bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Rigidities and Inflationary Bias in a Monetary Union: The Consequences of EU Enlargement
Authors: Campoy Juan Cristóbal , Negrete Juan Carlos 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThe authors analyze how the design of the central bank interacts with the implementation of structural reforms in a monetary union. They show that the first‐best is achieved when the common central bank is collectively designed, irrespective of whether or not reforms are cooperatively implemented. On the other hand, in the case where the central bank has been designed, an enlargement of the union worsens the incumbent members' welfare unless the inflation target of the monetary authorities diminishes or the accession countries implement a sufficient level of reforms prior to joining in.
The New Member States and the Process towards EMU
Authors: García‐Solanes José , María‐Dolores Ramón 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThe authors apply two complementary empirical criteria to eight new member states (NMSs) of the European Union to assess how ready they are to adopt the euro. As a first step, they recover demand and supply shocks and calculate the social losses implied by the two relevant exchange rate regimes: flexible rates and currency board. As a second step, the authors calculate the real exchange rates variability that these countries are currently experiencing and compare it to that of three Mediterranean countries during a similar period before they joined the EMU. The combination of the results of both tests shows that Estonia and Slovenia are the only countries that seem ready to adopt the euro within the shortest period of time foreseen by the Maastricht criteria; that is, after the two mandatory years in the ERM2. The rest of the countries will probably still need some exchange rate flexibility to absorb external shocks in the coming years.
TAR Panel Unit Root Tests and Real Convergence
Authors: Beyaert Arielle , Camacho Maximo 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThe authors propose a new panel data methodology to test real convergence in a non‐linear framework. This extends the existing methods by combining three approaches: the threshold model, the panel data unit root tests, and the computation of critical values by bootstrap simulation. The authors apply their methodology to the per capita outputs of a total of 15 European countries, including some of the East European countries that have recently joined the EU.
Risk Sharing and Efficiency Implications of Progressive Pension Arrangements*
Authors: Fehr Hans , Habermann Christian 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThis paper aims to quantify the welfare effects of progressive pension arrangements in Germany. Starting from a purely contribution‐related benefit system, we introduce basic allowances for contributions and a flat benefit fraction. Since our overlapping‐generations model takes into account variable labor supply, borrowing constraints as well as stochastic income risk, we can compare the labor supply, the liquidity and the insurance effects of the policy reform. Our simulations indicate that it would be optimal to introduce a flat benefit share of 50 percent and a basic allowance that amounts to 30 percent of average income. Such a reform would yield an aggregate efficiency gain of 3.3 percent of resources.
Measuring Financial Contagion Using Time‐Aligned Data: The Importance of the Speed of Transmission of Shocks*
Authors: Kleimeier Stefanie , Lehnert Thorsten , Verschoor Willem F. C. 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThis paper presents a new empirical approach to address the problem of trading time differences between markets in studies of financial contagion. In contrast to end‐of‐business‐day data common to most contagion studies, we employ price observations, which are exactly aligned in time to correct for time‐zone and end‐of‐business‐day differences between markets. Additionally, we allow for time lags between price observations in order to test the assumption that the shock is not immediately transmitted from one market to the other. Our analysis of the financial turmoil surrounding the Asian crisis reveals that such corrections have an important bearing on the evidence for contagion, independent of the methodology employed. Using a correlation‐based test, we find more contagion the faster we assume the shock to be transmitted.
Occludin oligomeric assembly at tight junctions of the blood‐brain barrier is disrupted by peripheral inflammatory hyperalgesia
Authors: McCaffrey Gwen , Seelbach Melissa J. , Staatz William D. , Nametz Nicole , Quigley Carolyn , Campos Chris R. , Brooks Tracy A. , Davis Thomas P. 
Published: July 2008

AbstractTight junctions (TJs) at the blood‐brain barrier (BBB) dynamically alter paracellular diffusion of blood‐borne substances from the peripheral circulation to the CNS in response to external stressors, such as pain, inflammation, and hypoxia. In this study, we investigated the effect of λ‐carrageenan‐induced peripheral inflammatory pain (i.e., hyperalgesia) on the oligomeric assembly of the key TJ transmembrane protein, occludin. Oligomerization of integral membrane proteins is a critical step in TJ complex assembly that enables the generation of tightly packed, large multiprotein complexes capable of physically obliterating the interendothelial space to inhibit paracellular diffusion. Intact microvessels isolated from rat brains were fractionated by detergent‐free density gradient centrifugation, and gradient fractions were analyzed by sodium dodecyl sulfate–polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis/ Western blot. Injection of λ‐carrageenan into the rat hind paw produced after 3 h a marked change in the relative amounts of oligomeric, dimeric, and monomeric occludin isoforms associated with different plasma membrane lipid raft domains and intracellular compartments in endothelial cells at the BBB. Our findings suggest that increased BBB permeability (i.e., leak) associated with λ‐carrageenan‐induced peripheral inflammatory pain is promoted by the disruption of disulfide‐bonded occludin oligomeric assemblies, which renders them incapable of forming an impermeant physical barrier to paracellular transport.
The work of the devil? Theatre, the supernatural, and Montaigne's public stage
Authors: Butterworth Emily 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTThis article takes as its starting point the story of the hoax ghost that Montaigne tells in Chapter 11 of Book 3 of the Essais, ‘Des boyteux’. Montaigne employs a consistent vocabulary of the theatre in describing this hoax as a ‘farce’ and a ‘battelage’. The article explores the sixteenth‐century contexts this intersection between demonology and theatricality throws into relief: the traditional suspicion of the theatre as diabolical, the efforts of demonologists to quantify and explain juggling tricks, and the impact a whiff of the theatre had on both witch‐finders’ certainty and sceptics’ critiques. Montaigne's chapter is also a meditation on political action, and accordingly the article examines how the theatrical model that appears through the story of the hoax ghost offers a different way of thinking and acting in a France polarized by the religious wars.
“Cola‐Game”: An Innovative Approach to Teaching Inventory Management in a Supply Chain
Authors: Dhumal Parag , Sundararaghavan P. S. , Nandkeolyar Udayan 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTIn this article we present a game that can be used as a tool to educate students and managers on the issues in supply chain (SC), inventory management. The game has a bilevel demand with one level during regular times and another during sale times. The game could be played in two modes (independence and cooperation) and has been field tested in engineering and business classes. Players developed an appreciation for fluctuating demand and its impact on the costs and performance of a SC. They also learned the benefits and a monetary evaluation approach for cooperation. Our statistical analysis revealed that, as the game progressed, the performance of the teams improved. We present an integer linear programming (ILP) model to evaluate the performance of the teams. Because it is a post facto analysis, while the game is played without knowing the materialized retailer demand for the period, the ILP solution is not a tight lower bound on the total cost of the SC. However, it could be used to compare performance across teams. As an alternative, we also present a possible distribution of total SC costs that could be used as another reference without actually solving an ILP.
Investigating Academic Success Factors for Undergraduate Business Students
Authors: Kaighobadi Mehdi , Allen Marcus T. 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTStudent academic performance is of major interest to all stakeholders of higher education institutions. This study questions whether or not statistical analysis of information that is readily available in most universities' official records system can be used to predict overall academic success. In particular, this study is an attempt to understand factors that affect academic success for business students by examining gender, age, ethnicity, and performance in two required core knowledge courses as predictors of academic success for a large sample of undergraduate students at a Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business–accredited business school. The results suggest that student performance is significantly related to some basic demographic variables, but the strongest predictors of overall academic success are the grades the students receive in core knowledge courses that are typically taken in the earlier semesters of business students' plans of study.
Presidential Address: The Cost of Active Investing
Authors: FRENCH KENNETH R. 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTI compare the fees, expenses, and trading costs society pays to invest in the U.S. stock market with an estimate of what would be paid if everyone invested passively. Averaging over 1980–2006, I find investors spend 0.67% of the aggregate value of the market each year searching for superior returns. Society's capitalized cost of price discovery is at least 10% of the current market cap. Under reasonable assumptions, the typical investor would increase his average annual return by 67 basis points over the 1980–2006 period if he switched to a passive market portfolio.
Back to the Beginning: Persistence and the Cross‐Section of Corporate Capital Structure
Authors: LEMMON MICHAEL L. , ROBERTS MICHAEL R. , ZENDER JAIME F. 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTWe find that the majority of variation in leverage ratios is driven by an unobserved time‐invariant effect that generates surprisingly stable capital structures: High (low) levered firms tend to remain as such for over two decades. This feature of leverage is largely unexplained by previously identified determinants, is robust to firm exit, and is present prior to the IPO, suggesting that variation in capital structures is primarily determined by factors that remain stable for long periods of time. We then show that these results have important implications for empirical analysis attempting to understand capital structure heterogeneity.
Asset Growth and the Cross‐Section of Stock Returns
Authors: COOPER MICHAEL J. , GULEN HUSEYIN , SCHILL MICHAEL J. 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTWe test for firm‐level asset investment effects in returns by examining the cross‐sectional relation between firm asset growth and subsequent stock returns. Asset growth rates are strong predictors of future abnormal returns. Asset growth retains its forecasting ability even on large capitalization stocks. When we compare asset growth rates with the previously documented determinants of the cross‐section of returns (i.e., book‐to‐market ratios, firm capitalization, lagged returns, accruals, and other growth measures), we find that a firm's annual asset growth rate emerges as an economically and statistically significant predictor of the cross‐section of U.S. stock returns.
Dissecting Anomalies
Authors: FAMA EUGENE F. , FRENCH KENNETH R. 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTThe anomalous returns associated with net stock issues, accruals, and momentum are pervasive; they show up in all size groups (micro, small, and big) in cross‐section regressions, and they are also strong in sorts, at least in the extremes. The asset growth and profitability anomalies are less robust. There is an asset growth anomaly in average returns on microcaps and small stocks, but it is absent for big stocks. Among profitable firms, higher profitability tends to be associated with abnormally high returns, but there is little evidence that unprofitable firms have unusually low returns.
Corporate Governance and Risk‐Taking
Authors: JOHN KOSE , LITOV LUBOMIR , YEUNG BERNARD 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTBetter investor protection could lead corporations to undertake riskier but value‐enhancing investments. For example, better investor protection mitigates the taking of private benefits leading to excess risk‐avoidance. Further, in better investor protection environments, stakeholders like creditors, labor groups, and the government are less effective in reducing corporate risk‐taking for their self‐interest. However, arguments can also be made for a negative relationship between investor protection and risk‐taking. Using a cross‐country panel and a U.S.‐only sample, we find that corporate risk‐taking and firm growth rates are positively related to the quality of investor protection.
Hedge Fund Activism, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance
Authors: BRAV ALON , JIANG WEI , PARTNOY FRANK , THOMAS RANDALL 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTUsing a large hand‐collected data set from 2001 to 2006, we find that activist hedge funds in the United States propose strategic, operational, and financial remedies and attain success or partial success in two‐thirds of the cases. Hedge funds seldom seek control and in most cases are nonconfrontational. The abnormal return around the announcement of activism is approximately 7%, with no reversal during the subsequent year. Target firms experience increases in payout, operating performance, and higher CEO turnover after activism. Our analysis provides important new evidence on the mechanisms and effects of informed shareholder monitoring.
Hedge Funds: Performance, Risk, and Capital Formation
Authors: FUNG WILLIAM , HSIEH DAVID A. , NAIK NARAYAN Y. , RAMADORAI TARUN 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTWe use a comprehensive data set of funds‐of‐funds to investigate performance, risk, and capital formation in the hedge fund industry from 1995 to 2004. While the average fund‐of‐funds delivers alpha only in the period between October 1998 and March 2000, a subset of funds‐of‐funds consistently delivers alpha. The alpha‐producing funds are not as likely to liquidate as those that do not deliver alpha, and experience far greater and steadier capital inflows than their less fortunate counterparts. These capital inflows attenuate the ability of the alpha producers to continue to deliver alpha in the future.
The Selection and Termination of Investment Management Firms by Plan Sponsors
Authors: GOYAL AMIT , WAHAL SUNIL 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTWe examine the selection and termination of investment management firms by 3,400 plan sponsors between 1994 and 2003. Plan sponsors hire investment managers after large positive excess returns but this return‐chasing behavior does not deliver positive excess returns thereafter. Investment managers are terminated for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to underperformance. Excess returns after terminations are typically indistinguishable from zero but in some cases positive. In a sample of round‐trip firing and hiring decisions, we find that if plan sponsors had stayed with fired investment managers, their excess returns would be no different from those delivered by newly hired managers. We uncover significant variation in pre‐ and post‐hiring and firing returns that is related to plan sponsor characteristics.
Optimal Decentralized Investment Management
Authors: Van BINSBERGEN JULES H. , BRANDT MICHAEL W. , KOIJEN RALPH S. J. 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTWe study an institutional investment problem in which a centralized decision maker, the Chief Investment Officer (CIO), for example, employs multiple asset managers to implement investment strategies in separate asset classes. The CIO allocates capital to the managers who, in turn, allocate these funds to the assets in their asset class. This two‐step investment process causes several misalignments of objectives between the CIO and his managers and can lead to large utility costs for the CIO. We focus on (1) loss of diversification, (2) unobservable managerial appetite for risk, and (3) different investment horizons. We derive an optimal unconditional linear performance benchmark and show that this benchmark can be used to better align incentives within the firm. We find that the CIO's uncertainty about the managers' risk appetites increases both the costs of decentralized investment management and the value of an optimally designed benchmark.
International Cross‐Listing, Firm Performance, and Top Management Turnover: A Test of the Bonding Hypothesis
Authors: LEL UGUR , MILLER DARIUS P. 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTWe examine a primary outcome of corporate governance, namely, the ability to identify and terminate poorly performing CEOs, to test the effectiveness of U.S. investor protections in improving the corporate governance of cross‐listed firms. We find that firms from weak investor protection regimes that are cross‐listed on a major U.S. Exchange are more likely to terminate poorly performing CEOs than non‐cross‐listed firms. Cross‐listings on exchanges that do not require the adoption of stringent investor protections (OTC, private placements, and London listings) are not associated with a higher propensity to remove poorly performing CEOs.
Feedback Effects and Asset Prices
Authors: OZDENOREN EMRE , YUAN KATHY 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTFeedback effects from asset prices to firm cash flows have been empirically documented. This finding raises a question for asset pricing: How are asset prices determined if price affects fundamental value, which in turn affects price? In this environment, by buying assets that others are buying, investors ensure high future cash flows for the firm and subsequent high returns for themselves. Hence, investors have an incentive to coordinate, which may generate self‐fulfilling beliefs and multiple equilibria. Using insights from global games, we pin down investors' beliefs, analyze equilibrium prices, and show that strong feedback leads to higher excess volatility.
Economic Links and Predictable Returns
Authors: COHEN LAUREN , FRAZZINI ANDREA 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTThis paper finds evidence of return predictability across economically linked firms. We test the hypothesis that in the presence of investors subject to attention constraints, stock prices do not promptly incorporate news about economically related firms, generating return predictability across assets. Using a data set of firms' principal customers to identify a set of economically related firms, we show that stock prices do not incorporate news involving related firms, generating predictable subsequent price moves. A long–short equity strategy based on this effect yields monthly alphas of over 150 basis points.
Market Liquidity, Investor Participation, and Managerial Autonomy: Why Do Firms Go Private?
Authors: BOOT ARNOUD W. A. , GOPALAN RADHAKRISHNAN , THAKOR ANJAN V. 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTWe focus on public‐market investor participation to analyze the firm's decision to stay public or go private. The liquidity of public ownership is both a blessing and a curse: It lowers the cost of capital, but also introduces volatility in a firm's shareholder base, exposing management to uncertainty regarding shareholder intervention in management decisions, thereby affecting the manager's perceived decision‐making autonomy and curtailing managerial inputs. We extract predictions about how investor participation affects stock price level and volatility and the public firm's incentives to go private, providing a link between investor participation and firm participation in public markets.
Legitimacy and Public Policy: Seeing Beyond Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Performance
Authors: Wallner Jennifer 
Published: July 2008

Studies of failure typically assess public policies through the lenses of effectiveness, efficiency, and performance. Here I wish to propose a further dimension to the evaluation and assessment of policy failure—legitimacy. The substantive elements of public policies and the procedural steps taken by authoritative decision makers during the policy cycle affect the perception of policy legitimacy held by both stakeholders and the public. In substantive terms, policy content should align with the dominant attitudes of the affected policy community and, ideally, the broader public. Procedurally, factors such as policy incubation, the emotive appeals deployed to gain support for an initiative, and the processes of stakeholder engagement shape the legitimacy of public policies and the governments who promote them.This argument is based on a comparison of education reform in two Canadian provinces during the 1990s. Governments in Alberta and Ontario pursued common agendas of education reform, but while Alberta achieved success, the Ontario government experienced a series of setbacks and lost the support of education stakeholders and the public. The root of Ontario's failures lies in the realm of legitimacy. These findings highlight the fact that the strategies used for enacting policy change may fail to bring about the necessary consensus among societal actors to sustain a new policy direction and calls attention to our need to better understand how governments can achieve meaningful public participation while still achieving legislative success in an efficient fashion.
Effect of D256N and Y483D on Propofol Glucuronidation by Human Uridine 5′‐diphosphate Glucuronosyltransferase (UGT1A9)
Authors: Takahashi Hiroko , Maruo Yoshihiro , Mori Asami , Iwai Masaru , Sato Hiroshi , Takeuchi Yoshihiro 
Published: July 2008

Abstract: Uridine 5′‐diphosphate glucuronosyltransferases (UGTs) are part of a major elimination pathway for endobiotics and xenobiotics. UGT1A9 is a UGT that catalyses the conjugation of endogenous oestrogenic and thyroid hormones, acetaminophen, SN‐38 (an active metabolite of irinotecan) and phenols. UGT1A9 is the only isoform that catalyses the glucuronidation of propofol (2,6‐diisopropylphenol) in the liver. In the present study, we analysed polymorphisms of UGT1A9 in 100 healthy adult Japanese volunteers. A transversion of 766G > A resulting in the amino acid substitution of D256N was detected in exon 1. The allele frequency of D256N is 0.005. We investigated the effects of D256N and Y483D, which is located on the common exon ofUGT1, on propofol glucuronidation by anin vitroexpression study. TheKmof wild‐type, D256N and Y483D for propofol glucuronidation were 111.2, 43.6 and 64.5 µM, respectively. TheVmaxof D256N and Y483D were 8.1% and 28.8%, and the efficiencies (Vmax/Km) were 19.1% and 57.1% of the wild‐type, respectively. For mycophenolic acid, 1‐naphthol and naringenin, the D256N variant lowered glucuronidation activity considerably, compared to Y483D. TheVmaxvalue of D256N variant for mycophenolic acid was only 9.5% of the wild‐type. This study shows the importance of D256N in differences between individuals concerning adverse effects of drugs that are catalysed primarily by UGT1A9. Carriers of D256N may be at risk of suffering adverse effects of propofol and other substrates that are primarily metabolized by UGT1A9.