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This pre-conference workshop will engage the participants in the process to draft Program Educational Objectives (PEOs) appropriate for undergraduate engineering degree programs at ABET-accredited institutions of higher education. The PEOs must reflect the Mission Statement of the institution and serve as a yardstick of student achievement three to five years following graduation. The PEOs must be crafted such that measurable objective evidence can be obtained through appropriate alumni surveys. To be consistent and effective, the entire engineering department must contribute to the discussion, ratification, and eventual adoption of the PEOs. In order to ensure a meaningful contribution from all faculty members involved in defining the PEOs, this workshop presents a framework that facilitates the discussion and the steps which can be taken to define the PEOs that (1) adhere to the Mission of the University (2) achieve consistent and measurable expectations. In addition, the workshop discusses internal and external review procedures to periodically review and revise the language, assessment, and evaluation of the PEOs. The attendees should expect to gain the following from this workshop. • Understand the step-by-step process to draft and assess PEOs • Draft PEOs which establish the link between the Undergraduate Engineering Degree program and the Mission of the University • Work as individuals and on teams to develop the Department-wide consensus on the formulation and assessment language for each PEO • Learn to clearly distinguish the PEOs from student outcomes.

We study whether the stability of mutual funds and the propensity of a run among investors depend on the ownership structure. Flows of funds run by banks or by firms that belong to the same financial group as a bank are less volatile and less sensitive to bad past performance. This enables bank-affiliated funds to better weather distress and to hold lower precautionary cash buffers in comparison with their unaffiliated peers. Banks provide liquidity support to distressed affiliated funds increasing their stakes in funds that are experiencing large outflows. We find that liquidity support and other benefits of bank affiliation are stronger if the parent bank is more liquid and better capitalised. Analyzing the aftermath of two exogenous shocks to financial markets -- the Brexit referendum and political uncertainty in Italy -- we show that distress in the banking system spills over to the mutual fund sector via ownership links.

Using a unique dataset, we examine financial performance, arid venture capital involvement in 167 MBOs exiting through IPOs (MBO-IPOs) on the London Stock Exchange, during the period 1964 -1997. VC backed MBOs seem to be more underpriced than MBOs without venture capital backing, based on average value-weighted returns. MBOs backed by highly reputable VCs tend to be older companies, and exit earlier than MBOs backed by less reputable VCs. The results contradict 'certification' and 'grandstanding' hypotheses supported by US data (Meggirison arid Weiss, 1991; arid Gompers, 1996, respectively). We found no evidence of either significant underperformance, or that VC backed MBOs perform better than their non-VC backed counterparts in the long run. However, MBOs backed by highly reputable venture capital firms seem to be better long-term investments as compared to those backed by less prestigious venture capitalist firms. The results remain robust after using different methods to measure performance, and after controlling for sample selectivity bias. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005.

This article tells the story of University of Strathclyde Mediation Clinic through the eyes of its founder. Taking its first case in 2012, by the start of 2021 it will be providing a free mediation service in 16 of Scotland’s 39 sheriff courts,1 covering more than half the country's population. Yet it started with no plan, no budget and little theory. Writing in the first person, the author makes the case that mediation clinics, like mediation itself, call for improvisation. While mediators may plan and train, learning frameworks for action and a body of expert knowledge, they must then encounter complex, fallible people and the unpredictable dynamics of conflict. Responding well is arguably more important than reparation. And so it has been with the mediation clinic. The clinic was triggered by student demand and was shaped by its volunteers; it adapted to law clinic gatekeepers and negotiated with university administration; and it reinvented itself through contact with the courts, with hundreds of clients and, most recently, with a pandemic. Each interaction has shaped it. Strathclyde Mediation Clinic is a work in progress, as it must be if it is to fulfil the hope of pracademia: bringing the academy into the world and the world into the academy.

In the face of declining prominence and influence under industrial relations laws regulating Australian workplaces, Australian trade unions appear increasingly to be directing their attention to Corporations Law as a mechanism for pursuing union and employee "voice" within corporate business organisation. This paper undertakes an examination of four recent "union shareholder" campaigns, the circumstances in which they were undertaken, the objectives of the "union shareholder" strategies and the outcomes of the campaigns. The paper also opens up for consideration whether union shareholder activism is merely a new strategy for pursuing conventional industrial aims, or whether it potentially represents a move by unions to identify themselves as "insiders" with a dual interest in the profitability and governance of the corporation as both shareholders and stakeholders. © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

A model of over-the-counter markets is proposed. Some asset buyers are informed in that they can identify high-quality assets. Heterogeneous sellers with private information choose what type of buyers they want to trade with. When the measure of informed buyers is low, there exists a unique and stable equilibrium, and interestingly, price, trading volume and welfare typically decrease with more informed buyers. When the measure of informed buyers is intermediate, multiple equilibria arise, and price, trading volume and welfare may decrease or increase with more informed buyers depending on the equilibrium being played. A switch from one equilibrium to another can lead to large drops in liquidity, price, trading volume and welfare, like a financial crisis. The measure of informed buyers is then endogenized by allowing buyers to invest in a technology that enables them to identify high-quality assets. In this case, the model features endogenous strategic complementarity in acquiring the information technology. Multiple equilibria still exist, with different measures of informed buyers, but a scheme of tax/subsidy on information acquisition sometimes leads to the unique equilibrium.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-19; HCoV-19; COVID-19) has affected all daily activities. Has it also affected the number of United States (FDA) drug approvals over time? The short answer from empirical time series forecasting is not yet. Care should be taken as the crisis continues through maintaining the scientific, economic, political, and social supportive structures to sustain momentum. This conclusion is based on analyzing the results of (non-overlapping) forecasting routines (viz., complex exponential smoothing, auto-regressive fractionally integrated moving average, extreme learning machine, and multi-layer perceptron) performed on longitudinal (1939-present) FDA (CDER) drug approvals taking into regard pre- and extant-COVID-19 eras. This is an initial study and there are caveats with the approach, and as such, all data and programs are provided to support replication of the results and furthering of the investigation. Supplementary information The online version of this article (10.1007/s43441-020-00249-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Udgivelsesdato: SEP This empirical study of the exchange rate exposure management of Danish non-financial firms listed on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange shows that debt denominated in foreign currency (foreign debt) is a very important alternative to the use of currency derivatives. The results show that the relative importance of foreign debt is positively related to (1) the extent of foreign subsidiaries, (2) the relative value of assets in place, and (3) the debt ratio. The pivotal role of time horizon is emphasised. These findings are important to firms in other countries with open economies.

In the face of increased accountability pressures, nonprofits are searching for ways to demonstrate their effectiveness. In the Absence of meaningful tools to evaluate effectiveness, financial ratios are largely used to approximate it. There is an extensive body of literature on the determinants of nonprofit effectiveness. However, it largely remained exploratory in nature. This is a novel attempt to propose a theoretical framework linking performance to effectiveness, but also applying this to a larger sample by means of a survey. For this, we employed Iwu et. al. (2015) configuration for the identification of major financial and non-financial performance indicators of NPOs and used in the Program Logic Model (W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 2004) to assess its impact. We hypothesize that this financial and non-financial performance and activities produced positive output in terms of increased participation that in turn, leads to positive outcomes on the participants live and at last these outcomes leads to positive impact towards the society by reducing the problems this NPO are set to tackle. For the empirical side, we collected data from 200 participants belonging to 14 NROs operating in Pakistan, by means of a close-ended questionnaire. Data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation modeling. The results were according to the theory and showed a positive and significant effect of financial and non-financial performance on output, then to the outcome and finally to impact. These findings can be used by the growing number of not-for-profits throughout the world to measure and report performance.

Veblen effects and counter-effects occur when product prices signal consumer wealth. This study quantifies such effects and counter-effects through a quasiexperimental approach that addresses identification threats inherent to social interactions, unobserved supply factors, alternative social processes, unobserved consumption utility, and alternative effects of prices. The analysis capitalizes on the richness of a four-dimensional panel data set on automobile rentals to reveal that consumer sensitivity to local rankings of selling-prices of products is highly heterogeneous, often negative, and comparable in magnitude to consumer sensitivity to rental fees. Additional analyses suggest that the estimated effects of price rankings do reflect positional concerns and conspicuous consumption.

PurposeIn the era of big data, people are more likely to pay attention to privacy protection with facing the risk of personal information leakage while enjoying the convenience brought by big data technology. Furthermore, people’s views on personal information leakage and privacy protection are varied, playing an important role in the legal process of personal information protection. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a semi-qualitative method based framework to reveal the subjective patterns about information leakage and privacy protection and further provide practical implications for interested party.Design/methodology/approachQ method is a semi-qualitative methodology which is designed for identifying typologies of perspectives. In order to have a comprehensive understanding of users’ viewpoints, this study incorporates LDA & TextRank method and other information extraction technologies to capture the statements from large-scale literature, app reviews, typical cases and survey interviews, which could be regarded as the resource of the viewpoints.FindingsBy adopting the Q method that aims for studying subjective thought patterns to identify users’ potential views, the authors have identified three categories of stakeholders’ subjectivities: macro-policy sensitive, trade-offs and personal information sensitive, each of which perceives different risk and affordance of information leakage and importance and urgency of privacy protection. All of the subjectivities of the respondents reflect the awareness of the issue of information leakage, that is, the interested parties like social network sites are unable to protect their full personal information, while reflecting varied resistance and susceptibility of disclosing personal information for big data technology applications.Originality/valueThe findings of this study provide an overview of the subjective patterns on the information leakage issue. Being the first to incorporate the Q method to study the views of personal information leakage and privacy protection, the research not only broadens the application field of the Q method but also enriches the research methods for personal information protection. Besides, the proposed LDA & TextRank method in this paper alleviates the limitation of statements resource in the Q method.

In light of recent managerial oversights such as those connected with the Challenger space shuttle disaster, having executives rely more on their professionals might serve to improve their organization's ethical consciousness. Although the professional record on corporate ethical behavior is by no means exemplary, the functional basis of the professions, especially the support rendered members through their professional associations and codes, is sufficient to make them potential watchdogs of corporate misconduct. The IEEE, for example, has taken steps to defend engineers who, in acting professionally to defend the public interest, are subject to arbitrary reprisals from employers. Executives, however, need to lead in encouraging professionals to follow their best instincts in supporting an ethical position within the enterprise. According to Raelin, three steps executives can take in this regard are (1) raising an ethical consciousness, (2) setting up an ethical process and structure, and (3) institutionalizing the structure. The first step involves a pronouncement from the CEO that the company is forever committed to a free and open exchange of ideas, including discretionary opinions from the professional staff. It also consists of an articulation of social and ethical goals that share the corporate agenda with economic goals. The next steps dictate how the organization goes about meeting those goals and what decision-making procedures and structures are to be adopted in carrying out such a social policy. By institutionalization, professionals and operating managers have incorporated ethical objectives into their day-to-day practice.

The lack of synergy between the HRM functions and the ambiguity of human resources business partnering (HRBP) role are significantly blocking the way of HR professionals to become business partners. The paper proposed a theoretical framework, based on Ibrahim (2015) model focusing on the antecedents of HRBP performance, and further link HRBP performance to Organizational Performance and effectiveness. We proposed that factors such as having HR Business Knowledge by Management, Top Management & Line Manager support to HRBP, Management understanding of HRBP’s Role, and Synergy between HRM practices, positively affect the performance of HRBP, and better performance would lead to increased Organizational Performance and effectiveness. To establish the empirical validity, we conducted a self-administered study, from 250 employees belongs to HR top management, line managers, and professionals working in the banking sector. Data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation modeling. The results showed that among other factors, Synergy between HRM practices has a positive and significant influence on HRBP performance. However, HRBP performance positively and significantly affects both Organizational Performance and effectiveness. The findings revealed that HRBP would play an important and positive role to achieve goals, implement HR strategy, and also increased Synergy between HRM functions makes HRBP performance more effective.

Organizational ambidexterity originates from operational managers that follow together exploitative and exploratory activities. In a way from side to side which mechanisms, HR performances in Pakistan might really ease operational manager ambidexterity and further result in organizational ambidexterity is still an open question? For this, we applied (Mom, Chang, Cholakova, & Jansen, 2019) model to different sized firms of Pakistan. We hypothesize that ability and motivation enhancing HR practices effects operations manager ambidexterity through enhancing role breath and basic motivational orientation. Manager ambidexterity would further induce Organizational Ambidexterity. Moreover, Opportunity enhancing HR practices plays a complementary role in producing influencing of manager ambidexterity on Organizational Ambidexterity. A survey was directed by using a close-ended questionnaire which recognized the empirical validity. A multi-source and multilevel data were collected from 210 employees of the HR department belonging to 70 different sized firms and it was examined by means of confirmatory factor analysis and also organized equation modeling. For this, we gave 3 questionnaires to each firm. The result suggested that Ability Increasing these Practices directly and positively affect Operational Manager Ambidexterity along with the mediatory factor of Role Breadth Self-Efficacy. Operational Manager Ambidexterity in turn has a positive influence on Organization Ambidexterity. Manager and organizational Ambidexterity is also directly and positively affected by Role Breadth Self-Efficacy, Motivation Enhancing Practices, and Ability Enhancing Practices. Organizational Ambidexterity is also influenced by Opportunity Enhancing Practices. Lastly, Motivation Enhancing Practices have a positive and significant result of the mediatory factor of Intrinsic Motivation Orientation. We, however, didn’t find any significant evidence of complementarities between managers’ Ambidexterity and Opportunity enhancing HR practices in explaining Organizational Ambidexterity. The result suggests that the relationship among organizational ambidexterity along with the operational manager is liable on a firm that enhances HR practices. Along with that, our study that we scrutinized provides us important and new multilevel insights into the efficiency of strategic HR systems and in support of an individual and organizational ambidexterity.

There is a huge parallel economy going on in the country, and that economy is financed and managed by alternative system of money exchange and remittance. This sector is largely undocumented and very little has been written on it. By some standard, this sector caters to more than 50% of overall foreign exchange business in the country, the proceeds of which largely goes out of the economy undocumented. Government of Pakistan recently taken measures to regularize this sector and state bank devised some bylaws and policy to document this sector. Establishment of exchange companies and abolition of money changers are the few steps that state bank have taken in this regards. Exchange companies are required to follow proper standards and auditing requirements and by virtue of this state bank is now be able to have more insight of how much money is coming and flown from this country and on accounts of which beneficiary. At the same time there is a need that people making our policies should better be aware of how this system works and who are involved, its by trades and what measure to adopt to canalized the proceeds into the documented economy and also identify various changes that could be made in our financial sector to better caters the needs of expatriates like this system does. This study is done to answer these and similar questions.

This study shows that banking organization growth is associated with higher operational losses per dollar of total assets and incidence of tail risks. Event studies using M&A activity and instrumental variable regressions provide consistent evidence. The relationship between banking organization growth and operational risk varies by loss event types and balance sheet categories. We demonstrate that higher growth predicts worse operational risk realizations during the global financial crisis. These findings have implications for bank performance, risk management and supervision in a continually consolidating banking industry.

This paper develops a structural model to evaluate contingent capital notes (CCN) of Basel III under alternative regulatory closure rules. Our dynamic model has a fixed default barrier and at specific discrete time points an additional higher default barrier depending on the closure threshold. The closed-form expressions of CCN and subordinated debts (SD) in the simple Merton model are presented to understand the convex relationship between the price and capital ratio trigger of CCN and to examine the effects of closure rules on CCN and SD through their derivatives’ properties. Our numerical results in the more general model show that a lax closure rule increases the price of SD and distorts the risk information of issuing banks, but not so for CCN. The policy implications are that CCN are more effective than SD in terms of enhancing market discipline because the price/yield information of CCN is more sensitive to the issuing bank’s risk than SD and will not be distorted by regulatory closure rules.

Purpose The credit card market is very large and segmented by targeting different types of consumers. One type of credit card is one that specifically targets people in the education sector, for instance, students, teachers and other staff members. This study aims to compare the features of education and other credit cards in Malaysia. Design/methodology/approach The study analyzes data concerning 234 credit cards by using descriptive statistics and a one-way analysis of variance test. Findings Out of 234 credit cards, this study found only two credit cards especially target education sector customers. The study evaluated 13 features of these credit cards and found that only 2 features are statistically significantly different from other conventional credit cards in Malaysia. These features are interest rate and cash withdrawal charge fees. Originality/value This is an original study based on the compilation of data from secondary sources. The findings will provide valuable insights to financial regulatory policymakers, academics and business managers.

We examine academic research laboratories as examples of intractable governance sites. These spaces often elude regulatory warnings and rules because of the professional status of faculty members, the opacity of scientific work to outsiders, and loose coupling of policy and practice in organizations. We describe one university’s efforts to create a system for managing laboratory health, safety, and environmental hazards, thereby constraining conventional faculty habit to ignore administrative and legal procedures. We demonstrate the specific struggles safety managers face in creating system responsiveness, that is, feedback to re-channel noncompliant laboratory practices. We show how faculty members are buffered from the consequences of their activities, thus impeding the goals of responsibility and accountability. We conclude by asking where such pockets of intractability reside in other organizations and whether the surrounding buffer, if there is one, may nonetheless paradoxically create an effective margin of safety., National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0216815), National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0518118), National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0535870)

We examine a crowdfunding platform that connects artists with funders. Although the Internet reduces many distance-related frictions, local and distant funders exhibit different funding patterns. Local funders appear less responsive to information about the cumulative funds raised by an artist. However, this distance effect appears to proxy for a social effect: it is largely explained by funders who likely have an offline social relationship with the artist (“friends and family”). Yet, this social effect does not persist past the first investment, suggesting that it may be driven by an activity like search but not monitoring. Thus, although the platform seems to diminish many distance-sensitive costs, it does not eliminate all of them. These findings provide a deeper understanding of the abilities and limitations of online markets to facilitate transactions and convey information between buyers and sellers with varying degrees of social connectedness.

Do healthcare providers pick their patients? This paper uses patient-level administrative data on skilled nursing facilities in California to estimate a structural model of selective admission practices in the nursing home industry. I exploit within-facility covariation between occupancy and admitted patient characteristics to distinguish admission patterns attributable to selective admission practices from those attributable to heterogeneous patient preferences. In spite of anti-discrimination laws, I find strong evidence of selective admission practices that disproportionately harm Medicaid-eligible patients with lengthy anticipated stays. Counterfactual simulations show that enforcing a prohibition on selective admissions would increase access for these residents at the cost of crowding out short-stay non-Medicaid patients from their preferred facilities. I simulate two additional policies intended to mitigate selective admissions: raising the Medicaid reimbursement rate and expanding capacity. I find the latter to be less costly and more effective than the former.

This article attempts to clarify the effect of risk management on a company's cost of capital in the spirit of the traditional M&M/CAPM model. The traditional cost of capital model can and should be used to find the hurdle rate for a company's operating assets, since it can be applied regardless of the composition of the firm's non-operating assets or its risk management policy. The author's main message is that if a firm manages idiosyncratic risk, the correct cost of capital for the operating investment is not the firm's enterprise WACC, but rather the required return on the assets being funded. Using the case of a company with a single line of business that is evaluating an investment opportunity, the author demonstrates how to adjust the firm's overall WACC to find the cost of capital for the operating assets to be acquired.

This article considers the institutional dimensions of professionalism and the legal profession's struggle with the challenges of post-modernity. An aspect of this is the Law Society's Training Framework Review (TFR) which promises changes to solicitors' education from 'cradle to grave'. The first part of the article analyses the structure and drivers of the TFR, their origins, and how they will be articulated. Secondly, the TFR is considered in the context of the political economy of higher education and its role in the new capitalism. Finally, we examine the potential effects of the TFR for the legal profession in the context of increasing practice segmentation and the threat of deprofessionalization, and also for the Law Society itself, whether it can retain a key role in the life course of the legal profession.

We explore to what extent firms deliberately manage their financial reports by exploiting the flexibility of generally accepted accounting principles. Using a sample of Oslo Stock Exchange-listed firms with 20–50% equity holdings in other firms, we find that firms with high financial leverage tend to maximize reported earnings from these investments through their choice between the cost method and the equity method, possibly in an attempt to reduce debt renegotiation costs or to avoid regulatory attention. In contrast, managers do not systematically bias reported earnings to extract private benefits or to signal revised expectations about future cash flows. Firms use different earnings management tools in a consistent way, as the earnings effect of the cost/equity choice is not offset by discretionary accruals.

Banking sector openness may directly increase growth by improving the quality of financial services and increasing funds available, or indirectly by improving the efficiency of financial intermediaries, both of which may reduce the cost of financing, in turn, increase capital accumulation and economic growth. The objective of this paper is to empirically reinvestigate these direct and indirect links, using a more advanced econometric technique (generalised method-of-moments [GMM] dynamic panel estimators). An illustrative model is presented to link financial market development with investment. The empirical results support the presence of direct and indirect links, thus encouraging countries planning to open their financial markets.

This paper examines the effect of mandatory portfolio disclosure by actively managed investment funds on investee firms’ investment decisions. Mandatory portfolio disclosures can reduce fund managers’ incentive to collect and trade on private information, and thereby reduce the stock price informativeness of their portfolio firms. Using a difference-in-differences design around the May 2004 SEC regulation requiring more frequent disclosure, we find that investment sensitivity to stock prices declines for firms with significant ownership by actively managed funds affected by the regulation. Results from cross-sectional tests indicate that the decline in investment-price sensitivity is concentrated among firms owned by funds with larger expected proprietary costs and for firms more likely to learn from the information in price. We conduct numerous placebo and robustness tests to mitigate endogeneity concerns. Overall, our results suggest that portfolio disclosure requirements have spillover effects on corporate investment by lowering managers’ opportunities to learn from price.

The stories we tell about the world, through worlding practices such as films, open the possibilities of certain futures, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. Attuned to recent work on politica...

SummaryReconstruction of shapes and sizes of three-dimensional (3D) objects from two-dimensional (2D) information is an intensely studied subject in computer vision. We here consider the level of single cells and nuclei and present a neural network-based SHApe PRediction autoencoder. For proof-of-concept, SHAPR reconstructs 3D shapes of red blood cells from single view 2D confocal microscopy images more accurately than naïve stereological models and significantly increases the feature-based prediction of red blood cell types from F1 = 79.0% to F1 = 87.4%. Applied to 2D images containing spheroidal aggregates of densely grown human induced pluripotent stem cells, we find that SHAPR learns fundamental shape properties of cell nuclei and allows for prediction-based morphometry. Reducing imaging time and data storage, SHAPR will help to optimize and up-scale image-based high-throughput applications for biomedicine.

All economies of the world possess four essential elements, viz, land; labour; capital and entrepreneurship, though they are not evenly distributed. Entrepreneurship education seeks to provide students with knowledge, skills and motivation to encourage entrepreneurial success. The highest pool of potential workforce for any nation is its university students. This study was carried out in the University of Uyo, Nigeria, to investigate the appropriate strategies for integrating entrepreneurship education into TVET. 2 specific purposes and 2 research questions guided the study. A 30 item instrument tagged Entrepreneurship Training and Integration Questionnaire was used in collecting data for the study. 74 TVET lecturers constituted the population and a total of 48 were randomly selected to form the sample. It was found that industry-academia interaction, appropriate instructional methods and the development of problem solving skills, creativity, risk taking ability and team working skills were vital for developing entrepreneurship among students. It was recommended that there should be industry-academia interactions and that students should be guided to discover knowledge by themselves. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n2p211

Global open-ended mutual funds are an increasingly important source of capital for emerging market economies (EMEs). Mutual funds, however, have a greater propensity than other overseas investors to change their holdings of EME bonds following changes in macroeconomic conditions. This paper considers why. We use a novel methodology – underpinned by data on individual security holdings – to distinguish between the two reasons why a fund's holdings of EME bonds might change: (i) the amount invested in the fund changes and (ii) the fund manager changes its portfolio allocations. We find that funds' responsiveness to changes in global macroeconomic conditions - "push factors'' - is explained by investor flow decisions. Conversely, funds' responsiveness to changes in local macroeconomic conditions – "pull factors'' – is explained by manager reallocation decisions. We also identify other institutional factors which impact reallocation decisions: changes in their leverage, changes to their benchmark, and changes in risk appetite (funds reallocate towards safer EMEs when global risk increases).

Understanding the behavior of chief executive officers (CEOs) enables investors, regulators, and others to better appreciate the corporate decisions a CEO makes. Among the many aspects that determine CEO behavior are early-life experiences, we examine whether a CEO’s exposure to two important events — fatal natural disasters and violent crime — during the individual’s formative years is associated with the firm’s financial reporting quality. We provide evidence of a non-monotonic association between early-life exposures to such events and financial reporting outcomes. When a CEO has moderate levels of early-life exposure to deaths associated with natural disasters or to violent crimes, financial reporting quality is lower, consistent with the CEO being over-confident in dealing with risk. However, as exposure increases to extreme levels, the CEO becomes more aware of the risk effect and, as a result, more careful about decisions that could elevate the firm’s risk; thus, we find evidence of higher financial reporting quality.

Three-dimensional density field measurement techniques can be used to understand the complex heat transfer and mixing processes that occur in turbulent flows. Tomographic background-oriented schlieren (BOS) is an optical technique that can be used to measure the instantaneous three-dimensional density field in turbulent flows. Light rays propagating through the flow are deflected from their ambient path due to variations in refractive index related to the spatial density gradients. In BOS, a camera is placed looking through the flow at a reference image, which captures path-integrated information on the refractive index gradients in the form of apparent image displacements Richard and Raffel (2001). The displacements recorded simultaneously from many cameras placed around the flow form the basis of a tomographic reconstruction of the three-dimensional refractive index gradients Goldhahn and Seume (2007), from which the density field is obtained through integration of the gradients and application of the Gladstone-Dale relation.

This study fills a gap in the relevant literature by exploring the time-frequency domain causal relationship between financial risk and economic risk for five South American countries, namely Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela, over the period from 1984Q1 – 2018Q4. To the best of our knowledge, the causal relationship between finance and economics has not been comprehensively explored for the case of South America within the framework of risk. Therefore, the empirical findings of this study are likely to shed light on and open a new debate regarding the nexus between financial and economic activities. Based on our aims, the time domain Toda-Yamamoto causality test is performed as a robustness check, and the wavelet coherence approach is implemented to explore the joint time-frequency domain causal relationship between financial and economic risk. The empirical findings reveal that: (1) there is a feedback causality between financial risk and economic risk in Venezuela; (2) there is a one-way causality that runs from economic risk to financial risk in Colombia and Peru, and; (3) financial risk significantly leads to changes in economic risk in Argentina and Brazil. The empirical results are crucial for policy decision making and can be used by both researchers and macro-economic policymakers to take suitable actions, if necessary, by implementing more appropriate or alternative economic and financial decisions.

Innovative users can not only generate ideas for new products, but also self-select whether to share their ideas with peers or producers. Different innovative users have different degree of lead us...

This article recognizes the maturity of individual-level technology-adoption research and suggests three broad future research directions. They are: (i) business process change and process standards, (ii) supply-chain technologies, and (iii) services. Each of these areas is identified based on the topics likely of interest to the readers of the Decision Sciences by closely examining Decision Sciences' editorial mission and the recent research published in it. Within each of these three different broad topic areas, a few different specific directions are identified. The directions outlined here are not meant to be exhaustive but rather potential directions that can result in a theoretical contribution to individual-level technology-adoption research and the specific topic area.

Wind energy companies must implement risk management strategies in order to successfully integrate into a liberalized energy market. This study analyses the influence of operational size (number of wind turbines in the portfolio) on the effectiveness of power purchase agreements as instrument to reduce market risk. The analysis uses wind data from 14 wind farms and data from the German Energy Exchange EEX. The results of this research reveal that the effectiveness of power purchase agreements increases with operational size. The main driver of the effectiveness, however, remains an optimal spatial diversification of wind farm locations. Overall, this study shows that smaller wind energy companies should manage their risk by spatially diversifying their wind energy investments, while larger wind energy companies should consider power purchase agreements in order to reduce the riskiness of their revenue stream.

Severe respiratory virus infections initiate a robust host immune response that contributes to disease severity. Immunomodulatory strategies that limit virus-initiated inflammation are of critical importance. In this study, we compared the host response to influenza A virus (IAV) infection in susceptible animals (wild-type, WT) to resilient mice (Vimentin-/- mice). We identified distinct gene expression patterns in recruited monocyte-derived alveolar macrophages (MoAMs) associated with three phases (Infiltrating, Early Inflammatory, Late Inflammatory) that evolve in sequence over the course of IAV infection. We report a core set of pro-inflammatory genes involved in the WT MoAM Early Inflammatory response that is suppressed in Vim-/- MoAMs. Moreover, we identify CEBPB, Jun-AP1, and IRF transcriptions factors as regulators of this attenuated inflammatory response. We performed causal experiments using bone-marrow chimeras to credential that Vim-/- MoAMs with suppressed pro-inflammatory genes confer protection from influenza-induced mortality in WT susceptible mice. Taken together, these data support the notion that vimentin plays a causal role in determining the pro-inflammatory function of recruited MoAMs and drives IAV-induced lung injury.

This paper examines whether and to what extent the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) affects technology spillovers between focal firms (i.e., receivers of spillovers) and peers (i.e., senders of spillovers). I find that technology spillovers from peers located in states adopting the UTSA are 27% to 75% lower than technology spillovers from peers located in states not adopting the UTSA. Focal firms whose peers come from the UTSA states have lower R&D investments and fewer migrant inventors than firms whose peers come from non-UTSA states. I also find that the Defend Trade Secrets Act has weak effect on technology spillovers.

Using large panel data of public and private firms, this paper dissects the aggregate growth of bond financing in the Euro Area. It considerably broadened firms' access to funding, but can also lead to new risks. The composition of bond issuers has shifted, with the entry of many smaller and riskier issuers in recent years. New issuers invest and grow, leading to higher leverage and interest rates. Moreover, holdings of stable `buy-and-hold' bond investors are large in aggregate but small for weaker issuers. Finally, the majority of firms downgraded in the 2020 crisis were small private firms that recently entered the bond market.

Working from home will be key to mitigating harms from future pandemics and has also been proposed as a way to curtail emissions from commuting. This paper exploits a work-from-home order in Qatar to investigate the impacts of working from home on both electricity and water usage. We deploy quantile methods to analyze the distribution of consumption before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and find evidence that use was shifted from work to home for both electricity and water. For residential use, increases are largest in percentage terms for the lowest deciles of both the electricity and water distributions. For commercial use, reductions are largest in percentage terms for the lowest deciles of both distributions. Our results have implications for which types of customers policymakers might want to target for governmental aid in future pandemics.

5530 Background: ICON8 phase III trial did not show improvement in PFS or OS with first-line weekly dose-dense chemotherapy in EOC. This analysis evaluated the impact of tumor intrinsic primary chemosensitivity (assessed with modeled CA-125 ELIMination rate constant K (KELIM) based on the CA-125 kinetics during the first 100 days of chemo), on survival by treatment arms. Methods: Retrospective analysis of ICON8 where EOC patients were treated with chemo (Arm 1, standard (std) carboplatin AUC5-6 & paclitaxel 175mg/m2 q3weeks; Arm 2, carboplatin AUC 5-6 q3weeks and weekly paclitaxel 80 mg/m2; or Arm 3, weekly carboplatin AUC 2 & paclitaxel 80 mg/m2; ratio1:1:1) and debulking primary surgery (immediate (IPS), or delayed (DPS)). The association between standardized KELIM (dichotomized as favorable ≥ 1, or unfavorable < 1) and efficacy of treatment arms and surgery completeness was assessed univariate & multivariate analyses. Results: Of 1,566 enrolled patients, KELIM was calculated in 1,004 with ≥ 3 CA-125 available values. KELIM did not differ by treatment arm. Irrespective of surgical strategy, both KELIM and surgery completeness were significant prognostic factors, but treatment arms were not. In 354 IPS patients, 225 had unfavorable KELIM (63%). Weekly dose-dense carboplatin-paclitaxel (Arm 3) (compared to std chemo-Arm 1) was associated with improved survival in unfavorable KELIM patients (PFS:19.6 vs 11.0 months, HR 0.80 [0.54-1.17]; OS : 53.7 vs 40.1 months, HR 0.75 [0.50-1.14]), and worse survival in those with favorable KELIM (PFS: 26.7 vs 48.2 months, HR 1.27 [0.72-2.22]; OS: NR vs 69.2 months, HR 1.05 [0.53-2.06]). Maximum benefit was seen in highest-risk diseases (unfavorable KELIM + incomplete IPS; n = 116; PFS: 17.0 vs 7.4 months, HR 0.49 [0.29-0.82]; OS: 42.6 vs 27.0 months, HR 0.56 [0.33-0.96]). In 611 patients treated with neo-adjuvant chemo +/- DPS (279 unfavorable KELIM, 46%), the same trend for higher survival benefit from dose-dense carboplatin-paclitaxel was found in those with unfavorable KELIM (PFS: 10.8 vs 7.4 months, HR 0.84 [0.63-1.13]; OS: 26.4 vs 23.5 months, HR 0.80 [0.60-1.08]), and reversely. The higher KELIM, the higher the likelihood of complete surgery (OR 4.82 [3.21-7.37]). The prognostic impact of the surgery completeness was greater in unfavorable KELIM patients. Conclusions: In ICON8 trial, both the tumor primary chemosensitivity (by KELIM) and completeness of debulking surgery were major drivers of the prognosis & survival. Dose-dense fractionated chemotherapy in 1st-line setting may be beneficial for patients with lower tumor chemosensitivity, whilst it might be detrimental in those with highly chemosensitive disease. The greatest OS benefit (HR 0.56) from dose-dense chemotherapy was seen in highest-risk diseases (unfavorable KELIM and incomplete IPS).

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Radiology has an important role in the diagnosis of both drug-sensitive (DS) and drug-resistant (DR) pulmonary TB (PTB). This study aimed at comparing the chest x-ray (CXR) patterns of microbiologically confirmed cases of DS and DR PTB in Uganda.Methods: We conducted a hospital based retrospective study at the Mulago National Referral Hospital (MNRH) TB wards. All participants had microbiologically confirmed diagnosis of PTB. CXR findings extracted included infiltrate, consolidation, cavity, fibrosis, bronchiectasis, atelectasis and other non-lung parenchymal findings. All films were independently examined by two experienced radiologists blinded to clinical diagnosis.Results: We analyzed CXR findings of 165 participants: 139 DS- and 26 DR-TB cases. Majority (n=118, 71.7%) of the participants were seronegative for HIV. Overall, 5/165 (3%) participants had normal CXR. There was no statistically significant difference in the proportion of participants with consolidations (74.8% versus 88.5%; p – 0.203), bronchopneumonic opacities (56.1% versus 42.3%, p=0.207) and cavities (38.1% versus 46.2%, p=0.514), across drug susceptibility status (DS versus DR TB). Among HIV infected participants, consolidations were predominantly in the middle lung zone in the DS TB group and in the lower lung zone in the DR TB group (42.5% versus 12.8%, p – 0.66). HIV infected participants with DR TB had statistically significantly larger cavity sizes compared to their HIV uninfected counterparts with DR TB (7.7 ± 6.8cm versus 4.2 ± 1.3cm, p – 0.004). Conclusion- We observed that a vast majority of participants had similar CXR changes, irrespective of drug susceptibility status. However, HIV infected DR PTB had larger cavities. The diagnostic utility of cavity sizes for the differentiation of DR from DS TB could be investigated further.

Background: Accumulating evidence has implicated a pivotal role for FOXO3, FOXM1 and SIRT6 in cancer progression and metastasis. The majority of researches have focused on the functions of these proteins in drug resistance, but their relationships with radiotherapy (RT) response remain unclear. In this study, we examined the protein expression of FOXO3, FOXM1 and SIRT6 and their clinical significance in a Swedish rectal cancer trial of preoperative RT.Methods: Protein expression of FOXO3, FOXM1 and SIRT6 protein was examined by immunohistochemistry in tissue microarray (n =145). Genetic analysis of FOXO3, FOXM1 and SIRT6 were performed by cBioportal and MEXPRESS database. Gene-gene network analysis was conducted using GeneMANIA. Further functional enrichment analysis was performed based on LinkedOmics and Metascape online software.Results: The results showed that the FOXO3 and FOXM1 proteins were mainly expressed in the cytoplasm in both the normal and tumour tissues, and SIRT6 in both the cytoplasm and nucleus of the normal and tumour tissues. The FOXO3 and FOXM1 protein levels increased from the normal mucosa to the primary cancer (P < 0.001), while the SIRT6 protein decreased from the normal mucosa to the primary cancer (P < 0.001). High FOXO3 expression correlated with late TNM stage (P = 0.040) and distant metastasis (P = 0.032), as well as independently with disease free survival (RFS) in RT patients (HR = 7.948; P = 0.049; 95% CI = 1.002-63.032) but not in non-RT patients (P > 0.05). Furthermore, genetic analysis indicated that DNA methylation status contributes to the FOXO3 overexpression. Functional enrichment analysis demonstrated that FOXO3 is closely related to metabolism-related signalling pathway which is in turn associated with cancer radioresistance. Moreover, there were strong gene–gene interactions between FOXO3 and genes in metabolism-related signalling.Conclusions: Our findings suggest that FOXO3 may be a key predictive biomarker to optimise RT for rectal cancer patients to improve prognosis.Trial registration: Radiotherapy; 86151; Registered 17 November 1986; NCT00904813; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00904813?term=Preoperative+Radiotherapy&cntry=SE&draw=3&rank=3.

A Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enabled by Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an important field within the digitalisation of the economy. AI-driven robots and machines are forecasted to grow dramatically in the next years. AI-enabled RPA replaces the work a human would normally do by mimicking interactions with applications and provides direct access to systems using APIs. RPA has superior advantages versus human execution:24x7 execution, eternal lifetime and scalability. Process automatization is per se not a brand-new technology, however due to notable progress in AI, which RPAleverages, it has become an own solution category. RPA enables algorithmic rules without being biased. Ethical considerations intend to make AI-driven RPA more human and introduce morality into the machine learning. The Uber-Waymo trial made transparent how much AI development is influenced by human irrationality and irrational exuberances. It reveals a culture of agile software development, which prioritize releasing the latest software over testing and verification, and one that encourages shortcuts and irrationality. This also give proof that applying AI cannot ensure that irrational exuberances disappear. The reason for this irrational exuberance may have its roots in the exponential growth in computing and storage technologies predicted by Gordon Moore five decades ago. This paper develops a concept how irrational exuberances with the business case of RPA can be prevented from happening. One general approach for solutioning of the issue is to increase transparency. The paper recommends applying technology to make data more accessible and more readable on the application of artificial intelligence. With the aim of application of “transparency technology XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language)” is incorporated. XBRL is part of the choice architecture on regulation by governments (Sunstein, 2013). XBRL is connected to a taxonomy. The paper develops a taxonomy for RPA to make application of artificial intelligence more transparent to the public and incorporates ethical considerations. As a business case the strongly growing RPA industry is selected. The paper focus on the way to enhance AI that aligns with human values. How can incentive be provided that AI systems themselves do not become potential objects of moral concern. The main outcome of the paper is that AI-enabled RPA reveal moral concerns however transparency technologies at the same time also offer way to mitigate such risks.

The debate on the effects of import competition on sectoral composition of employment remains unsettled. Using the case of the Indian manufacturing sector and exploiting plausibly exogenous variation from Chinese imports, we provide the first causal evidence that higher import competition increases the share of the formal sector employment. We nd an increase in the level of formal sector employment, driven by firms in the top 50% of the productivity distribution, and in contrast, a fall in the informal sector employment. This labor reallocation from informal to formal enterprises is enabled by the usage of contract workers, who do not carry stringent ring costs and are usually not covered by trade unions. Our estimates imply that Chinese import competition led to an increase in the share of formal sector employment by 3.9 percentage points between 2000-2001 and 2005-2006, which suggests an increase in aggregate labor productivity by 3.28%. Our results are robust to an instrumental variables estimation, and controlling for a host of other potential trade channels and worker characteristics.

Objective: To evaluate the influence of the variability of Lipoprotein a (Lp(a)) and Non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (non-HDL-C) on the neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) during the follow-up period in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) after elective coronary intervention.Methods: A total of 3320 consecutive patients with CHD after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in a multi-center from January 2010 to January 2019 were enrolled. The baseline demographic data were Analyzed, and the NLR levels in tertile groups according to the baseline Lp(a) and non-HDL-C levels were compared. Linear regression is used to analyze the association of the variation rate of Lp(a) and non-HDL-C with NLR; and subgroup analysis of the relevant factors were found. All verifications are verified by SD, CV, and VIM triple methods.Results: The NLR is significantly different among tertile Lp(a) variation groups in SD, CV and VIM methods, which is consistent in non-HDL-C variation rate except SD method. Multiple linear regression indicated that Lp(a) variability, age, gender, BMI, hypertension, eGFR were related to NLR, which was verified in age, gender, hypertension and non-diabetic subgroups. Non-HDL-C variability, age, gender, BMI, eGFR, statins, follow-up HDL-C and non-HDL-C were also related to NLR, and established in the above subgroups.Conclusion: The variation rate of Lp(a) and non-HDL-C are independent positive predictors of NLR after elective PCI.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common primary hepatic malignancies. E2F transcription factors play an important role in the tumorigenesis and progression of HCC, mainly through the RB/E2F pathway. Prognostic models for HCC based on gene signatures have been developed rapidly in recent years; however, their discriminating ability at the single cell level remains elusive, which could reflect the underlying mechanisms driving the sample bifurcation. In this study, we constructed and validated a predictive model based on E2F expression, successfully stratifying HCC patients into two groups with different survival risks. Then we used a single-cell dataset to test the discriminating ability of the predictive model on infiltrating T cells, demonstrating remarkable cellular heterogeneity as well as altered cell fates. We identified distinct cell subpopulations with diverse molecular characteristics. We also found that the distribution of cell subpopulations varied considerably across onset stages among patients, providing fundamental basis for patient-oriented precision evaluation. Moreover, single-sample gene set enrichment analysis revealed that subsets of CD8+ T cells with significantly different cell adhesion level could be associated with different patterns of tumor cell dissemination. Therefore, our findings linked the conventional prognostic gene signature to the immune microenvironment and cellular heterogeneity at the single-cell level, thereby providing deeper insights into the understanding of HCC tumorigenesis.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether labour mobility is likely to act as a sufficient adjustment mechanism in the face of asymmetric shocks in Euroland. To this end, we estimate the elasticity of migration with respect to changes in unemployment and income on the basis of regional panel data provided by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union. Regression results are provided for Western Germany, France, and Italy. It is shown that labour mobility is highest in Germany, followed by France, and Italy. However, even in Germany, the accommodation of a shock to unemployment by migration takes several years. We conclude that labour mobility is extremely unlikely to act as a sufficient adjustment mechanism to asymmetric shocks in Euroland.

This paper examines the effects of the nondiscretionary trading demands of VIX exchangetraded products (ETPs) issuers on the prices and volumes in the VIX futures. We find that the ETPs’ information-less, mechanical rebalancing of futures positions to maintain the constant maturity of the index and the promised leverage ratios of the VIX ETPs have significantly positive predictive power for end-of-day futures returns. We also show that the impact on price has diminished through time as a result of the increased liquidity provided by hedge funds, and the “natural” hedging of the issuers’ inverse products.

The management practices of private and public sector enterprises of Bangladesh have been continually improving since the independence of the country. From the inception of the country in 1971, there was a highly disorganized management in both the public and private sectors. However, it has now been reached to a reasonable shape that can be claimed as moderate management practices like other developing countries of the world. Observation shows that a rapid development in the management of private sector has been occurred since early 1990s. In 2000, there has been a substantial change and modification in management practices of the private sector enterprises in Bangladesh due to shifting focus of the government from public to private sector. The reasons can be attributed by the development of information technology and introduction to the privatization policy of the enterprises. This study shows that the development of management practices followed an upward trend in Bangladesh. The higher the development in private sector management is inducing the higher development of public sector management in Bangladesh.