Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of TSX Long Life Order on Market Quality, Execution Quality and Price Discovery

Using data from the first phase implementation of the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) Long life order type on November 30, 2015, we estimate market quality, execution quality and price discovery metrics in order to investigate the impact of the new order type on 26 eligible stocks listed on the TSX. Using a difference-in-difference method, this study finds a 0.016% increase in the number of active or fleeting orders, a 0.015% decrease in the number of passive orders, a 0.009% decline in the fill rate and a 34 units increase in order to trade ratio. We also find marginal improvement in market quality and price discovery metrics. We find a 4.41 bps decrease in quoted spread, 8.77 bps decrease in effective spread, a 4.15 bps decrease in realized spread and a 6.07 bps decrease in price impact. Furthermore, the study finds a 0.002 decrease in mid-quote return autocorrelation, a 0.00003% decrease in short-term volatility and a 0.017 decrease in delay metric.
Pension Deferral With Reference to Actuarial Fairness, Cost Neutrality, and Adverse Selection; a UK Perspective

Persons who are eligible for a defined benefit social security pension may defer their pension and receive, through accruals, an extra pension or possibly a lump sum, on termination of deferral. In certain cases, partners of the deferrer may inherit such benefits. For such a scheme, the concept of actuarial fairness to a category of pensioners is defined. A scheme that is actuarially fair will not be cost neutral to the pension provider unless the discount rate is the same for both parties. In addition to this asymmetry, adverse selection will impact upon both actuarial fairness and cost to the provider. Expressions are derived for the cost penalty to the provider for attempting to achieve actuarial fairness both with and without an acknowledgement of adverse selection. Similarly, when the objective is to achieve cost neutrality for the provider, expressions for the cost to the deferrer are obtained. Some numerical examples are given in the case of the UK state pension scheme. Under present rules it is shown that there are significant departures from actuarial fairness, particularly for those who achieved state pension age before 6 April 2016 and those with partners eligible to inherit benefits. Even when a pension provider attempts to achieve either actuarial fairness or cost neutrality, if adverse selection is ignored, then significant departures from both are quite possible.
Time for Money: A Social Impact Perspective on Moral Licensing

Moral self-regulation is essential in daily work decisions. Past research has demonstrated that sometimes a moral decision is followed by another good deed (moral consistency) while other times it leads to a bad deed (moral licensing). Drawing on social meaningfulness and social impact theory, we focus on the domain of pro-social moral decision-making to disentangle moral consistency from moral licensing. In field and online contexts, we find that volunteering for a charity, followed by a donation decision, leads to moral licensing of donations (Studies 1 and 2). We then test a predicted moderator of social meaningfulness (Study 3): when a moral decision has a socially meaningful impact, we find that it leads to moral licensing. Conversely, volunteering for a non-socially meaningful cause, such as a for-profit organization, did not cause donations to be licensed, even when the organization donated money to a socially meaningful cause. We discuss the ethical and managerial implications of moral consistency and moral licensing in socially meaningful activities in and outside the workplace. <br>
Hydrogen Storage by Titanium Based Sulfides： Nanoribbons （TiS3） and Nanoplates （TiS2）

Nowadays, finding cheap and non-toxic materials able to reversibly store high amounts of hydrogen is a challenge in the renewable energy field. Metal sulfides seem to be promising candidates to this purpose. Titanium sulfides are reported to be particularly interesting but their ability to store hydrogen remains unclear. In this work, titanium based sulfides TiS2 and TiS3 with two-dimensional nanostructures have been synthesized by solid-gas reaction between titanium powder and sulfur at temperatures between 500-600 oC. The morphology and crystal structure of Ti-sulfides were characterized by SEM (scanning electronic microscopy) equipped with EDX (energy dispersion X-ray) and XRD (X-ray diffraction), respectively. Their thermal stability was examined by TGA (thermal gravimetric analysis). Their hydrogenation properties have been determined by manometric means using a Sieverts system and by DSC-HP (high-pressure differential scanning calorimetric). Ti-sulfides hardly absorb/adsorb hydrogen for hydrogen pressures up to 80 bar and reaction temperatures up to 300 °C.
Assurance of Integrated Reports: An Exploratory Study From Egypt

The purpose of the study is to investigate the extent of the presentation of integrated reporting as well as the provision of assurance of integrated reports by external auditors in Egypt. The research issues under study are informed by the stakeholder and institutional perspectives. Methodologically, we used the questionnaire instrument to collect data from external auditors registered on the Egyptian Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA). In general, we found a limited provision of integrated reports as well as assurance of this kind of reports by Egyptian public companies. This was mainly found to be ascribed to the nonobligation of local companies to issue integrated reports and to solicit external auditors to provide assurance of these reports, as well as the lack of professional standards and guidelines that empower accountants and auditors to do so. The study has implications for local regulatory and business organizations –it directs their attention to the extant gap in the practice of integrated reporting in Egypt, and hence to the actions required by regulatory bodies to reap the awaited benefits of adopting integrated reporting as outlined in the literature.
Emotional Labor and Other Antecedence of Turnover Intentions, Motivation and Organisational Trust among Employees in Non-Profit Organization of Pakistan

Although the retention of competent workers is critical in all organizations, retaining social workers in nonprofit organizations is especially important because they mainly determine the quality of social services. This paper explores the factors which have an impact on turnover intentions, motivation, and organizational trust in Non-Profit Organizations. For this, we propose a theoretical framework thereby modifying Cho &amp; Song (2017) model, along with adding intrinsic factors like organizational culture, leadership, and rewards. We hypothesize that factors like 1. Supervisory Support, 2. Autonomy, 3. Diverse and inclusive Organizational Culture, 4. Trust in Leadership, 5. Monetary Incentives/ Rewards, and emotional labor (6. Frequency, 7. Variety, 8. Duration, and 9. Intensity level), all produce a positive effect on the motivation of employees, increased Organisational Trust, and decreased Turnover intention among employees of NPO and social workers. This paper particularly focused on emotional labor dimensions such as frequency of emotional display, the intensity of emotional display, and duration of emotional display. Empirical validity was established by conducting a survey using a close-ended questionnaire. Data were collected from 220 social workers and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation modeling. <br><br>The results indicate that supervisory support, autonomy, leadership organizational culture, and trust have a significant effect on the motivation, retention, and Organizational trust of employees. However, organizational culture have a negative effect on motivation. Moreover, Apart from leadership, all other factors seem to increase the turnover intentions. With regards to emotional labor dimensions, all factors expect duration did not produce any significant effect on all three dependent variables. This research is useful for NPO’s management as well as future scholars for studying the same domain. <br>
Stock Market Trading Agent Using On-Policy Reinforcement Learning Algorithms

Stock market has been a complex system which has been difficult to predict for humans, thereby, making the trading decisions difficult to take. It will be useful for traders if there is a model agent which can learn the stock market trends and suggest trading decisions which in turn maximizes the profits. Inorder to develop this agent we have formulated the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and created a stock trading environment which serves as a platform for this agent to trade the stocks. In this paper, we introduce a Reinforcement Learning based approach to develop a trading agent which performs trading actions on the environment and learns according to the rewards in terms of profit or loss it receives. We have applied different On-policy Reinforcement Learning Algorithms such as Vanilla Policy Gradient (VPG), Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) on the environment to obtain the profits while trading stocks for 3 companies viz. Apple, Microsoft and Nike. The performance of these algorithms in order to maximize the profits have been evaluated and the results and conclusions have been elaborated.
How Ethics and Benevolence in Leadership Inspires Creativity: The Mediating Role of LMX and Motivation, Complemented by Culture with Greater Power Distance.

Ethical leadership is expected to communicate, promote, and reinforce the ethical behaviors of the followers. Ethical leadership has not fully considered the nature of the leader-follower exchange, and, in addition, few studies have considered the impact of follower individual differences in reactions to ethical leadership. However, virtuous leader behavior in the form of benevolent leadership has a considerable impact on employee creativity. Evans et. al. (2016) predicted that the impact of ethical leadership on organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and organizational identification is greater for individuals with a more benevolent orientation. However, little is know if it also results in employees’ creativity. More importantly, how benevolence and ethics in leadership affect creativity. For this, we proposed a theoretical framework merging Lin et. al. (2018) model of Benevolent Leadership, with Feng et. al. (2018) ethical leadership framework. More specifically, we proposed and tested a moderated mediation model positing leader-member exchange (LMX) as well as intrinsic motivation as a mediator, and employee power-distance orientation as a moderator in the relationship of ethical and benevolent leadership with employees and team creativity. Empirical validity was established by conducting a survey using a close-ended questionnaire. Data was collected from 300+ employees working in different sectors in Pakistan and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation modeling. As proposed in our theory, the results indicate a significant positive impact of Top Management Ethical and Benevolent Leadership on both intrinsic motivations, as well as Leader-Member Exchange (LMX). Moreover, both motivation and LMX positively impact both team and employees Creativity. However, LMX doesn’t seem to impact the employee’s creativity. Hence, overall all results indicated a positive indirect effect of both forms of leadership on creativity. Understandably, Power distance doesn’t seem to affect LMX but does impact motivation. Interestingly, the effect of Ethical leadership on both motivation and LMX is significantly weakened in cases of higher power distance. Whereas, the same power distance seems to strengthen benevolent leadership and motivation nexus. The findings imply that ethical leadership is not enough to induce creativity in a culture of higher power distance as it develops a gulf between followers and leaders, and it is needed to be complemented by benevolence.
Variations in Investment Advice Provision: A Study of Financial Advisors of Millionaire Investors

Abstract Vignette methodology is used to examine how the personal characteristics of investors and financial advisors contribute to portfolio recommendations, and the judgements that advisors make about investment knowledge and control of prospective millionaire UK clients. We find that advisors use investor characteristics to make recommendations broadly in line with economic theory and regulatory requirements. However, women are judged less knowledgeable and in control of their investments than equivalent men. They also receive portfolio recommendations with slightly lower risk profiles. Portfolio recommendations vary by advisor, with experienced advisors and those with wealthier clients recommending higher risk portfolios. Unmeasured advisor variables also impact on judgements and recommendations. These findings have relevance to the wealth management industry and regulators, in focusing attention on the conscious and unconscious influences on the judgements advisors make about their clients.
Etude et caractérisation de couches minces photosensibles organique-inorganique à base de titane pour la conversion de l'énergie solaire

Ce travail porte sur l'etude et la mise en forme de sols gels photosensibles d'oxyde de titane. Ces oxydes de titane ont la particularite de presenter, apres reduction du Ti(IV) en Ti(III), un niveau intermediaire dans leur bande interdite. Ils peuvent ainsi etre des candidats potentiels pour des applications photovoltaiques, notamment pour la troisieme generation de cellules solaires, visant a depasser le rendement theorique de Schokley-Queisser. Ces oxydes ont deja pu etre caracterises en volume lors de precedents travaux au sein de l'Institut des Materiaux Jean Rouxel, mais ont ete etudies sous la forme de couches minces pour la premiere fois lors ce travail. Dans un premier temps, une etude par spectroscopies Infra-Rouge et Raman a ete mise en place afin d'etudier le mecanisme de polycondensation de ces sols en gels d'oxydes de titane. Puis, une caracterisation des couches minces de ce sol-gel est realisee a la fois par spectroscopie Infra-Rouge, Raman et par XPS. La seconde partie de ce travail est basee sur les changements observes dans la nature du materiau, une fois la reduction initiee. Pour cela, des illuminations in situ ont ete realisees en XPS et en Infra-Rouge sur des couches minces et leurs etats intermediaires ont ete caracterises. Une methode vectorielle a egalement ete developpee dans l'optique d'identifier et approfondir la nature de ces changements. Enfin, ces sols-gels d'oxydes de titane ont ete utilises pour realiser des cellules solaires de troisieme generation, basees sur des architectures utilisees dans des cellules solaires organiques. Des mesures courants-tension ont ete realisees, en utilisant differentes couches interfaciales
Customers Buying Behavior And Preference Towards International Branded Sports Shoes

This paper study the factors influencing buying international sports shoes. There are four different brands of international sports shoes were selected for this study are Nike, Puma, Adidas, and Reebok. The data was collected from international branded sport shoe users. Radar chart, Hendry Garett ranking test, and Pearson correlation were applied to find out the strength of international branded shoes individually and also find out the consumer buying behavior and brand preferences for the international branded sports shoes. It is concluded that quality, comfortableness, price, and innovation played a major role in the purchase aspects. The strength of each brand is gauged based on that Reebok had performance, price and comfort identity; quality, advertisement, and design for Nike; performance, quality, advertisement, design for Adidas; and Puma for advertisement, packaging, innovation, and marketing activities were the highest identity for each brand. Advertisement, customized sports shoes available on the internet, suggested by friends and family, endorsed by celebrities are highly influenced by the customers' buying behavior towards sports shoes.
Enhanced fermentative production of Cephalosporin C by magnetite nanoparticles in culture of Acremonium chrysogenum

Magnetite (Fe3O4) nanoparticles (MNPs) have many applications in bioprocesses. This study investigated bioprocess production of Cephalosporin C (CPC) by Acremonium chrysogenum. The effect of MNPs was tested for enhancing the fermentation process. MNPs were synthetised by a straightforward method of co-precipitation. Various concentrations of MNP (0, 0.0025, 0.005, 0.01, 0.02 and 0.04 g/l) were added to fermentation media of the strain. During fermentation, evaluations were taken for titer of CPC, biomass, pH value and morphology of the strain. Comparison was made between CPC produced in the control medium and that in the nanoparticle enriched media from several consecutive batches; it was determined that MNP addition had a positive effect on the bioprocess and enhanced titer production. The titer of CPC in MNP-containing medium (0.04 g/l) increased by 60% compared with MNP-free medium. These results show that MNPs present good potential for improving bioprocesses and enhancing productivity of CPC fermentation by A. chrysogenum.
Airline Economics: An Essay on International Airline Alliances

This article describes the factors supporting inter-firm cooperation in the form of international airline alliances. It presents the benefits of such cooperative agreements by drawing conclusions from related empirical literature examination under a structure-conduct-performance paradigm. The review shows some factors, that is, legislation and government policies, can result in changes in the demand for air travel and that the characteristics of the airline business can lead to collaborations to form international airline alliances. The review demonstrates that members of airline alliances gain five beneficial consequences from making such mutual pacts - passenger traffic boosting, improved cost efficiency, enhanced exercise of market power, global network expansion and service quality improvements. These all represent competitive advantages compared to nonaligned airlines. This study, consequently, offers compact guidelines for firms seeking strategies to improve performance which are open to considering international airline alliances as a solution. Additionally, policy recommendations are provided. <br>
A Gradient Boosting Approach to Estimating Tail Risk Contagion

We propose a flexible CoVaR-based measure to estimate the tail risk contagion across financial institutes in a high dimensional framework. Considering potential nonlinearity and interaction among the financial institutes, a single-index indicator representing directed spillover is derived from Gradient Boosting Machine based generalized quantile regression. Our approach can be utilized to monitor risk spillover channels for risk supervision. Empirically, we investigate 16 publicly-listed banks in China with our proposed method. We show the outperformance of our method over the linear model. The empirical study suggests that the tail risk is inclined to spill over into the same type of banks. Besides, we find that not only state-owned banks are systemically important, but small and medium banks can play key roles in tail risk contagion, too. The total connectedness peaks when the financial system is under distress.
MLP, CNN, LSTM and Hybrid SVM for Stock Index Forecasting Task to INDU and FTSE100

The aim of this paper is to investigate the Support Vector Machine (SVM), the Binary Gravity Search Algorithm combined Support Vector Machine (BGSA-SVM), the Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP), the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network, when applied to the task of forecasting and trading FTSE100 and INDU indexes from 2000 to 2018. Results show that the performance of the SVM is unstable as it displays sensitivity to inputs and parameters. The other Machine Learning models (BGSA-SVM, MLP, CNN and LSTM) outperform Buy-and-Hold and Random Walk (RW). Additionally, this paper finds no significant difference between the performance of BGSA-SVM, MLP, CNN and LSTM.
Real-Time Stock Market Forecasting using Ensemble Deep Learning and Rainbow DQN

After years of study by researchers and finance experts on stock market prediction, there is no definite method that seems to predict stock price both accurately and is long- lasting at the same time. This is due to the uncertain behavior of stock movement and numerous parameters that take part in deciding market performance. Lots of techniques have been examined for stock market price prediction. Also, various comparative studies have been done to find the best techniques which can help traders make decisions. This paper proposes the use of ensemble techniques like Rainbow DQN, LSTM, and GRU for real time stock market forecasting and indicating buy/sell signals. The results of these techniques used were closely examined keeping a check on overfitting. The performance of the techniques was evaluated using accuracy, return of investment. Few well-known indicators like MACD and RSI were also used for verifying results. Tests were run on NIFTY50, Microsoft and Google with real-time data structured in 1-minute intervals.
Towards a (Humble) Standard Social Value Metric

In literature, several approaches have been adopted to define and measure the value that companies generate to society. However, none of this research lines have yet produced a metric that could be considered standard and social to measure and compare the social value generated for companies, regardless of their size, industry and geography. Our research aims to contribute in filling this gap. To do so, we try to grasp what corporate standard social value should represent and analyze how some prominent, previous lines of work in the field of economic and social value fit into it. Based on the study of these approaches, we build up a proposal of our own, that can provide useful information for primary stakeholders, beyond shareholders and financial analysts, upon which they can take action.
Performance of Hierarchical Equal Risk Contribution Algorithm in China Market

This paper studies the performance of the portfolios based on the Hierarchical Equal Risk Contribution algorithm in China stock market. Specifically, we consider a variety of risk measures for calculating weight allocations which include equal weighting, variance, standard deviation, expected shortfall and conditional draw-down risk and four types of linkage criteria used for agglomerative clustering, namely, single, complete, average, and Ward linkages. We compare the performance of the portfolios based on the HERC algorithm to the equal-weighted and inverse-variance portfolios. We find that most HERC portfolios are not able to beat the equal-weighted and inverse-variance portfolios in terms of several comparison measures and HERC with Ward-linkage seems to dominate the ones with other linkages. However, the results do not show that any risk measures can beat other measures consistently.