Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Out-of-Pocket Costs of Complementary Medicine Following Cancer and the Financial Impact in a Setting With Universal Health Coverage: Findings From a Prospective Cohort Study

PURPOSE: To determine household spending patterns on complementary medicine following cancer and the financial impact in a setting with universal health coverage. METHODS: Country-specific data from a multinational prospective cohort study, Association of Southeast Asian Nations Costs in Oncology Study, comprising 1,249 cancer survivors were included. Household costs of complementary medicine (healthcare practices or products that are not considered as part of conventional medicine) throughout the first year after cancer diagnosis were measured using cost diaries. Study outcomes comprised (1) shares of household expenditures on complementary medicine from total out-of-pocket costs and health costs that were respectively incurred in relation to cancer, (2) incidence of financial catastrophe (out-of-pocket costs related to cancer ≥ 30% of annual household income), and (3) economic hardship (inability to pay for essential household items or services). RESULTS: One third of patients reported out-of-pocket household expenditures on complementary medicine in the immediate year after cancer diagnosis, accounting to 20% of the total out-of-pocket costs and 35% of the health costs. Risk of financial catastrophe was higher in households reporting out-of-pocket expenditures on complementary medicine (adjusted odds ratio: 1.39 [95% CI, 1.05 to 1.86]). Corresponding odds ratio within patients from low-income households showed that they were substantially more vulnerable: 2.28 (95% CI, 1.41 to 3.68). Expenditures on complementary medicine were, however, not associated with economic hardship in the immediate year after cancer diagnosis. CONCLUSION: In settings with universal health coverage, integration of subsidized evidence-based complementary medicine into mainstream cancer care may alleviate catastrophic expenditures. However, this must go hand in hand with interventions to reduce the use of nonevidence-based complementary therapies following cancer.
The role of NUMB/NUMB isoforms in cancer stem cells

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are a subpopulation of cancer that can self-renew and differentiate into large tumor masses. Evidence accumulated to date shows that CSCs affect tumor proliferation, recurrence, and resistance to chemotherapy. Recent studies have shown that, like stem cells, CSCs maintain cells with self-renewal capacity by means of asymmetric division and promote cell proliferation by means of symmetric division. This cell division is regulated by fate determinants, such as the NUMB protein, which recently has also been confirmed as a tumor suppressor. Loss of NUMB expression leads to uncontrolled proliferation and amplification of the CSC pool, which promotes the Notch signaling pathway and reduces the expression of the p53 protein. NUMB genes are alternatively spliced to produce six functionally distinct isoforms. An interesting recent discovery is that the protein NUMB isoform produced by alternative splicing of NUMB plays an important role in promoting carcinogenesis. In this review, we summarize the known functions of NUMB and NUMB isoforms related to the proliferation and generation of CSCs.
Long-term exposure to polypharmacy impairs cognitive functions in young adult female mice

The potential harmful effects of polypharmacy (concurrent use of 5 or more drugs) are difficult to investigate in an experimental design in humans. Moreover, there is a lack of knowledge on sex-specific differences on the outcomes of multiple-drug use. The present study aims to investigate the effects of an eight-week exposure to a regimen of five different medications (metoprolol, paracetamol, aspirin, simvastatin and citalopram) in young adult female mice. Polypharmacy-treated animals showed significant impairment in object recognition and fear associated contextual memory, together with a significant reduction of certain hippocampal proteins involved in pathways necessary for the consolidation of these types of memories, compared to animals with standard diet. The impairments in explorative behavior and spatial memory that we reported previously in young adult male mice administered the same polypharmacy regimen were not observed in females in the current study. Therefore, the same combination of medications induced different negative outcomes in young adult male and female mice, causing a significant deficit in non-spatial memory in female animals. Overall, this study strongly supports the importance of considering sex-specific differences in designing safer and targeted multiple-drug therapies.
Technological Ecological Momentary Assessment Tools to Study Type 1 Diabetes in Youth: Viewpoint of Methodologies

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is one of the most common chronic childhood diseases, and its prevalence is rapidly increasing. The management of glucose in T1D is challenging, as youth must consider a myriad of factors when making diabetes care decisions. This task often leads to significant hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia, and glucose variability throughout the day, which have been associated with short- and long-term medical complications. At present, most of what is known about each of these complications and the health behaviors that may lead to them have been uncovered in the clinical setting or in laboratory-based research. However, the tools often used in these settings are limited in their ability to capture the dynamic behaviors, feelings, and physiological changes associated with T1D that fluctuate from moment to moment throughout the day. A better understanding of T1D in daily life could potentially aid in the development of interventions to improve diabetes care and mitigate the negative medical consequences associated with it. Therefore, there is a need to measure repeated, real-time, and real-world features of this disease in youth. This approach is known as ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and it has considerable advantages to in-lab research. Thus, this viewpoint aims to describe EMA tools that have been used to collect data in the daily lives of youth with T1D and discuss studies that explored the nuances of T1D in daily life using these methods. This viewpoint focuses on the following EMA methods: continuous glucose monitoring, actigraphy, ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, personal digital assistants, smartphones, and phone-based systems. The viewpoint also discusses the benefits of using EMA methods to collect important data that might not otherwise be collected in the laboratory and the limitations of each tool, future directions of the field, and possible clinical implications for their use.
Signed Infinitely Divisible Signed Probability Models in Finance

Procedures for constructing the characteristic functions of risk neutral densities, from option prices at a fixed maturity, are developed. The logarithm of these characteristic functions are shown to synthesize the Fourier transform of formal Lévy tails. The formal Lévy tails are actual Lévy tails if their derivatives are nonnegative. The derivatives of formal Lévy tails embedded in option prices are observed on occasion to be negative, reflecting signed Lévy measures. Though puzzling at first, cosine perturbations of the symmetric variance gamma are shown to provide theoretical examples of such signed Lévy measures. They also arise when models of signals perturbed by independent noise yielding examples of characteristic functions for signal densities that are ratios of pure jump infinitely divisible characteristic functions. Such ratio characteristic functions can reflect signed Lévy measures. Specific models using ratios of bilateral gamma and CGMY models are developed and calibrated to short maturity option prices. The ratio models provide significant improvements over their non-ratio counterparts. More generally the absence of strong arbitrages only implies that risk neutral densities be signed probabilities and the models constructed are signed infinitely divisible, signed probabilities.
Historical Banking Crises: A New Database and a Reassessment of their Incidence and Severity

We highlight limitations with existing chronologies of banking crises and showcase new approaches for reconstructing and analyzing the global history of banking crises. We review recent quantitative approaches to ask: When did banking crises happen and how severe were they? Building on the chronology of banking crises put forth by Baron, Verner, and Xiong (2021), we present a new database of the causes, timeline, bank failures, creditor panics, policy responses, and consequences of banking crises in 47 countries since 1870.
Automation, Job Quality, and Labor Supply: Empirical Evidence

Automation may affect job quality and labor supply, but these effects are not well appreci5 ated. Conventionally, supermarket cashiers scan and collect payment. Collecting payment 6 is cognitively demanding and risky. A semi-automated job design relieved cashiers of col7 lecting payment and focused them on scanning. Empirically, the median cashier preferred 8 the new design by 4.1 percent of monthly wages, and the job design increased local cashier 9 labor supply by about 1 percent. These results support the proposition that automation 10 which substitutes machines for humans in disliked tasks enables the redesign of jobs to 11 raise job quality and increase labor supply. 12
Organization Environmental Footprint through InputOutput Analysis

The implementation of global sustainability has gained worldwide attention in recent years. The Organization Environmental Footprint, which encompasses 14 impact categories, is a multicriteria measure of the environmental performance of goods and services provided by an organization from a life cycle perspective. In this article, the focus is on quantifying the Organization Environmental Footprint of a construction company in Spain. By applying an environmentally extended input-output approach, its total footprint and impacts along the supply chain from two consecutive years were calculated. The results show that the environmental impacts from the second year of implementation were significantly higher than those from the first year. The impact category climate change was found to have experienced the greatest increase from one year to the other, with a 31% increase. This work provides an overview of 14 environmental impact categories of the company assessed, as well as recommendations for the implementation of this indicator in companies and public procurement. This approach could pave the way to shape organizations’ action plans and meet the European environmental challenges.
Diversity Staff and Bill Sponsorship in the U.S. House

The salience of race in American politics has attracted scholarly research studying<br>its impact under different contexts. However, relatively little attention has been given<br>to the legislative impact of racial and ethnic diversity congressional staffers. I argue<br>that having a racial diversity staffer will increase the number of minority issue bills<br>sponsored by the corresponding legislator. Using an original dataset of racial diversity<br>staffers and minority issue bills from the 111th Congress to the 115th Congress, I find<br>that members with senior racial minority staffers sponsor more bills related to minority<br>issues, conditional on the member's district's minority population. These findings have<br>important rami fications for understanding racial equality empirically and theoretically.
Finance and Green Growth

We study how countries’ financial structure affects their transition to low-carbon growth. Using global industry-level data, we document that carbon-intensive industries reduce emissions faster in economies with deeper stock markets. The main channel underpinning this stylised fact is that stock markets facilitate green innovation in carbon-intensive sectors, resulting in lower carbon emissions per unit of output. More tentative evidence indicates that stock markets also help to reallocate investment towards more energy-efficient sectors. Cross-border spill-overs are limited: less than five percent of these industry-level reductions in domestic emissions are offset by carbon embedded in imports. A firm-level analysis of an exogenous shock to the cost of equity in Belgium confirms our findings.
Maternity Risk and Female Participation in Innovative Entrepreneurship

I investigate how participation of women into innovative entrepreneurship responds to a shock to maternity risk, de ned as the possibility of an unexpected pregnancy. Exploiting the liberalization of an emergency contraception pill in Italy in 2015, combined with spatial variation in access to abortion at the municipality level, I nd that in response to lower maternity risk new female founders have larger equity holdings, make bigger investments, and become more likely to be the rst executives and the main owners of their rms. These e ects are smaller for women who join less innovative rms, and female participation in self and paid employment is una ected. I also document a weaker but positive e ect on the probability of women to become entrepreneurs. These results highlight the importance of maternity risk for women selecting in innovative entrepreneurship, especially for the intensity of commitment inside the rm.
Enhancement of the water solubility of organic pollutants such as pyrene and atrazine by dissolved humic and fulvic acids

Many factors determine the fate and transport of an organic pollutant in the environment but water solubility is certainly one of the most important. Among the environmental factors that alter the solubility of a molecule are naturally occurring humic and fulvic acids. We have hypothesized that the humic/fulvic acids from different sources within a watershed have different binding affinities for pollutants such as pyrene and atrazine. This could lead to different rates of transport or bioavailability within the watershed. Humic/fulvic acids were isolated from a stream, adjacent wetland and nearby wooded upland sites. A fluorescence quenching method was developed to quantify the binding coefficient of the pollutants with the dissolved organic carbon. From these results a model was constructed to determine the sites with the greatest potential to modify pollutant contamination in the environment.
The Post-Earnings Announcement Drift – A Pre-Earnings Announcement Effect? A Multi-Period Analysis

For many years, the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) has been accepted as an anomaly to the efficient markets hypothesis. This drift subsequent to earnings announcements has been ascribed to the incomplete incorporation by the market of the information in these earnings announcements. Interestingly, over the past five decades of extensive research, no rational economic explanation of the PEAD has been found. However, there has been no specific consideration of the effect of economic information subsequent to the earnings announcements. Our multi-year examination of the cumulative abnormal return (CAR) incorporates the effect of economic information subsequent to the earnings announcement of traditional PEAD studies. Our analysis shows that a PEAD can arise without recourse to invoking market inefficiency. Our results are consistent for three samples covering the period 1973 to 2016. We do not assert that we prove that there is no component of the PEAD due to market inefficiency. Rather, our results show that studies to determine whether there is a market inefficiency component of the PEAD should use a multi-period approach in order to account for the effect of economic information subsequent to the earnings announcements and thereby focus more precisely upon the cause of the PEAD reported in previous research studies.
Do companies redact material information from confidential SEC filings?

The Securities and Exchange Commission permits companies to redact proprietary information from material contract filings so long as the redacted information 1) would cause competitive harm if disclosed, and 2) the information is legally immaterial. Because these joint criteria are inherently contradictory, we examine whether legally immaterial redacted information is economically material to investors. We find that firms’ stock price discovery process is significantly slower and insider trading is significantly greater after companies file redacted contracts compared to non-redacted contracts. We then examine the impact of the 2019 FAST Act which reduced the SEC’s oversight of redacted contracts. Companies redact more frequently and insider trading (but not speed of stock price discovery) is more pronounced after the FAST Act. Taken together, these findings suggest that at least some redacted information is economically material to investors and that reducing SEC oversight of redacted information may not be in investors’ best interests.
Total antioxidant activity, phenolic, flavonoid and ascorbic acid contents of Nigerian vegetables.

Antioxidant activities, total phenolic, flavonoid and ascorbic acid contents of different vegetables commonly consumed in Nigeria were determined. The antioxidant activities of vegetables ranged from 22.15% (Talinum triangulare) to 92.30% (Capsicum frutesceus). Solanum macrocarpon, with the lowest IC50, is the most potent vegetable of the samples analyzed, that could scavenge most free radicals; while Cucumis sativus, with the highest IC50, is the least potent. Total phenolic, flavonoid and ascorbic acid contents of vegetables ranged from 22.1 to 370.68 mg quercetin g– 1; 10.23 to 215.39 mg quercetin g– 1 and between 16.67 to 150.67 mg ascorbic acid g– 1, respectively. A high and significant correlation existed between antioxidant activity and total phenolic content of vegetables (r2 = 0.861, p < 0.05), indicating that total phenolic content is the major contributor to the antioxidant activity of vegetables. However, flavonoids, which belong to the phenolic compounds, were not significantly correlated with antioxidant activity (r2 = 0.143, p < 0.05). Ascorbic acid fairly correlated (r2 = 0.546, p < 0.05) with antioxidant and phenolic content (r2 = 0.591, p < 0.05).
Hydroxyl radical scavenging properties of cyclitols

Cyclitols are low molecular weight substances which accumulate in plant cells in response to various environmental stress situations, for example drought (Ford 1984), salinity (Gorham et al . 1984), low temperature (Richter et al . 1990). Apart from their more general role in osmotic adjustment, only in the case of salt stress is their mode of function well understood. Cyclitols (e.g. pinitol) accumulate when plants are exposed to increasing salt concentration (Paul & Cockburn 1989) and act as compatible solutes (Sommer et al . 1990) as defined by Brown & Simpson (1972). The significance of cyclitol accumulation in stress adaptation of plants to drought and cold still remains uncertain. However, it is generally accepted that drought and cold as well as several other stress situations lead to an enhanced generation of oxygen free radicals (Elstner 1990; Smirnoff & Colombe 1988), including the hydroxyl radical as the most harmful one. The report by Smirnoff & Cumbes (1989) that myo-inositol is an effective hydroxyl radical scavenger prompted us to test other naturally-occuring cyclitols like pinitol, quebrachitol, 1-D-1-O-methyl-muco-inositol, ononitol and quercitol for their ability to scavenge hydroxyl radicals.
Option Valuation Disclosure: Excessive Discretion or Information Transmission?

We propose a new methodology to identify non-compliance with FASB guidance with respect to the dividend yield and the volatility rate for stock option valuation disclosures. The FASB gives firms some flexibility in choosing these parameters. Accordingly, we take into account a number of justifiable measures and we study when firms announce parameter values ``outside the bounds'', which cannot be obtained by any combination of justifiable measures. With this new methodology, we find that underreporting of the volatility rate, which understates the cost of stock-options, is more likely in firms where executive compensation is ``excessive'', and that the dividend yield reported is informative about the future dividend yield, especially in cases of overreporting.
How Costly Is Tax Avoidance? Evidence from Structural Estimation

I develop a structural model to quantify the costs of tax avoidance. In the model, the firm trades off tax savings with tax audit risk, financial reporting considerations, and operational frictions imposed by tax avoidance, the last of which I label as nontax costs. The estimated parameters suggest nontax costs, which are difficult to observe, decrease pretax income by 6.4 percent or $58 million per firm-year. The large magnitude of this estimate can explain why firms appear to underutilize tax avoidance strategies. Through counterfactual analysis, I estimate the effect of tax audit risk and financial reporting considerations to find that financial reporting considerations have an effect on tax avoidance similar to the penalties imposed by tax authorities. Overall, the estimated parameters help explain the “undersheltering puzzle. ” JEL Classifications: G14; H21; H25; H26; M41; M48.
Where Do Superstar Firms Go in Recessions? The Impact of Aggregate Fluctuations on Business Formation*

This paper studies rm dynamics over the business cycle. Using administrative records from U.S. Census data, I document that exceptionally large rms tend not to be started in recessions. I also present evidence that nancial conditions play an important role in determining the types of rms that are born at di erent stages of the business cycle. I then develop a general equilibrium model with incomplete markets and aggregate shocks. In the model, rms choose their target size at birth, which is key to account for the patterns observed in the data. Financial frictions in the form of collateral constraints slow the rate at which rms grow, and thereby a ect larger businesses disproportionately; this discourages such rms from entering during recessions. I estimate the model using Bayesian methods, and nd that nancial shocks play a threefold greater role for large rms' entry relative to smaller businesses, which has important implications for micro-targeted government stimulus policies.
Measuring the information content of disclosures: The role of return noise

Disclosure is of fundamental interest to accounting research. When the sign/magnitude of disclosed news is unclear, the information in disclosure events is inferred using the ratio of return volatilities during event and non-event windows (Beaver, 1968). We show that return noise due to microstructure frictions and mispricing affects this ratio and that effect is comparable to or exceeds that of information content. We use the SEC’s Tick Size Pilot program to confirm the causal effect of return noise on the ratio, and to evaluate alternative ways to control for it. The most promising approach is to use the difference between, rather than the ratio of, return volatilities during event and non-event windows. We illustrate its benefits by showing how it alters prior inferences regarding time-series and cross-sectional variation in information content as well as changes in the information content of earnings announcements around the 2004 amendments to Form 8-K filings.