large parts of South America under future warming; changes in extreme precipitation are nonlinear with increasing global mean temperatures; and exposure plays a minor role compared to hazard. In all the models, limiting warming to 1.5 °C as opposed to 2 °C shows a general reduction in both area and population exposure to dangerous extreme precipitation throughout South America. The southeast region of South America exhibited the highest multi-model median percentage of avoided area exposure at 13.3%, while the southwest region shows the lowest percentage at 3.1%. Under all shared socioeconomic pathways, South America Monsoon region and southern South America region yielded the highest multi-model median percentage of avoided population exposure (>10%). The strong spatial heterogeneity in projected changes in all the models highlights the importance of considering location-specific information when designing adaptation measures and investing in disaster preparedness.
Issues of Conscience

: Some readers have been appalled at the lack of abortion counseling t een-age patients receive while others are appalled that anything at all on abortion is published. The abortion patient is at a particularly vulnerable time in her life. The reality of the situation is that since 1966, with the liberalization of abortion laws in a number of states, the number of abortion patients has been steadily increasing. This means that an increasing number of patients will seek care that most nurses have not been educated to render. Nurses who see abortion as an unconscionable act should protect both her patient's freedom and her own by refusing to work in a situation which she finds morally offensive. Respecting the rights of other makes one humane.
Language Policy in University Education: the Case of Khakassia and Tyva

The paper deals with interface of macro- and micro-language policies in the language education of the southern Siberian republics of Tuvan and Khakassia, which includes Russian, foreign languages and indigenous languages, Tuvan and Khakass, which have the status of republican official languages. A comparative study of non-linguistic educational programs at various levels in Khakass State University and Tuva State University made it possible to evaluate the linguistic “weight” of undergraduate curricula and reveal a more obvious linguistic orientation in Tuvan State University. The undisputed leader among the foreign languages studied at two universities is English, German is the second. Sociolinguistic surveys of students of different ethnicity allowed establishing the levels of self-assessment of their language competence in foreign and native languages. Almost a third of respondents rate the quality of foreign language skills as unsatisfactory, which is associated with low level of school language education and minimal prospects for studying and working abroad. Self-assessment of the level of proficiency in ethnic languages is significantly higher — with only 18 % of Khakass respondents not speaking their native language. However, the Tuvinian and Khakass languages included in the Atlas of Endangered Languages of UNESCO are practically not represented in the programs of university non-linguistic education. The introduction of mandatory USE in Russian and foreign languages, became a new challenge and threat to republican state languages and strengthens the role of micro-language planning and its agents at different levels
The battle of ideas on the euro crisis: evidence from ECB inter-meeting speeches

ABSTRACT The European Central Bank (ECB) has often been portrayed as highly resistant to ideational change. This paper paints a different picture. A battle of ideas dominated the academic debate on the euro crisis: one view stressed crisis-stricken countries’ fiscal laxity, whereas the other highlighted the systemic roots of financial turmoil. I argue that the failure of policy experiments inspired by the fiscal discipline view favoured the ECB’s adoption of systemic risk ideas, which shaped its crisis response. Empirically, I use an innovative technique combining automated text classification and unsupervised scaling methods to detect ideational variation in ECB Executive Board members’ public speeches. Results indicate that the ECB has progressively moved from a fiscal to a systemic narrative of the euro crisis. Significantly, this shift anticipated and accompanied the ECB’s commitment to unlimited bond purchases in summer 2012. Evidence suggests that this ideational turn was incremental and driven by policy learning dynamics.
Milchlebensleistung in Bayern unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Rinderzucht auf Lebensleistung

Bereits in den sechziger Jahren entwickelte Prof. Bakels in Deutschland das Zuchtkonzept der Rinderzucht auf Lebensleistung. In den achtziger Jahren wurde in Bayern eine Zuchtorganisation gegrundet, welche die Lebensleistungszucht nach Prof. Bakels weiterfuhrt. Ziel der Arbeit war es, Gesundheits- und Leistungsparameter von 79 bayerischen Mitgliedsbetrieben dieser Organisation mit dem Durchschnitt aller bayerischen MLP-Betriebe zu vergleichen. Die Daten wurden getrennt nach Rassen (Holstein Schwarzbunt, Fleckvieh) und Wirtschaftsweisen (konventionell, okologisch) ausgewertet. Biobetriebe zeigten bessere Lebensleistungsparameter. Auch bei den Mitgliedsbetrieben der Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur Rinderzucht auf Lebensleistung waren bessere Lebensleistungsparameter festzustellen, insbesondere bei der Rasse Fleckvieh.
Corporate governance, structuurregime en de financiering van het bedrijfsleven

Voor een onderneming is het belangrijk dat ze in haar vermogensbehoefte kan voorzien door een beroep te doen op financiële markten en instellingen. Het is een soort ‘smeerolie’ die ervoor zorgt dat een onderneming optimaal kan inspelen op ontwikkelingen in de markt om daarmee haar concurrentiepositie te waar­ borgen en zo mogelijk te versterken. Als ze alleen toegang zou hebben tot intern gegene­ reerde fondsen dan zou haar flexibiliteit onno­ dig worden ingeperkt. Toegang tot extern ver­ mogen tegen een acceptabele prijs is echter geen vanzelfsprekendheid. De aanbieders van vermogen de financiers zijn veelal buiten­ staanders die zich zullen afvragen hoe zij zich ervan kunnen vergewissen dat de onderne­ mingsleiding een beleid voert dat ook hun belangen waarborgt. Deze vraag is nauw ver­ want aan de problematiek van corporate go­ vernance die in de laatste jaren zowel in de populaire pers (zie bijvoorbeeld de hierboven vermelde verwijzing naar The Economist) als in de wetenschappelijke literatuur (zie Jensen (1993)) is uitgegroeid tot een onderwerp van formaat. Deze problematiek is van actueel belang, niet alleen vanwege de vermeende inefficiënties en de mogelijk tekortschietende ‘Accountable to no-one’
A view from the policy community: a new strategic narrative for Europe?

ABSTRACT Reflecting on the results presented in articles in this special issue, European leaders should take greater account of external perceptions in crafting the European Union's strategic narrative and guiding its actions. Failure to do so has impaired external policies like the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, the European Neighbourhood Policy and Eastern Partnership. Leaders emerging from the Arab uprisings perceived the EU as complicit with their countries’ former anciens régimes and Russian leaders see EU support for democracy and the market economy in former Soviet states as duplicitous and instrusive. Awareness of such perceptions should be filtered into EU decision-making, without validating views that European officials and diplomats consider misleading.
Three essays on the impact of foreign direct investment on productivity

This thesis attempts to provide a better understanding of the role of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) and the productivity relationship by providing both a theoretical and empirical contribution to the existing literature. Chapter 2 studies how inward FDI can affect economic growth. We extend a leader-follower endogenous growth model and highlight theoretically the endogeneity of FDI in a regression on growth, where FDI acts as a bridge linking technology transfer to firms' adaptation activities, which enable developing countries to catch-up with developed countries. We empirically test the main predictions of our theoretical model and we find positive and statistically significant effects of FDI on the relative level of GDP per capita. The subsequent chapter investigates whether current measures of vertical linkages capture the spillover effects from multinational firms to domestic firms. We construct measures of vertical linkages at the firm-level to include the differences in firms' sourcing and supplying strategies within an industry and to better measure vertical spillovers derived from multinational activities. Our newly constructed measures show how the differences in sourcing and supplying activities across firms determine the advent of vertical spillovers. In chapter 4, we exploit alternative mechanisms through which the productivity of domestic firms rises. Our empirical findings suggest that the presence of foreign ownership alters firms' core product competences, skewing firms' production towards their most profitable product lines and then raising firms' productivity. However, the presence of foreign ownership also increases product market competition by reducing markups across all product lines, and this effect further alters firms' production towards their core varieties.
A Real-time Density Forecast Evaluation of the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters

We evaluate the real-time predictive ability of density forecasts from the European Central Bank’s Survey of Professional Forecasters (ECB SPF) using the Diebold and Mariano (1995) and West (1996) test. As the sample size for the ECB SPF is fairly small, we use fixed-b and fixed-m asymptotics to alleviate size distortions. We verify in an original Monte Carlo design that fixed-smoothing asymptotics delivers correctly sized tests in this framework. Empirical results indicate that ECB SPF density forecasts for unemployment and real GDP growth beat simple benchmarks at one-year horizon. ECB SPF density forecasts for inflation instead do not easily outperform simple benchmarks, as up to 2008 ECB SPF inflation expectations are close to the target. After 2008, we find that the predictive ability of the ECB SPF is more conspicuous for all variables, even though inflation expectations are still loosely anchored to the target.
Essays in Economics of Education: Teacher Labour Markets and Earnings of University Graduates

This thesis consists of three substantive chapters, which explore topics related to the economics of education. Two of the chapters examine teacher labour markets, and one chapter examines the earnings of university graduates. In Chapter 2, I create a new and unique dataset to examine how teacher characteristics affect the probability of acquiring a permanent teaching position in the Ontario public school system. This chapter provides evidence of how difficult it was for recent Ontario teachers’ college graduates to obtain a teaching job. The odds of finding a position in 2006 were, on average, around four times higher than they were in 2013. Moreover, qualified French-language teachers were, on average, three to five times more likely to find a job than teachers without French-language qualifications. In Chapter 3, I take advantage of restricted-access data to examine what is more important for earnings — the university that a student attends or the program that he or she pursues. In particular, this chapter uses a method called relative-importance analysis, which partitions the variation in earnings into program and school components and thus allows me to determine the degree to which they affect earnings. The results show that there is more variation in earnings across programs than schools. Programs account for between two and eleven times the amount of variation in earnings than schools, depending on gender, degree type and period since graduation. In Chapter 4, I estimate the outside-option salaries of recent Ontario teachers’ college graduates from the 2007 to 2013 graduating cohorts and compare them to teaching salaries
Parasites and Paragons: Ownership Reform and Concentrated Interest among Minority Shareholders

Do investors with concentrated shareholding infringe on the value of more‐fragmented shareholders (‘parasites’) or facilitate the growth of firm value for all shareholders (‘paragons’)? In a major ownership reform of Chinese listed firms, we obtain evidence which suggests that larger minority shareholders undertook certain actions both for a rent‐seeking purpose – that these actions allowed them to reap private benefits at the expense of smaller minority shareholders, and for a value‐creating purpose – to potentially increase firm value after the reform. It is plausible that both drivers co‐existed, but they generated different implications of wealth redistribution. When institutional constraints on rent‐seeking were ineffective, higher concentration of minority shares decreased the immediate gains captured by the small investors who held minority shares at the time of the reform, but increased the future value of the firm to be divided among for all investors, large and small, who held firm shares after the reform.
Secular Stagnation: Evidence from the Irish Economy

A over decade after the financial crisis, the global economy has been slow in returning to the growth that was seen in previous recoveries. That in turn has led to the revival of secular stagnation theory. This study investigates the symptoms of secular stagnation and indeed for the existence of secular stagnation within the Irish economy. The research in this paper is conducted through the quantitative methodological paradigm using 33 years of historical data to investigate for the presence of the symptoms of secular stagnation, as well as to generate a model to test if the symptoms of secular stagnation have a significant effect on Irish growth prospects. The findings of this research paper would imply that there is evidence of the symptoms of secular stagnation within the Irish economy and that these symptoms do have a significant effect on domestic growth prospects. However, the Irish economy continues to grow at a significant rate implying that secular stagnation is not present in the Irish economy at this time.
CEO age and analysts forecast properties

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess whether there is an association between CEO age and analysts forecast properties (particularly forecast accuracy and bias/optimism). CEOs, having the central role in managing firms, can significantly influence the financial and non-financial decisions in an organisation. Furthermore, having been identified as key culprits in past major accounting scandals, it is also important to identify the CEO characteristics that affect financial reporting decisions. Design/methodology/approach This study adopts the upper echelon theory on the relationship between CEO age and analysts forecast properties. The authors use a sample of 2,730 Australian firm-year observations for the period 2004–2013 drawn from IBES, Connect 4 and SIRCA databases. Findings The authors find that analyst forecast accuracy increases and bias (optimism) reduces with the CEO age. The authors conclude that earnings and related information provided to analysts improves with the CEO age, which increases the forecast accuracy and reduces bias (optimism). Additional results suggest that the positive (negative) effect of CEO age on forecast accuracy (bias) remains until the CEOs reach the age of their retirement age (65 years). The results remain consistent with a number of sensitivity tests and provide implication for stakeholders such as firms, analysts, auditors, financial statements users and regulators. Practical implications The authors demonstrate that the relationship between CEO age and analyst forecast properties is not linear but is, in fact, curvilinear substantiating concerns that CEOs that are much younger or much older do not help increase the quality of the information environment. Consequently, firms hiring CEOs in the right age bracket also benefit by having higher-quality information environment leading possibly to reduce costs such as those relating to debt and/or equity ultimately increasing firm value. Originality/value Empirical studies on the association between CEO age and analysts earnings properties in Australia are scarce and this paper contributes to the determinants of the analysts forecast accuracy and bias (optimism) and the CEO age literature.
Human / society's right to information on the environment. Reception of selected issues of the Aarhus Convention into the EU and Polish law

Journal of Modern Science tom 3/42/2019 Abstract The subject of the study is the right to information on the environment. It is a human right, but also a collective right, aimed not only at satisfying curiosity about activities, but also allowing for taking actions aimed at protecting the environment. The purpose of the study is to analyze the provisions of international, EU and Polish law in terms of similarities and differences in legal solutions adopted in the field of access to information on the environment. The research hypothesis is the statement that it is impossible to effectively protect the natural environment against its degradation by human activities without the right to information about that environment. The final conclusions indicated that the social activation is necessary to increase the level of using the right to information on the environment. It is necessary to change the mentality of citizens, but also of public authorities.
Exploration des accidents vasculaires ischemiques a la phase aiguë

L’accident vasculaire cérébral (AVC) ischémique est devenu une urgence thérapeutique au même titre que l’infarctus du myocarde. L’ischémie cérébrale est un phénomène dynamique qui s’aggrave durant les premières heures voire les premiers jours après l’apparition des signes cliniques [5]. Ce concept doit encourager à refuser comme fatalité cet accident et mettre en œuvre dans des centres spécialisés tous les moyens pour limiter ou empêcher l’évolution de l’oligémie (diminution de l’apport sanguin) ou de l’ischémie (absence d’apport sanguin) vers l’infarctus (nécrose cellulaire irréversible).
Estimating meltwater retention and associated nitrate redistribution during snowmelt in an Arctic tundra landscape

Nitrogen availability in Arctic ecosystems is a key driver for biological activity, including plant, growth and thereby directly linked to the greening of the Arctic. Here, we model the redistribution of meltwater following spring snowmelt as well as the accumulation of meltwater and dissolved nitrate at landscape scale. By combining snow mapping with unmanned aerial systems, snow chemistry, and hydrological modelling, we argue that the majority of nitrate in the snowpack is flushed out of the landscape due to the limited storage capacity of meltwater in the early growing season frozen soil. We illustrate how landscape micro-topography is a crucial parameter to quantify storage capacity of meltwater at landscape scale and thereby the associated pool of soluble compounds such as nitrate. This pool will be available for plants and may be important for plant diversity and growth rates in the wettest part of the landscape. This study illustrates that the evenly distributed nitrate input during the Arctic winter may be redistributed during the initial snowmelt and lead to marked differences in biologically available nitrate at the onset of the growing season, but also that the majority of deposited nitrate in snow is lost from the terrestrial to the aquatic environment during snowmelt.
Projet COMPAQH 2ème phase (2006-2009) : rapport final

Le projet COordination de la Mesure et Amelioration de la Performance Hospitaliere (COMPAQH), debute en mars 2003, est depuis soutenu par le Ministere charge de la Sante et la Haute Autorite de Sante, et reconduit jusqu’en 2012 sous le nom de COMPAQ-HPST.
Aproximación del proceso de internacionalización bajo IED : caso de estudio “Siga la vaca, Autentica Parrilla Argentina”

Siga la Vaca is an Argentine restaurant founded in 1993, implanted in the city of Buenos Aires an innovative system especially applied to grilled meats. This revolutionary system allowed him to Siga la Vaca a national and international recognition for the part of the large number of tourists who visited daily, due to this, it is seen a need to expand and venture into new markets. In 2004 one of its partners created a restaurant with the same characteristics of the Argentine restaurant in the US market; thought this experience, in to 2012, Siga la Vaca entry to international market, because in Miami, United States, the advantages of premises of a Latin population, ease of obtaining raw materials and ease of doing business. These reasons are key to the incursion of Siga la Vaca. Today this restaurant has come to a do clear example and a model of internationalization to follow the companies.
Experiences with Occupational Pensions in Denmark

Summary: This paper focuses on the development of the funded, occupational pension (OP) system in Denmark. Launched in 1987, as a grand agreement between social partners backed by the government, and as part of the collective wage bargaining process, the Danish OP system differs from the set-up in most other countries, where OP schemes typically have been introduced as part of the legislative process. The OP schemes, being a major component of the overall Danish pension system, have attracted a lot of international attention in recent years and play a key role behind the system’s success with respect to achieving satisfactory coverage, providing high replacement rates and not least, for keeping fiscal policy on a sustainable path. Finally, the paper discusses a number of future challenges, mainly related to the interaction between private and public pensions in a welfare state.