Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Labor market effects of work-sharing arrangements in Taiwan, ROC

Purpose - To measure the effects of work-sharing arrangements on participants’ subsequent labor market outcomes in Taiwan such as full-time employment rates, working hours of women and men and the difference in scale effect and effect of substitution between hours and employment for women and men. Design/methodology/approach - Using the data from Manpower Utilization Survey, we applied the differences-in-differences estimation method to test the effects of work-sharing arrangements on working hours, wage and employment. Multinomial logit was used to measure the effects of work sharing on full-time employment. In order to correct the simultaneity and selectivity problems, we followed the Heckman two-stage selection procedures to solve the selection bias, and used weighted least squares to solve heteroskedasticity in the wage and hour equations. The instrumental variable (IV) method was used to avoid simultaneity bias in the hour equation. Findings - This paper found the restrictions enforced by law on working hours have negative effects on employees’ working conditions in certain industries in Taiwan. After controlling the working hours, we found the wages paid to women and men have increased subsequent to the enforcement of law. However, compared to men the net wage earned by women has increased to a lesser extent. It was further observed that with enactment of work-sharing law, the employment rate of women has considerably declined since 2001. Main findings assimilating the results for hour, wage and full-time employment suggest that a country like Taiwan (with work-sharing arrangements implemented by law) has witnessed a smaller gap between women's and men's working time and wages during 2001-2002. However, for the period of 2003-2006 the amendment that introduced compressed work week brought a larger gender gap in working hours as well as wages. In other words, the implementation of work-sharing law has reduced the gender gap in hours and wages during 2001-2002, but the prevailing gender gap in hours as well as wages has worsened after the introduction of compressed work week during 2003-2006. Practical implications - An in-depth analysis of labor market effects of work-sharing law will be useful for the policymakers, especially those interested in understanding the impact of their policies on labor market outcomes like wage, hour and employment, and finding out whether policies were effective at reducing the gender gap in given outcomes. Originality/value - Findings of the present study should not only provide the broad lessons for policymakers in Taiwan, but the results that have emerged from the country case study may be referred by other Asian countries who want to bring a change in working and employment conditions for their labor by implementing work-sharing law.
Understanding Mainland Chinese Tourists’ Motivation and Constraints of Visiting Taiwan

ABSTRACT China has been by far the fastest growing source market in recent years and is now the largest tourism source market in the world. Mainland Chinese travelers were permitted to directly visit Taiwan in 2008. Within a short period of time, the Mainland Chinese travel market has become the top source market for Taiwan’s tourism industry. However, limited attention has been paid to the travel behavior of this significant market, such as why Mainland Chinese travelers visit Taiwan and why do they not. Using interviews, this study identified a list of motivation factors and travel constraint factors. Three themes, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and contextual factors, influenced Mainland Chinese tourists’ intention to visit Taiwan. In particular, contextual factors, such as ‘the cross-strait relations’ between Mainland China and Taiwan, play a key role in influencing tourists’ visit intention. Like two sides of the same coin, ‘the cross-strait relations’ could be a facilitator to attract Mainland Chinese tourists or an inhibitor to stop Mainland Chinese visiting Taiwan.
THE GRADUAL SHIFT TOWARD CHINA AND THE GULF

After coming to power in a bloodless coup in 1994, Yahya Jammeh gradually established himself as a controversial leader of a country less than half the size of Dalarna, home to the Dalarna University. During the last decades of his rule, he became known for his controversial speeches at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and his anti-Western rhetoric. Jammeh broke diplomatic ties with Taiwan after two decades of a marriage of convenience; he became ever more hostile to the West; and sought cooperation with China and the Gulf states of Qatar and Kuwait. At the domestic front, he embarked on establishing an Islamic identity. This is an explanatory single case study of foreign policy. The aim of this paper is to understand what statelevel and systemlevel variables could have motivated the gradual shift in Gambia’s foreign policy between 2006 and 2016. Why did Jammeh, despite depending so much on the European Union (EU) for financial support, grow increasingly belligerent and uncooperative, leading him to cut ties with the bloc, expel its top-diplomat, and shift Gambia’s foreign policy toward China and the Gulf? How can Gambia’s foreign policy shift be explained in relation to China’s expanding material capabilities and Qatar’s growing political and financial influence? What are some of the implications of the reformation and diversification of the foreign aid landscape for the relationship between traditional donors and authoritarian regimes? Informed by the theory of neoclassical realism, this study has, at the systemic level, looked at the impacts of structural modifiers such as the diversification of the foreign aid landscape, China’s relatively growing capabilities, and Qatar’s financial influence. At the statelevel or unitlevel, this study has looked at the three concepts that informed Gambia’s foreign policy shift: leadership image, perceptions and misperceptions; the attempt to establish an Islamic identity; and the domestic political and institutional setting. This study has applied an empirical research method by conducting semi-structured interviews, internet-based research, and by consulting academic literature. Interviews have also been conducted with former Gambian diplomats, academics at the University of The Gambia (UTG), experts on Gambian politics, journalists and human rights activists. I have also consulted scholarly articles and news reports relevant to this study.
Intelligent Event Focused Crawling

There is need for an integrated event focused crawling system to collect Web data about key events. When an event occurs, many users try to locate the most up-todate information about that event. Yet, there is little systematic collecting and archiving anywhere of information about events. We propose intelligent event focused crawling for automatic event tracking and archiving, as well as effective access. We extend the traditional focused (topical) crawling techniques in two directions, modeling and representing: events and webpage source importance. We developed an event model that can capture key event information (topical, spatial, and temporal). We incorporated that model into the focused crawler algorithm. For the focused crawler to leverage the event model in predicting a webpage’s relevance, we developed a function that measures the similarity between two event representations, based on textual content. Although the textual content provides a rich set of features, we proposed an additional source of evidence that allows the focused crawler to better estimate the importance of a webpage by considering its website. We estimated webpage source importance by the ratio of number of relevant webpages to non-relevant webpages found during crawling a website. We combined the textual content information and source importance into a single relevance score. For the focused crawler to work well, it needs a diverse set of high quality seed URLs (URLs of relevant webpages that link to other relevant webpages). Although manual curation of seed URLs guarantees quality, it requires exhaustive manual labor. We proposed an automated approach for curating seed URLs using social media content. We leveraged the richness of social media content about events to extract URLs that can be used as seed URLs for further focused crawling. We evaluated our system through four series of experiments, using recent events: Orlando shooting, Ecuador earthquake, Panama papers, California shooting, Brussels attack, Paris attack, and Oregon shooting. In the first experiment series our proposed event model representation, used to predict webpage relevance, outperformed the topic-only approach, showing better results in precision, recall,
International Stock Market Linkages

Recent years have seen considerable attention devoted to analysis of linkages among stock markets in different countries. Much of the research was prompted by the nearly simultaneous world-wide collapse of equity markets in October 1987, which apparently provided evidence of strong linkages in the price movements of the major world stock markets. Interest in the topic has also been enhanced by the globalization of financial markets, the progressive relaxation of controls on international capital movements and the increasing importance of cross-border equity flows. In the financial economics sphere, three key questions arise about changes in international stock market linkages: first, what are the implications for the rapid international transmission of national financial disturbances; second, what are the implications of these trends for the efficiency of stock markets in different countries; and third, what are the implications of linkages between stock markets for the international diversification of equity portfolios? The internationalization of equity flows would appear to be accompanied by enhanced information flows, and hence greater market efficiency, while the removal of barriers between markets should lead to a tendency towards the equalization of the price of risk. However, if markets become more closely linked in the sense that there are stronger co-movements of prices across markets, then this may result in changes to optimal international portfolio diversification strategies. The issue of stock market linkages is also relevant from a policy perspective in an environment where moves towards greater regional economic integration are being promoted. Increased linkages between stock markets is a component of regional or international capital market integration, which is in itself important for the integration of the goods and services markets to be effective. Most of the research to date on international stock market linkages has been concentrated on the major world stock markets (US, Japan, UK and Germany), although there has also been some work on the smaller developed country markets and Asian markets (Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.). The Mexican crash of 1994/1995 and its apparent transmission to other Latin American markets, as well as the recent episode of seemingly rapid transmission of financial market disturbances across East Asia, may well prompt more research into linkages between emerging markets. We are not aware of any research into linkages among African stock markets, however, even though stock markets have been growing in importance in several African countries in recent years. In this paper, we investigate the extent of linkages among three stock markets in southern Africa, specifically Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa. We also consider the extent to which these markets are related to emerging markets more generally and to the larger international markets.
Contribution of an adenine to guanine single nucleotide polymorphism of the matrix metalloproteinase-13 (MMP-13) −77 promoter region to the production of anticyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies in patients with HLA-DRB1*shared epitope-negative rheumatoid arthritis

We examined whether matrix metalloproteinase-13 (MMP-13) contributes to disease susceptibility or severity of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Eighty-seven patients with RA whose disease duration was <2 years and 71 healthy controls were enrolled in the study. Adenine (A) to guanine (G) single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of the −77 MMP-13 promoter region in RA and healthy controls was determined by polymerase chain reaction–restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) technique. Human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-DRB1 genotyping was also performed using the same populations. Anticyclic citrullinated peptide (anti-CCP) antibodies from RA patients at entry were studied, and their relationships were examined. The genotype and allele frequency of SNP of MMP-13 at −77 did not differ between RA patients and healthy controls. We focused on the RA patients who were negative for HLA-DRB1*shared epitope (SE) alleles and found that the seropositivity of anti-CCP antibodies with a titer >25 U/ml was high in the A/A genotype compared with the G/G genotype. The same characteristic was also found in HLA-DRB1*0405 allele-negative patients. Our data suggest that SNP of the −77 MMP-13 promoter region acts as a surrogate marker of anti-CCP antibody production in HLA-DRB1*SE allele-negative RA patients, which may reflect RA severity.
ICT investments and growth accounts for the European Union

This paper analyses developments of comparative output and productivity levels in 17 manufacturing industries in Taiwan, South Korea and Indonesia compared to the United States for the period 1980-2000. In order to express value added in a common currency, unit value ratios are developed for the benchmark year 1997. The study provides an update and extension of the benchmark studies for 1987 of Taiwan (Timmer, 1998), South Korea (Pilat, 1994) and Indonesia (Szirmai, 1994). In addition, comparisons of unit labour cost are made. It is shown that the Asian financial crisis has led to a quick restructuring process in South Korea which maintained its catch-up trend with the US during the 1990s. The level of value added per hour worked in 2000 is 35% of the US. On the other hand, performance in Taiwanese manufacturing dwindled in the 1990s and it has almost lost it productivity lead over South Korea. In 2000, labour productivity was 40% of the US level. Catching up in Indonesia started to take off at the end of the 1980s but this process has been dramatically reversed in the aftermath of the 1997 financial crisis. It has barely recovered to pre-1997 levels and growth relies heavily on export industries with little productivity growth. In 2000, value added per hour worked in the medium and large scale industry is still below 10% of the US level.
Refining the complex rheumatoid arthritis phenotype based on specificity of the HLA-DRB1 shared epitope for antibodies to citrullinated proteins.

OBJECTIVE The main genetic risk factor for rheumatoid arthritis (RA), the HLA region, has been known for 25 years. Previous research has demonstrated, within the RA population, an association between HLA-DRB1 alleles carrying the shared epitope (SE) and antibodies directed against cyclic citrullinated peptides (anti-CCP antibodies). We undertook this study to make the first comparison of SE allele frequencies in the healthy population with those in RA patients who do or do not harbor anti-CCP antibodies. METHODS HLA-DRB1 typing was performed in 408 RA patients from the Leiden Early Arthritis Clinic (the Leiden EAC; a Dutch population-based inception cohort in which disease course was followed up over time), in 423 healthy Dutch controls, and in 720 affected members of 341 US multiplex (sibpair) families of Caucasian origin from the North American RA Consortium (NARAC) with well-established disease and fulfilling the American College of Rheumatology classification criteria for RA. The presence of anti-CCP antibodies was determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. RESULTS For the Leiden EAC, the odds ratio (OR) describing the association of 2 copies of the SE allele with anti-CCP positivity (using no copies of the SE allele in the healthy control group as the referent) was 11.79 (P < 0.0001), while the OR for 1 SE allele was 4.37 (P < 0.0001). No association with the SE was observed in the Dutch anti-CCP-negative RA patients. For the NARAC families, linkage and association analysis revealed the SE to be associated only with anti-CCP-positive disease and not with anti-CCP-negative disease. Stratified analyses indicated that anti-CCP antibodies primarily mediated association of the SE with joint damage or disease persistence. CONCLUSION HLA-DRB1 alleles encoding the SE are specific for disease characterized by antibodies to citrullinated peptides, indicating that these alleles do not associate with RA as such, but rather with a particular phenotype.
au US Equity Market SpillOver and Contagion Effects on Selected Asian Markets

Considering the global dominance of the US equity market, it is expected that the impact of September 11 on the US market would spill-over to other markets. Since this terrible event had created a global climate of fear and uncertainty, it is possible that the US spill-over effect could have been driven not only by fundamental factors but also by non-fundamental ones. Thus, contagion could have played a significant role in transmitting the effect of September 11 from the US to other markets. In this paper, we verify whether indeed this has happened. Based on leveraged bootstrap causality tests, we examine the causal effects of the US on Indonesia, China, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore in relation to September 11. We found that the causal effects of the US on Japan and Singapore intensified as a result of September 11; however, we did not find these to be associated with contagion effects. It appears that the September 11 impact on the US market was not transmitted to the other Asian markets as the US influence on these markets either remained the same or even diminished. JEL Classification: G15; C32
Human Papillomavirus Infection Among Sexually Active Young Women in the United States: Implications for Developing a Vaccination Strategy

Objectives: Population-level data on prevalence and distribution of human papillomavirus (HPV) types in the United States are necessary to guide optimal vaccination strategies. Study: Urine specimens from 3262 women ages 18 to 25 in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Wave III) were tested and typed for HPV. Poststratification sampling weights generated nationally representative estimates. Results: Overall HPV prevalence was 26.9% and as high as 14.3% among women with 1 lifetime partner but did not vary by geographic region. High-risk types were detected in 20%; ∼10% were infected with types in current candidate vaccines. HPV infection was independently associated with mixing sex with alcohol, a black partner, >3 lifetime sex partners, being single, and illegal drug use. Having a current sex partner and receptive oral sex were inversely associated with HPV. Conclusion: HPV prevalence was high throughout the country, even among women with only 1 lifetime partner, suggesting early and widespread rather than targeted immunization of young women.
Mechanism and computer simulation of a new robot hand for potential use as an artificial hand.

A prosthetic hand is essential to provide rehabilitation for individuals who lose a hand. A prosthetic hand serves two purposes: cosmetic and functional. In this paper, a prototype of the artificial hand with an emphasis on the functionality purpose is presented. A new mechanism, the NTU-Hand (NTU-Hand, patent number 107115, Taiwan, R.O.C.), which has 5 fingers with 17 degrees of freedom, has been designed and fabricated in our laboratory. Due to the special design of the mechanism, the hand has an uncoupled configuration in which each finger and joint are all individually driven. The size of the hand is almost the same as a human hand. All actuators, mechanical parts, and sensors are on the hand. The compact design makes it feasible to adapt the hand to the injured wrist. A computer simulation with three-dimensional graphics was also built to evaluate the manipulative range of the artificial hand. From the results of this simulation, the relationship between the hand and the grasped object in a specific viewpoint can be obtained.
Multiple species within the Striated Prinia
 Prinia crinigera–
 Brown Prinia
 P. polychroa
 complex revealed through an integrative taxonomic approach

We re‐evaluated the taxonomy of the Striated Prinia Prinia crinigera–Brown Prinia P. polychroa complex using molecular, morphological and vocal analyses. The extensive seasonal, sexual, age‐related, geographical and taxon‐specific variation in this complex has never before been adequately studied. As no previous genetic or vocal analyses have focused on this group, misinterpretation of taxonomic signals from limited conventional morphological study alone was likely. Using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, we found that P. crinigera sensu lato (s.l.) comprises two non‐sister groups of taxa (Himalayan crinigera and Chinese striata groups) that differ substantially morphologically and vocally and that are broadly sympatric in Yunnan Province, China. Prinia polychroa cooki (Myanmar) and P. p. rocki (southern Vietnam) are each morphologically, vocally and genetically distinct. Thai, Cambodian and Laotian populations formerly ascribed to P. p. cooki are morphologically and vocally most similar to and most closely related to Javan P. p. polychroa, and require a new name, proposed here. Prinia p. bangsi of Yunnan is part of the crinigera group rather than of P. polychroa, and hence there is no evidence for sympatry between P. polychroa s.l. and P. crinigera s.l. , nor of the occurrence of P. polychroa in mainland China or Taiwan. We recommend the recognition of five species in the complex, with the following suggestions for new English names: Himalayan Prinia P. crinigera sensu stricto (s.s.; with subspecies striatula, crinigera, yunnanensis and bangsi); Chinese Prinia P. striata (subspecies catharia, parumstriata and striata); Burmese Prinia P. cooki (monotypic); Annam Prinia P. rocki (monotypic) and Deignan's Prinia P. polychroa s.s. (subspecies Javan polychroa and the new Southeast Asian taxon). This study underlines the importance of using multiple datasets for the elucidation of diversity of cryptic bird species and their evolutionary history and biogeography.
PHONETIC EVIDENCE FOR IAMBIC/TROCHAIC LAW EFFECTS IN CHAOZHOU

The Iambic/Trochaic Law has been a long standing hypothesis on linguistic rhythm. However, it has yet to be tested with languages that are rich in tone. Based on predictions of the Iambic/Trochaic Law, this paper examines phonetic evidence in terms of duration and intensity in Chaozhou (Teochew, Southern Min), a six-tone language with bidirectional sandhi spoken in the Chaoshan region of China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. Data elicited from two native speakers reading seventy-two disyllabic units exhausting the tonal combinations based on the two sandhi types (i.e. left and right dominant tone sandhi) was submitted to LMER models with R to test whether there is an interaction between rhythmic types (i.e. positions of prominence within a disyllabic domain) and tone sandhi types. Results showed the expected interaction, and significant duration and intensity contrasts for the respective sandhi type.