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Through the theory of legitimacy and the theoretical perspective of New Institutional Economics, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of economic freedom over the relationship between Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) practices and profitability. The sample was finance companies located in the Americas, between 2017 and 2020, using the Refinitiv Eikon® database. The analysis used data modeling in a hierarchical panel. Results demonstrate that ESG practices have a positive and significant impact on profitability. Individually, only the social variable showed a positive and significant relationship over profitability. As for the moderating effect of economic freedom, it was shown that economic freedom enhances the relationship between an ESG index and profitability, and only enhances the relationship between corporate governance and profitability when analyzed individually. Furthermore, findings imply that a country's institutional quality has an important influence on ESG practices and profitability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to analyze and generalize the factors influencing credit decision-making in Turkey's service sector, which has seen substantial growth and increased dynamism post-2000, coinciding with accelerated economic development. The evolving competitive landscape and shifting consumer purchasing perceptions have led companies within this sector to seek differentiation strategies to attain a competitive edge. In this context, access to credit emerges as a crucial enabler for companies to expand and capture market share. The research focuses on the financial and non-financial characteristics of medium-sized service sector firms seeking credit, recognizing that both sets of variables play a pivotal role in the credit allocation process conducted by banks. The core of this study involves applying established assumption tests from extant literature, followed by an extensive regression analysis. The primary objective of this analysis is to identify and underscore the key financial and non-financial factors that significantly impact credit decisions in the service sector. By examining these variables, the study seeks to contribute valuable insights into the credit decision-making process, addressing the nuanced and varied nature of the service sector. This approach not only provides a deeper understanding of the sector's credit dynamics but also assists in formulating more informed strategies for businesses seeking financial support within this evolving economic landscape. The primary conclusion reached by the study is that non-financial variables exert a greater influence on credit decision-making in the service sector compared to financial variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the failed finance companies in Sri Lanka used fair value accounting practices as an opportunistic earnings management practice to launder money under weak corporate governance structures. Design/methodology/approach: This paper uses a qualitative design under the philosophy of interpretivism. The case study research strategy is used inductively to investigate how fair value accounting had been used for money laundering. Findings: The dishonest intention of major shareholders and board of directors had forced failed companies to misuse fair value accounting to manipulate performance and use them for personal benefits which were detrimental to the depositors and stability of the companies. The weak corporate governance structures which were developed because of regulatory forbearance were influential for manipulations. The concentrated ownership had reduced agency conflicts between shareholders and managers because major shareholders were the members of the board of directors. The appointed committees were not effective because of an inadequate number of independent directors with sufficient expertise. The reduced agency conflict between shareholders and managers has exaggerated the agency conflict with depositors. Therefore, it is recommended to dilute ownership concentration to establish good corporate governance structures and make stable institutions. Research limitations/implications: This study does not discuss the dishonest fair value accounting practices of all licensed finance companies because of the sensitivity of the matter for surviving companies. Originality/value: This paper is an original work of the authors which discusses how fair value accounting practices had been used to launder money in failed finance companies in Sri Lanka as an emerging market context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's business environment, companies cannot operate without an efficient supply offinancial resources. Financial assets are the lifeblood of all organizations. Accounting and finance as separate departments are at the center of every company and are responsible for ensuring efficient financial management and financial controls necessary to support the realization of business activities.The accounting andfinance departments is at the centre of any organization and is responsible for ensuring the efficient financial management andfinancial controls necessary to support all business activities. For companies to achieve financial success, it's important for them to have a financial strategy with thorough oversight for the entire company. The finance department oversees income and expenses throughout a company to ensure that it can sustain its operations and invest in expansion. Running a company requires effective management of resources. Finances, human, industry knowledge, and infrastructure are the resources required for running a business. Financial resources are the most important for starting and running a business. The finance function refers to practices and activities directed to manage business finances. The functions are oriented toward acquiring and managing financial resources to generate profit. The financial resources and information optimized by these functions contribute to the productivity of other business functions, planning, and decision-making activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examine how debt financing in general and bank borrowings in particular affect the earnings quality (EQ) at Indian firms. We conducted an empirical analysis, taking a sample of 626 Indian non-financial firms from 2003 to 2021. Our sample comes from the food and agro-based industry, which is divided into four relatively homogenous groups. On each of the groups, we apply an industry-wise cross-sectional version of the modified Jones model (Dechow et al., 1995) for estimating discretionary accruals (DACC), a measure of EQ. Testing the hypotheses using industry fixed effects for four sub-sectors, we found that bank financing is negatively associated with DACC (positively associated with EQ), whereas non-bank loans affect positively. We interpret this as a sign of discretion applied by opportunistic managers of borrowing firms to showcase a good financial position for reducing the cost of covenant violation. Further, the age, size and performance of the firms are positively related to EQ, while growth opportunity has a negative impact, as expected. The study is helpful for lenders and stakeholders to make policies and minimise their exposure to credit risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Brazilian Journal of Education, Technology & Society (BRAJETS) / Cadernos de Educação Tecnologia e Sociedade (CETS) is the property of Brazilian Journal of Education, Technology & Society - BRAJETS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The key interest rates. which have risen since March 2022, continued with an increase in long-term yields on advanced economies government bonds in Europe and North America by 1. 7 to 2. 2 percentage points. In addition, the rise in interest rates increased banks' financing costs which in turn reduces the financing conditions of households and companies. The rise in interest rates has led to falling bond prices and reduced their vallie on banks' balance sheets. The Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a US bank specialising in US startups, had to sell high-loss bonds in mid-March 2023 to offset deposit outtlows to operate. Due to liquidity bottlenecks, SVB and two other small US banks, Signature and Silvergate, closed. This has unsettled the financial markets. Silvergate Bank held assets in cryptocurrency. The failure of SVB was caused by mismanagement, inadequate oversight by the board of directors and senior leadership, and insujficient action from Federal Reserve supervisors. This highlights weaknesses in regulation and supervision that need to be addressed. The report emphasises the need to strengthen the Federal Reserve 's supervision and regulation based on the lessons learned from SVB 's failure. It identifiesfour key takeaways: SVB 's failure to manage risks, supervisors' failure to fully understand vulnerabilities, inadequate actions taken to address identified problems, and the negative impact of the board's tailoring approach on supervision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an error-correction style ARDL model and bounds tests for co-integration, we examine the impact of credit card reform on the relationship between credit card interest rates and funding costs in Australia. Our results show that after a major reform was carried out in the early 2000s, Australian banks reduced the spread between credit card lending rates and deposit rates. In both the long term and the short term, credit card rates were more responsive to changes in the cost of funds. However, after the outbreak of the GFC, the impact of the reform has been more than reversed and there is no evidence further reforms have bucked this trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While disclosing financial information has been widely proved to reduce the financing cost of a company, the impact of non-financial information, such as sustainability information, disclosing on the financing cost of the company is still in debate. The goal of this paper is to explore the impact of disclosing sustainability-related information on the cost of equity for firms. The paper first introduces the concept of sustainability information disclosure, and then exhibits its benefit through exploring its impact on reducing a firm's financing cost. It uses the Gartner supply chain top 50 rankings to construct the experiment environment to test for the effect of sustainability information disclosure on the cost of equity capital. The study uses the Gartner top 50 supply chain rankings from 2013 to 2017 to construct the experiment environment, and test for the sustainability information disclosure's impact on reducing the cost of equity capital. The regressions, which are based on the 350 firm-year sample of the United States and the 604 global firm-year sample, indicate that sustainability information disclosure significantly reduced the cost of equity capital. This paper uses a fixed effect regression method to analyze the impact of sustainability information disclosure. According to the regression result, the sustainability information disclosure variable has a significant negative coefficient. The result is robust under many settings. Thus, the paper finds that sustainability information disclosure significantly diminishes the cost of equity capital, controlling for ESG information disclosure. It also discusses the implications of the findings and future research directions for sustainability information disclosure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an online experiment with a sample of finance professionals and participants from the general population (acting as clients), we examine drivers and motives of clients' choices to delegate investment decisions to agents. We find that clients favor delegation to investment algorithms, followed by delegation to finance professionals compensated with an aligned incentive scheme, and lastly to finance professionals receiving a fixed payment for investing on behalf of others. We show that trust in investment algorithms or finance professionals, and clients' propensity to shift blame on others increase the likelihood of delegation, whereas clients' own decision-making quality is associated with a decrease in delegation frequency. This paper was accepted by Bruno Biais, finance. Funding: This work was supported by Austrian Science Fund [Grants SFB F63 and Y617-G11], Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council) [Grant 2015-01713], and Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian National Bank) [Grant 17788]. M. Holmén and E. Wengström acknowledge funding from the Swedish House of Finance. Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4555. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Based on the different stages of the business creation process and using qualitative methods, this study's aim is to understand the functioning of the process of accompaniment entrepreneurs in the Tunisian context. Design/methodology/approach: The authors' exploratory research is qualitative. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with a manager of an entrepreneurial accompaniment structure and 11 entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs were subjected to a manual content analysis. Findings: The results of the authors' research show the importance of the different mechanisms and structures put in place in the Tunisian context to promote private initiative. Tunisia is a diverse and very rich environment for the entrepreneurial process. The results of the authors' research confirm the processual nature of entrepreneurial accompaniment, which is presented as a continuum of five stages: the promoting of the entrepreneurial spirit, the exploration of the entrepreneurial profile, the study of the project and preparation of the business plan, the financing of the creation of a company and the creation of the company. Originality/value: The authors' study contributes to a better understanding of the close relationship between the entrepreneurial process and accompaniment in order to confirm the procedural nature of the latter. Then, this study highlights the involvement of the context in entrepreneurial accompaniment and the role of this accompaniment in the success of the entrepreneurial project. In addition, the authors' survey confirms the interest of entrepreneurial accompaniment from the stage of promoting the entrepreneurial spirit until the effective creation of the company. Taking into account the specificities of each stage of the creation process, the study shows the interest of a procedural approach to entrepreneurial accompaniment in order to put in place the necessary and above all adequate measures to help the entrepreneur at each stage of the entrepreneurial process and, subsequently, maximize the chances of success of the entrepreneur's business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explain the benefits of implementing a protected cultivation system for farmers in the San Quintin Valley (in Baja California) dedicated to the production of vegetables, particularly tomato. The methodology involved two steps: collection of theoretical information and data collection through a questionnaire applied to eight tomato companies in the San Quintin Valley during 2020. As results, it was found that most of them opt for cultivation with greenhouse for the production of the products, but it is very difficult to obtain government resources. It is concluded that there are still limitations in the acquisition of government support and it is for this reason that most use the capital of their own company and the financing of a bank for their implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/Context: This article surveys the evolution of commercial finance in Ming-Qing China and responds to the debates about the role of finance in the “Great Divergence” between China and Europe. Methodology: Based on new historical materials, especially commercial documents, we study the evolution of financial organizations at different levels as delineated by Fernand Braudel. We also analyze the long-run trends of commercial interest rates in the Ming-Qing eras based on a novel historical database of interest rates in China. Originality: This article explores capital market developments since the 16th century and their relationship with the state —a topic that has been almost entirely neglected in the existing literature. We also find improvements in market integration in China before the late 19th century when Western financial institutions began to enter China, and the prime commercial interest rate in the capital market was much lower than the dominant accounts in the “Great Divergence” debate. Conclusions: While current comparative studies either emphasize the financial stagnation of Ming-Qing China relative to the West or emphasize its special development through non-market mechanisms, e.g., clans, this article shows that the capital market played a similar key role in the evolution of finance in Ming-Qing China as it did in advanced parts of Europe. Thus, we suggest that the difference in financial development between China and the West lies in the organizational structure of the financial sector and the relationship between finance and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to assess the efficiency of housing finance companies operating in India by applying Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). We analyse 26 housing finance companies' efficiency using various key financial indicators. In addition to DEA, we utilised Tobit regression to investigate the determinants of efficiency in housing finance companies. The findings indicate that large firms need internal restructuring of their coefficients to achieve efficiency, while small firms maintain efficiency within their capacity in the given scenarios. The total factor productivity change for housing finance companies was the highest in 2020–21, followed by a comparative decline in the subsequent year. By considering censored or truncated data, Tobit regression allows us to identify the specific factors influencing efficiency scores derived through DEA. The independent variables used in the Tobit regression model include financial indicators and other relevant factors impacting housing finance companies' efficiency. Overall, this study sheds light on the performance of housing finance companies and highlights the financial parameters necessary for maintaining a robust non-banking financial system in the Indian economy. The combination of DEA and Tobit regression provides a comprehensive understanding of efficiency and aids in identifying areas for improvement in the housing finance sector while benefiting policymakers and industry stakeholders alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research constructs a credit default estimation model for micro and small enterprises (MSEs) under the condition of changing information asymmetry. The model is established through the refinement, abstraction and portrayal of the core elements contained in the default trigger mechanism; this mechanism is based on the cash flow, the default boundary and the distribution of actual cash flow in the framework of the incomplete information model. By relaxing the assumption that the bank can fully observe the customer's initial information, this work constructs a theoretical model with practical application value that can effectively describe the default risk of MSEs. Numerical simulation shows that the model can accurately estimate the default probability of MSEs by quantitatively modelling the mechanism of default risk management and control which is applicable to the risk characteristics of MSEs. The model is also suitable for the continuous dynamic estimation and forecast of individual customer credit application and post‐lending risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation banking has a history of nearly forty years in Turkey, including its predecessors, special finance houses. Despite this relatively long history, the point reached by the sector is discussed and criticized in many ways. Participation banking, known in the world as Islamic banking, is an important sub-field of Islamic finance. Interest in this has increased especially after the 2008 world financial crisis. In this context, the aim of this article is to identify today's participation banking problems in Turkey, both through the literature that has emerged with increasing interest since the aforementioned period, and through the users and employees from whom information was obtained through interviews, and to propose solutions. Therefore, the main methods of the article are literature research and e-mail interviews. Within the scope of the interviews, 23 users and 5 employees from the cities of Istanbul and Kayseri were interviewed. According to the findings obtained from the literature review, there has been no change in most of the problems expressed in the literature in the last ten years. The prominent ones are; inadequacy of ATMs and branches, lack of knowledge and belief of employees, and lack of product. In the interview study conducted on 28 people in total, the most prominent problem was the lack of knowledge and belief of the employees. The article ends with suggestions for solutions to the main problems identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sylvia Beach is known for her 'imperfect record keeping' and often indecipherable business accounts (Fitch, N. R. (1985). Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. New York: Norton, p. 161). That said, data from her lending library cards and logbooks provide key insight into Shakespeare and Company's cash flow. While this financial information is not always presented in a systematic or exhaustive manner, it can still be used to develop a more nuanced understanding of the inner workings of Beach's literary enterprise. To that end, in this article, I use the Shakespeare and Company Project data sets to examine the exchange of books in Beach's bookshop. More specifically, my analysis centers on the details surrounding purchases and borrows of books from the events data set. By limiting the scope of my study to only those records that contain transactional data—whether in the form of membership fees or actual book purchases—I provide a case study of how to approach incomplete data that unearths a new array of networks that were central to the daily operations of Shakespeare and Company. As a result, in contrast with the common focus on solely the most notable lending library members (or members of the Lost Generation in general), this financial approach brings to light invisible networks and underexplored figures whose monetary contributions were essential to keeping Beach's business afloat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Kastamonu University Journal of Economics & Administrative Sciences Faculty / Kastamonu Üniversitesi Iktisadi ve Idari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi is the property of Kastamonu University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In order to achieve a just transition to a low-carbon economy, there is a need for large-scale and far-reaching organizational reform. In particular, this needs to happen with multi-national and state-owned energy companies. These firms play a key role in societies worldwide today, however, they are ignoring or neglecting their role in the energy transition and the wider movement towards achieving a low-carbon economy in a 'just' way. These companies are transitioning far too slowly and the rhetoric they advance is now outdated given the current market and societal dynamics. Early indications are that Governments and the public remain willing to assist in financing the transitioning of these companies. However, this support will have a time limit. This short brief focuses on the need for these companies to 'repurpose' themselves, to obtain requisite data for their decision-making and begin future-proofing their strategies which includes themselves individually also. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose: The unemployment rate (UR) is the leading macroeconomic indicator used in the credit card loss forecasting. COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented level of volatility in the labor market variables, leading to new challenges to use UR in the credit risk modeling framework. This paper examines the dynamic relationship between the credit card charge-off rate and the unemployment rate over time. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses quarterly observations of charge-off rates on credit card loans of all commercial banks from Q1 1990 to Q4 2020. Univariate, multivariable, machine learning, and regime-switching time series modeling are employed in this research. Findings: The authors decompose UR into two components – temporary and permanent UR. The authors find the spike in UR during COVID-19 is mainly attributed to the surge in temporary layoffs. More importantly, the authors find that the credit card charge-off rate is primarily driven by permanent UR while temporary UR has little predictive power. During recessions, permanent UR seems to be a stronger indicator than total UR. This research highlights the importance of using permanent UR for credit risk modeling. Originality/value: The findings in the research can be applied to the credit card loss forecasting and CECL reserve models. In addition, this research also has implications for banks, macroeconomic data vendors, regulators, and policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the investor's investment decision in a standard financial contracting model. The investor chooses among entrepreneurs with heterogeneous production technologies who generate different probability distributions of cash flow under effort. I provide a complete characterization of optimal contracts, agency rents, and the investor's investment decision. Differences in entrepreneurs' production technologies imply differences in optimal contracts and agency rents across equally productive entrepreneurs, which biases and potentially distorts the investor's investment decision. The results provide a complete characterization of entrepreneurs' financial constraints in the presence of heterogeneous production technologies and uncover a fundamental link between production technologies, financial contracts, and financial constraints. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance. Funding: This work was supported by the Swedish House of Finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shipping Enterprise Credit Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to recognize shipping enterprise credit entities from unstructured shipping enterprise credit texts. Aiming at the problem of low entity recognition rate caused by complex and diverse entities and nesting phenomenon in the field of shipping enterprise credit, a deep learning method based on multi-feature fusion is proposed to improve the recognition effect of shipping enterprise credit entities. In this study, the shipping enterprise credit dataset is manually labeled using the BIO labeling model, combining the pre-trained model Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) with conditional random field (CRF) to form the BERT-BiGRU-CRF model, and changing the input of the model from a single feature vector to a multi-feature vector (MF) after stitching character vector features, word vector features, word length features, and part-of-speech (pos) features; BiGRU is introduced to extract the contextual features of shipping enterprise credit texts. Finally, CRF completes the sequence annotation task. According to the experimental results, using the BERT-MF-BiGRU-CRF model for NER of shipping enterprise credit text data, the F1 Score (F1) reaches 91.7%, which is 8.37% higher than the traditional BERT-BiGRU-CRF model. The experimental results show that the BERT-MF-BiGRU-CRF model can effectively perform NER for shipping enterprise credit text data, which is helpful to construct a credit knowledge graph for shipping enterprises, while the research results can provide references for complex entities and nested entities recognition in other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing ownership is one of the most important indicators of welfare in almost every society. The housing process, which requires long-term savings, is usually covered by long-term bank loans. In Muslim societies, where religious sensitivity regarding the prohibition of interest is widespread, various alternatives, one of which is the savings-based interest-free housing finance system (FKFS), have been developed. In this study, the model proposed by these new types of businesses, which was not legalized until 2021, operating in Turkey has been analyzed in terms of real economic returns and costs and compared with alternative systems. The model increases the uncertainties in fund raising and utilization and creates sunk costs that do not benefit the participants, forcing them to stay in the system in this way; necessitating a high amount of organization fee; that imposes more costs on the majority of the participants than alternative fund methods with or without interest; It has been concluded that monetary funds that are not equivalent in real terms cannot be evaluated by drawing only one factor, such as whether or not to trade with interest, without taking into account the consequences that lead to a kind of Chance-based wealth transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Article examines a peculiar legal dilemma--implicating securities law, legal ethics, and evidence law--that arises when litigation finance companies (LFCs) become public companies. LFCs provide funding to litigants and law firms for prosecuting lawsuits in exchange for a share of the lawsuit recoveries. In recent years, LFCs have significantly altered the landscape of the civil justice system in common law jurisdictions. But their assets, which are just rights to proceeds from lawsuits, are notoriously opaque--who really can predict what a jury will do when it comes to liability and damages? When LFCs go public, this opacity frustrates public investors' legitimate expectations to be able to understand the company's accounts and operations. The problem is exacerbated by the applicable accounting rules, which outsource the task of valuing the assets to the LFCs themselves, vesting them with significant discretion to build their own financial statements. The resulting lack of clarity about basic valuation matters undermines the two main objectives of securities law: investor protection and market integrity. From a securities law perspective, the normal solution to an opacity problem is more and better disclosure. However, concerns over the possible waiver of evidentiary protections flowing from the attorney-client privilege and the work-product doctrine complicate matters for LFCs. To avoid the possibility of waiver of privileged, confidential information (which would, in most cases, undermine the cases underlying their assets), LFCs are circumspect when it comes to disclosing any details of the valuation models for their assets, much less relevant details about specific cases. The shadow of privilege waiver thus chills the entirety of LFC disclosure practice, foreclosing it as an effective corrective to the intrinsic opacity of LFC accounts. After detailing the sources and extent of this opacity problem, the Article explores two case studies. The first, involving the 2015 failure of Juridica Investments, illustrates how opaque LFC accounts can undermine the investor protection objective of securities law. The second, involving the 2019 "short attack" by hedge fund Muddy Waters on litigation funder Burford Capital, shows how the opacity problem can also undermine the market integrity objective. The Article concludes by laying out a framework for reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)