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In the post World War II period, most U.S. cities experienced large movements of population from the city centers to the suburbs. In this paper we provide causal evidence that this process of suburbanization can be explained by the rise of violent crime in city centers. We do so by proposing a new instrument to exogenously predict violent crime. This instrument uses as time variation the U.S. national levels of lead poisoning. Cross-sectional variation comes from a proxy for soil quality, which explains the fate of lead in soil and its subsequent bio-availability. Using data for more than 300 U.S. cities, results show that the increase in violent crime from the level in 1960 to its maximum in 1991 decreased the proportion of people living in city centers by 15 percentage points. This increase in crime moved almost 25 million people to the suburbs. As a result of suburbanization, we find that people remaining in the city center are more likely to be black people, consistent with the "white flight" phenomenon. We then demonstrate that this suburbanization process had aggregate effects on the city. Exploiting a spatial equilibrium model, we determine that violent crime had externalities on productivity and amenities.

Background: Actionable feedback from patients after a clinic visit can help inform ways to better deliver patient-centered care. A 2-word assessment may serve as a proxy for lengthy post-visit questionnaires. We tested the use of a 2-word assessment in an outpatient hand clinic. Methods: New patients were asked to provide a 2-word assessment of the following: (1) their physician; (2) their overall experience; and (3) recommendations for improvement and their likelihood to recommend (LTR) after their clinic visit. Sentiment analysis was used to categorize results into positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. Recommendations for improvement were classified into physician issue, system issue, or neither. We evaluated the relationship between LTR status, sentiment, actionable improvement opportunities, and classification (physician issue, system issue, or neither). Recommendations for improvement were classified into themes based on prior literature. Results: Sixty-seven (97.1%) patients noted positive sentiment toward their physician; 67 (97.1%) noted positive sentiment toward their overall experience. About 31% of improvement recommendations were system-based, 5.9% were physician-based, and 62.7% were neither. Patients not LTR were more likely to leave actionable opportunities for improvement than those LTR ( P = .01). Recommendations for improvement were classified into predetermined themes relating to: (1) physician interaction; (2) check-in process; (3) facilities; (4) unnecessary visit; and (5) appointment delays. Conclusion: Patients not likely to recommend provided actionable opportunities for improvement using a simple 2-word assessment. Implementation of a 2-word assessment in a hand clinic can be used to obtain actionable, real-time patient feedback that can inform operational change and improve the patient experience.

In the context of digital signatures, the proxy signature holds a significant role of enabling an original signer to delegate its signing ability to another party (i.e., proxy signer). It has significant practical applications. Particularly it is useful in distributed systems, where delegation of authentication rights is quite common. For example, key sharing protocol, grid computing, and mobile communications. Currently, a large portion of existing proxy signature schemes are based on the hardness of problems like integer factoring, discrete logarithms, and/or elliptic curve discrete logarithms. However, with the rising of quantum computers, the problem of prime factorization and discrete logarithm will be solvable in polynomial-time, due to Shor's algorithm, which dilutes the security features of existing ElGamal, RSA, ECC, and the proxy signature schemes based on these problems. As a consequence, construction of secure and efficient post-quantum proxy signature becomes necessary. In this work, we develop a post-quantum proxy signature scheme Mult-proxy, relying on multivariate public key cryptography (MPKC), which is one of the most promising candidates of post-quantum cryptography. We employ a 5-pass identification protocol to design our proxy signature scheme. Our work attains the usual proxy criterion and a one-more-unforgeability criterion under the hardness of the Multivariate Quadratic polynomial (MQ) problem. It produces optimal size proxy signatures and optimal size proxy shares in the field of MPKC.

Objectives:Behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) are among the most challenging aspects of dementia for individuals living with dementia and their caregivers. Identifying factors...

This paper investigates spillovers from foreign economies to the U.S. through changes in longterm Treasury yields. We document a decline in the contribution of U.S. domestic news to the variance of long-term Treasury yields and an increased importance of overnight yield changes—a rough proxy for the contribution of foreign shocks to U.S. yields—over the past decades. Using a model that identifies U.S., Euro area, and U.K. shocks that move global yields, we estimate that foreign (non-U.S.) shocks account for at least 20 percent of the daily variation in long-term U.S. yields in recent years. We argue that spillovers occur in large part through bond term premia by showing that a low level of foreign yields relative to U.S. yields predicts a decline in distant forward U.S. yields and higher returns on a strategy that is long on a long-term Treasury security and short on a long-term foreign bond.

Recent evidence suggests that female-led firms are more likely to be targeted by activist investors. We examine how Chief Executive Officer (CEO) gender influences retail investors' responses to proxy contests. We find that these investors are more likely to support-through their proxy voting behavior-campaigns that target female-led versus male-led firms, despite the fact that retail investors evaluate female and male CEOs similarly. We show that this apparent discrepancy is a function of how subjective ratings mask stereotype-influenced judgments, consistent with the shifting standards model (SSM). Respondents use lower standards to evaluate female versus male CEOs. This difference becomes apparent when externally-anchored judgments are employed, such as when investors are asked to choose sides in a proxy contest. Correspondingly, activists are judged as relatively more competent when targeting female-led firms. Our findings contribute to research on CEO gender and activism. In doing so, our research also introduces the SSM to the investor decision-making literature, thereby enriching the discussion about what mechanisms underpin the less favorable investment outcomes female-led firms can experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Artificial Intelligence Based Internet of Things (AI-IoT enables autonomous communication among social networks and IoT to leverage the promising solution in the modern paradigms. It can provide an interactive platform across the globe to enrich the quality of networking services to the end-users. Of late, the expansion of Information-centric networking has brought an incredible technique known as public auditing scheme for IoT-enabled sensors technologies. It uses a cloud-based medical cyber-physical system (M-CPS to rely on cloud-computing that ensures fast computing and reliable data storage. To exploit proxy authorizer and trusted auditor, an identity-based proxy authorized outsourcing with public auditing (ID-PAOPA is proposed. It uses proxy authorization and verification to upload medical data over cloud-based M-CPS. To substantiate the finding, this paper provides security proof based on the EC-DLP assumption. Lastly, the performance analysis proves that the proposed ID-PAOPA achieves less computation and auditing timing to fulfill the objectives of cloud-based M-CPS.

This article aims to compare the existing approaches, such as citation-lag distribution, Tobit regression, and multilayered neural network to forecast forward patent citations as a proxy for patent technological impact. For the purpose of analysis, in this article, we focuse on estimating lifespan forward citations in the telecommunications sector because sector-specific characteristics may affect the citation patterns. Accordingly, U.S. utility patents in the telecommunications sector are collected and the patent ex-ante information (the information provided at the point of patent disclosure) along with patent ex-post information (the information available after patent disclosure) are extracted to be used for forecasting forward citations. The research findings indicate that the deep learning approach tends to outperform the other approaches only with the ex-ante information, and the performance of the deep learning approach increases significantly when the ex-post information is added to the ex-ante information. This article is expected to offer useful guidelines for choosing an appropriate approach to forecast citations based on available dataset.

We measure value creation by activist investors via structural estimation of a model of the choice between passive investment and activism. Our estimates imply that average returns following activist intent announcements consist of 74.8 % expected value creation, or treatment, 13.4 % stock picking, and 11.8 % sample selection effects. Higher treatment values predict improvements in firm performance and lower proxy contest probabilities, whereas abnormal announcements returns do not, suggesting that our estimate identifies more effective activism campaigns. The evidence demonstrates the importance of using the joint distribution of investment strategies and announcement returns to recover the expected returns and costs of activism.

The Steptoean Positive Isotopic Carbon Excursion, or SPICE event, was a globally recorded +2‰ to +6‰ shift in δ13C values during the later Cambrian (ca. 500 Ma). The excursion is associated with regional sea level change and trilobite extinctions documented from multiple paleocontinents, yet the mechanism(s) for these events and the excursion itself are not fully understood. Recent studies have suggested that the SPICE is accompanied by global changes in redox conditions, which may have served as an extinction driver. Here, we present new geochemical and mineralogical data from an outcrop of the SPICE located along the Port au Port Peninsula in western Newfoundland. We focus on paired sedimentary mercury and glauconite enrichments as a potential redox indicator in an effort to evaluate local redox conditions during the SPICE in Newfoundland and assess the validity of Hg as a redox proxy. These strata record small mercury enrichments (

We provide a novel explanation for the empirical failure of the CAPM despite its widespread practical use. In a rational-expectations economy in which information is dispersed, variation in expected returns over time and across investors creates an informational gap between investors and the empiricist. The CAPM holds for investors, but the Securities Market Line appears flat to the empiricist. Variation in expected returns across investors accounts for the larger part of this distortion, which is empirically substantial; it offers a new interpretation of why “Betting Against Beta” works: BAB really bets on true beta. The empiricist retrieves a stronger CAPM on days when public information reduces disagreement among investors.

In both casual conversations and interview settings, people may be required to provide details of instances that were similar to other experiences. When this happens repeatedly, consistency across reports is often taken as a proxy for credibility. However, processes of schema formation and interference due to similarity make recall and accurate source attribution of details to specific instances challenging. We investigated the accuracy and consistency of recall in these contexts in a re-analysis of five studies. Confusions of details were widespread (1) across instances—participants frequently attributed the origin of details to incorrect instances, but also (2) across repeated retrieval attempts—participants frequently changed parts of their reports. There was, however, a clear pattern of primacy and recency effects: Recall of the first and final instances was more accurate and consistent than recall of the middle instances. We discuss potential mechanisms underlying these effects as well as their practical implications.

We investigate whether a firm’s financial statement comparability is associated with the firm’s tax strategy. We hypothesize that external observers (e.g., press, shareholders, analysts, and tax authorities) can better detect a firm’s atypical tax strategy when the firm has high financial statement comparability with its industry peers. Detection and its consequent penalties should restrain firm managers from choosing tax strategies that deviate significantly from those of industry peers. Using firms’ uncertain tax benefits (UTBs) as a proxy for tax avoidance, we find that the UTBs of firms with high financial statement comparability move toward their industry peers in subsequent periods. Results suggest that comparability reduces tax aggressiveness for high tax-avoidance firms and enhances tax aggressiveness for low tax-avoidance firms, in comparison with those of industry peers. Overall, these findings indicate a strong within-industry harmonization in tax avoidance for firms with high financial statement comparability.

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the informational content of sentiment extracted from news articles about the state of the economy. We propose a fine-grained aspect-based sentiment analysis that has two main characteristics: 1) we consider only the text in the article that is semantically dependent on a term of interest (aspect-based) and, 2) assign a sentiment score to each word based on a dictionary that we develop for applications in economics and finance (fine-grained). Our data set includes six large US newspapers, for a total of over 6.6 million articles and 4.2 billion words. Our findings suggest that several measures of economic sentiment track closely business cycle fluctuations and that they are relevant predictors for four major macroeconomic variables. We find that there are significant improvements in forecasting when sentiment is considered along with macroeconomic factors. In addition, we also find that sentiment matters to explains the tails of the probability distribution across several macroeconomic variables., Comment: 46 pages, 11 figures, to be published in Journal of Business & Economic Statistics

We study retail shareholder voting using a nearly comprehensive sample of U.S. ownership and voting records. Analyzing turnout within a rational-choice framework, we find participation increases with ownership and expected benefits from winning and decreases with higher costs of participation. Even shareholders with a negligible likelihood of affecting the outcome have non zero turnout, consistent with consumption benefits from voting. Conditional on participation, retail shareholders punish the management of poorly performing firms. Overall, our evidence provides support for the idea that retail shareholders utilize their voting power to monitor firms and communicate with incumbent boards and management.

In this paper we empirically investigate the drivers of genuine FDI inflows in advanced economies for the period 1985–2018. Our contribution to the existing literature is two-fold. First, we use newly available data of genuine FDI flows analysing the role of statistical artefacts, such as special purpose entities and financial round-tripping in headline FDI data. Second, we augment the traditional analysis on the drivers of FDI inflows in advanced economies by considering a range of potential factors which are under the policy makers’ control, i.e. measures that proxy for a country's quality of economic structures. Our results show that it is important to get the data right. In particular, more recently, total FDI data became increasingly distorted thus prompting misspecifications if not cleaned beforehand. Moreover, we suggest that there is a significant empirical relation between the quality of a host country's economic structures and FDI inflows. Our findings are robust to various economic specifications.

Cumulative abnormal returns around proxy statements containing “in-depth” disclosures of planning for CEO succession are significantly positive indicating that succession planning is a value-adding undertaking. Further analyses, including exploiting a 2009 SEC ruling that induced more disclosures of succession planning, indicate that succession planning is not a one-size-fits-all undertaking in that succession planning is value-enhancing only for larger, older, more complex firms with lower stock return volatility. Other analyses support that in-depth disclosure of succession planning is a credible signal of actual planning and that in-depth disclosure of succession planning is value-reducing for firms that “should not” plan for succession.

Sit-to-stand (STS) transfer is an easy everyday activity for healthy people, but it is a challenging task for the elderly, and patients with lower-limb dysfunctions. This paper presents an intelligent assistive walker which assists the user accomplish safe STS transfers. An STS intention recognition method is proposed based on an optimized adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), where the walker can detect a voluntary STS accurately and appropriate controller is applied accordingly. The walker is controlled by a proxy-based controller with respect to the detected human intention, that is measured using thin-film Force Sensing Resistors (FSRs). During the STS transfer, the assistance force is generated on-line using a virtual spring-damper between the proxy and the linear actuator of the assistive walker. The stability of the proposed controller is theoretically analyzed, and verified by simulations. Experiments with five young healthy subjects and one elderly subject demonstrated that the proposed assistive walker is able to efficiently follow the user's intention to complete stable and compliant STS transfers.

Person-centred care requires improved documentation of nursing home resident wellbeing, e.g. by nursing staff proxy assessments. Previous studies mainly focused on proxy self-report agreement of quality of life of people with dementia, using lengthy questionnaires. This is the first study to investigate how well nursing staff assess residents’ wellbeing after training, using a single-question assessment method of happiness and engagement. We conducted a cross-sectional mixed-method study, including proxy assessments from 49 nursing staff, and self-reports from 49 nursing home residents without dementia (mean age 85). We explored agreement between colleagues, and between proxy assessments and self-reports, and potential nursing staff characteristics associated to this (age, experience, hours worked per week). Brief written motivations were evaluated on nursing staffs’ understanding of the happiness and engagement concepts. The results showed low agreement between colleagues, and low agreement between proxy assessments and self-reports. Nursing staff assessed happiness and engagement substantially higher than residents’ self-reports. Hours worked per week was related to happiness proxy assessments, but none of the included nursing staff characteristics were related to proxy self-report agreement. Nursing staff interpreted the concepts in diverse ways. Overestimating resident wellbeing when using this single-assessment method may undermine subsequent efforts to improve wellbeing. We could not identify which nursing staff could best provide wellbeing assessments. For now, proxy wellbeing assessments should always be combined with regular self-reports whenever possible.

The $F_{10.7cm}$ radio flux and the Sunspot Number are the most widely used long-term indices of solar activity. They are strongly correlated, which led to the publication of many proxy relations allowing to convert one index onto the other. However, those existing proxies show significant disagreements, in particular at low solar activity. Our aim is to bring a global clarification of those many issues. We compute new polynomial regressions up to degree 4, in order to obtain a more accurate proxy. We also study the role of temporal averaging on the regression, and we investigate the issue of the all-quiet $F_{10.7}$ background flux. Finally, we check for any change in the $F_{10.7}$ -- sunspot number relation over the entire period 1947 -- 2015. We find that, with a $4^{th}$-degree polynomial, we obtain a more accurate proxy relation than all previous published ones, and we derive a formula giving standard errors. The relation is different for daily, monthly and yearly mean values, and it proves to be fully linear for raw non-averaged daily data. By a simple two-component model for daily values, we show how temporal averaging leads to non-linear proxy relations. We also show that the quiet-Sun $F_{10.7}$ background is not absolute and actually depends on the duration of the spotless periods. Finally, we find that the $F_{10.7cm}$ time series is inhomogeneous, with an abrupt 10.5% upward jump occurring between 1980 and 1981. Our new proxy relations show the importance of temporal scale for choosing the appropriate proxy and the $F_{10.7}$ quiet-Sun background level. From historical evidence, we conclude that the 1981 jump is most likely due to a unique change in the $F_{10.7}$ scientific team and the data processing, and that the newly re-calibrated sunspot number (version2) will probably provide the only possible reference to correct this inhomogeneity., 51 pages, 27 figures, 10 tables

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.

We propose a bridging model that connects risk-based factor models to sentiment models by using characteristics. Investors use stock characteristics as information to form their biased view and hence creating mispricing. Characteristics also serve as the proxy for the covariance risk to a latent factor. The α from our factor model of mispricing ranges from 0.70% to 1.38% monthly after controlling for other common factors and mispricing measures. Well-known anomalies are only represented in either underpriced or overpriced stocks but not in all the cross-section.

International technological diffusion is a key determinant of cross-country differences in economic performance. While patents can be a useful proxy for innovation and technological change and diffusion, fully exploiting patent data for such economic analyses requires patents to be tied to measures of economic activity. In this paper, we describe and explore a new algorithmic approach to constructing concordances between the International Patent Classification (IPC) system that organizes patents by technical features and industry classification systems that organize economic data, such as the Standard International Trade Classification (SITC), the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) and the Harmonized System (HS). This ‘Algorithmic Links with Probabilities’ (ALP) approach incorporates text analysis software and keyword extraction programs and applies them to a comprehensive patent dataset. We compare the results of several ALP concordances to existing technology concordances. Based on these comparisons, we select a preferred ALP approach and discuss advantages of this approach relative to conventional approaches. We conclude with a discussion on some of the possible applications of the concordance and provide a sample analysis that uses our preferred ALP concordance to analyze international patent flows based on trade patterns.

This paper examines the effect of corporate social responsibility on firm performance by accounting for the role of Intellectual capital efficiency as a mechanism underlying Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)– firm performance association. In this study, we consider 2132 US companies and develop a structural model for CSR, Intellectual Capital (IC), and firm performance while contemplating endogeneity issues in analyses over the period of 2009–2018. The value-added intellectual capital co-efficient is employed as a proxy measure for IC performance, taking into consideration corporate performance and governance measures. The findings suggest that CSR has a significant effect on firm performance. In particular, the findings reveal that CSR has a link with IC, indirectly affecting a firm performance, and the association between CSR and firm performance is partially mediated by Intellectual capital efficiency.

In this article, we study the effect of peer influence on products that exhibit positive network externalities to non-adopters (i.e., products that benefit adopters’ friends even if they do not adopt). Contrary to products that exhibit positive network externalities upon adoption, this structure of incentives likely results in negative peer influence: the more friends that adopted the product, the smaller the incentives to adopt. We measure this effect empirically by using observational data from a large mobile carrier serving 5.7 million users. We estimate the effect of peer influence across five different products of this type. A naive approach to do so results in a positive estimate for peer influence, due to unobserved homophily. We follow two approaches to address this issue. First, we suggest using the number of friends that end up adopting the product as a proxy for unobserved user fixed effects. Second, we control for homophily by applying a shuffle test (i.e., we compare the effect of peer influence from the original data with the effect obtained from comparable, randomly generated data without peer influence). We obtain negative estimates from both approaches, which provides robustness to our findings. Finally, we show that even for these products, the effect of peer influence associated with the first friends that adopt the product is positive, which arises because they still convey useful information about reducing uncertainty. The negative effect of peer influence arises only for the subsequent friends that adopt the product. These friends are unlikely to convey new information about the product, but each of them decreases the economic incentive to adopt, resulting in a negative aggregate effect of peer influence.

Recent empirical evidence has shown that firm’s innovation behavior exhibits high persistency but not much is known about potential contingencies affecting the degree of persistence. This paper focuses on the role of the local knowledge environment and asks how local knowledge spillovers affect firms' innovation persistence. The empirical analysis draws upon a representative panel data set of firms in Germany from 2002-2016, complemented by detailed geographic information of patent activity over discrete distances to proxy local knowledge spillovers. Based on correlated random effects probit models that control for state dependence, unobserved individual heterogeneity and endogenous initial conditions, our results corroborate former evidence that persistency in innovation is driven by true state dependence. More importantly, we find that the local patenting activity positively moderates firms' degree of persistency in innovation behavior. This is a novel firm-level mechanism that can explain the widening of spatial disparities in innovation performance. Estimations with different distance bands show that the strength of knowledge spillovers that contribute to innovation persistence via true state dependence declines rather rapidly with increasing distance.

Estimating tail risk measures for portfolios of complex variable annuities is an important enterprise risk management task which usually requires nested simulation. In the nested simulation, the outer simulation stage involves projecting scenarios of key risk factors under the real-world measure, while the inner simulations are used to value pay-offs under guarantees of varying complexity, under a risk-neutral measure. In this paper, we propose and analyse an efficient simulation approach that dynamically allocates the inner simulations to the specific outer scenarios that are most likely to generate larger losses. These scenarios are identified using a proxy calculation that is used only to rank the outer scenarios, not to estimate the tail risk measure directly. As the proxy ranking will not generally provide a perfect match to the true ranking of outer scenarios, we calculate a measure based on the concomitant of order statistics to test whether further tail scenarios are required to ensure, with given confidence, that the true tail scenarios are captured. This procedure, which we call the dynamic importance allocated nested simulation approach, automatically adjusts for the relationship between the proxy calculations and the true valuations and also signals when the proxy is not sufficiently accurate.

We compare non-GAAP earnings per share (EPS) in firms’ annual earnings announcements and proxy statements using hand-collected data from U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings. We find that proxies for capital market incentives (contracting incentives) are more highly associated with firms’ disclosure of non-GAAP EPS in annual earnings announcements (proxy statements). However, we find systematic differences in the properties of firms’ non-GAAP earnings and exclusions depending on whether they disclose non-GAAP EPS in both the earnings announcement and the proxy statement. When firms disclose non-GAAP EPS in both documents, we find that non-GAAP EPS is more useful for assessing firm value. Specifically, these firms are more likely to: (1) exclude nonrecurring items, (2) exclude less persistent earnings components, and (3) provide less aggressive non-GAAP EPS. Our results suggest that non-GAAP EPS is higher in quality for investors when disclosed in both the annual earnings announcement and the proxy statement. We provide some of the first large-sample evidence consistent with the use of non-GAAP EPS metrics in both financial reporting and compensation contracting. This paper was accepted by Brian Bushee, accounting.

OBJECTIVE Subjective memory decline (SMD) has been identified as a potential early marker of nonnormal and accelerated cognitive decline. We performed data-driven analyses that integrated trajectory classification with prediction modeling to test declining trajectory class prediction by SMD facets, pulse pressure (PP; i.e., a robust proxy for vascular health), and sex. METHOD The longitudinal design featured memory trajectories across a 40-year band (55-95 years) of nondemented aging (N = 580; Mage = 70.2 years; 65% female) from the Victoria Longitudinal Study. First, latent class growth analyses identified distinct classes of memory trajectories. Second, we used the three-step method (R3STEP) to predict membership in the declining memory classes using six measures: memory complaints, memory concerns, memory compensation, memory self-efficacy, PP, and sex. RESULTS First, we identified four classes of memory aging trajectories: (a) stable memory aging (STABLE), (b) typical memory aging (TYPICAL), (c) slowly declining memory aging (SLOW), and (d) rapidly declining memory aging (RAPID). Second, more memory concerns predicted membership in the SLOW and RAPID classes. Higher PP predicted membership in the SLOW class. Male sex predicted membership in the declining (TYPICAL, SLOW, RAPID) classes. CONCLUSION Among SMD facets, memory concerns represent the most severe degree of apprehension about subjectively experienced memory losses. The present integrative data-driven analysis indicated that such concerns predicted membership in declining memory trajectory classes in addition to worse vascular health (higher PP) and sex (male). In nondemented aging, concerns about increasing memory failures may be veridical indicators of memory loss, especially when coupled with vascular comorbidity and being male. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The academic debate on whether there is a “resource curse” has lasted for nearly three decades. This paper aims to verify the existence of a “resource curse” with the proposed new model, named the generalised weighted least squares support vector panel regression (GWLS-SVPR) model, from the perspective of spatial heterogeneity, in response to the debate of scholars. Our case study focuses on the data of 31 regions in China from 2009 to 2018. The results show that the impact of natural resources on economic growth has spatial correlation and heterogeneity, and different proxy variables have different conclusions. Overall, it is easier to conclude that there is a “resource curse” by using resource dependence as a substitute variable for natural resources than by using resource abundance. Using per capita GDP as the proxy variable of economic growth is easier to get the conclusion that there is no “resource curse” than per capita GDP growth rate. After considering both spatial heterogeneity and proxy variable differences, we conclude that a “resource curse” does exist in some regions of China, but there are obvious spatial differences.

An emerging literature is experimenting with using survey response behavior as a proxy for hard-to-measure abilities. We contribute to this literature by formalizing this idea and evaluating its benefits and risks. Using a standard and nationally representative survey from Australia, we demonstrate that the survey item-response rate (SIRR), a straightforward summary measure of response behavior, varies more with cognitive than with noncognitive ability. We evaluate whether SIRR is a useful proxy to reduce ability-related biases in a standard economic application. We show empirically that SIRR, although a weak and imperfect proxy, leads to omitted-variable bias reductions of up to 20%, and performs better than other proxy variables derived from paradata. Deriving the necessary and sufficient conditions for a valid proxy, we show that a strong proxy is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to reduce estimation biases. A critical consideration is to which degree the proxy introduces a multicollinearity problem, a finding of general interest. We illustrate the theoretical derivations with an empirical application.

Coverage surveys for mass drug administration (MDA) rely on respondent recall and often permit proxy responses, whereby another household member is allowed to respond on behalf of an absent individual. In this secondary analysis of coverage surveys in Malawi, Burkina Faso, and Uganda, we explore the characteristics of individuals who require proxy responses and quantify the association between proxy responses and reported drug coverage. The adjusted logistic regression model found that men 11–39 years and women 11–18 years who were eligible for MDA had greater odds of requiring a proxy response compared with ineligible men and women in the same age groups. A hierarchical multivariable analysis found that proxy responses had 1.70 times the odds of reporting ingestion of MDA drugs compared with first-person responses, controlling for age and sex (95% CI: 1.17, 2.46). This finding is surprising, given that individuals absent during a coverage survey may also have been absent during the MDA, and suggests that proxy responses may be leading to an inflation of survey estimates of drug coverage. This study highlights the possibility for recall bias in proxy responses to MDA coverage; however, excluding absent individuals from coverage surveys would introduce a new bias. Further research is necessary to determine the best method for obtaining information on drug coverage when individuals are absent.

A high level of information asymmetry is characterizing for venture capital investments making new information about entrepreneurial companies especially valuable for a venture capitalist’s valuation process. This paper uses text classification and text mining methodology to extract structured data about capital allocation plans in a unique sample of 1,550 European funding rounds that serves as proxy for the private informational updates shared with investors by entrepreneurs. We show that venture capitalists incorporate the content and specificity of information into their valuation process. Further, results confirm that the value of new information is dependent on the prevailing level of information asymmetry.

It is often believed that investment enhances welfare, particularly through channels of capital creation, employment generation, and output growth. Two commonly used measures of a nation’s ability to attract investment are the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) and the Ease of Doing Business Index (EDBI). This paper attempts to estimate the causal link between these indices and per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). A positive relation between these would essentially vindicate the theory that better investment implies better prosperity. Two complementary methods are used for estimating the effects, viz, reduced form analysis and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). SFA is an appealing method but to have a convincing SFA setup and eventually get at causal estimates, endogeneity issues need to be addressed. Reduced form setting using fixed effects and proxy variables provides the required foundation for the SFA. Overall, we find evidence of a positive relation between GCI and per capita GDP.

Proxy cache access speeds and decreases load time. There is an uncertainty regarding cache level 2 which you neglect. This research shall investigate the L1 cache, primary cache, and L2 cache as a secondary proxy server cache. LRU is typically utilised instead of cache. LRU for cold cache removal used to be a time-consuming process, but it isn't particularly efficient today. The performance of the cache L1 used LRU and L2 used LRU_AVL has risen with these solutions. The output is the LRU_AVL among other ways that utilize LRU tables and graphs. proxy cache LRU, LRU_AVL, and LRU_BST have average time of access calculated. Median access time is estimated using Python tools including Pandas, MatPlotLib as well as LRU, LRU_AVL, and LRU_BST. This research will anticipate the average period of usage of LRU, LRU_AVL, and LRU_BST cache algorithms.

This paper investigates the cross-sectional relation between industry-level media tone and expected stock returns in China. Using a machine learning technique to establish a proxy for industry-level media tone, we find that stocks in industries with more positive media tone earn significantly higher future returns than these with more negative media tone. Specifically, relative to stock-specific media tone, industry media tone plays a dominant role in forecasting stock returns. Moreover, the return premium for higher industry-level media tone continues for two months, and the returns are positive though insignificant within half a year, indicating that the media contains fundamental information.

We propose an optimal currency hedging strategy for global equity investors using currency value, carry, and momentum to proxy for expected currency returns. A benchmark risk constraint ensures the overlay closely mimics a fully hedged portfolio. We compare this with naïve and alternative hedges in a demanding out-of-sample test, with transaction and rebalancing costs and margin requirements. Other hedging methods generally reduce risk but at a cost. Some tend to short currencies with high returns and all incur substantial costs with frictions, mostly margin requirements and equity rebalancing costs. The proposed strategy uses predictable returns to reduce this cost. It produces a statistically significant 17% gain in Sharpe ratio and an annualized Jensen-α of 0.93% versus a fully hedged benchmark. Notably, most of the implementation costs of the strategy would be incurred by the benchmark anyway. This reduces its marginal cost and highlights a specific synergy of integrating hedging with speculation. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.

Poor quality of care may have a detrimental effect on access and take-up and can become a serious barrier to the universality of health services. This consideration is of particular interest in view of the fact that health systems in many countries must address a growing public-sector deficit and respond to increasing pressures due to COVID-19 and aging population, among other factors. In line with a rapidly emerging literature, we focus on patient satisfaction as a proxy for quality of health care. Drawing on rich longitudinal and cross-sectional data for Spain and multilevel estimation techniques, we show that in addition to individual level differences, policy levers (such as public health spending and the patient-doctor ratio, in particular) exert a considerable influence on the quality of a health care system. Our results suggest that policymakers seeking to enhance the quality of care should be cautious when compromising the level of health resources, and in particular, health personnel, as a response to economic downturns in a sector that traditionally had insufficient human resources in many countries, which have become even more evident in the light of the current health crisis. Additionally, we provide evidence that the increasing reliance on the private health sector may be indicative of inefficiencies in the public system and/or the existence of features of private insurance which are deemed important by patients., Ministerio de Economia Industria y Competitividad, y Ministerio de Ciencia Innovación y Universidades: PID2019-105688RB-I00 and ECO2015-66553-R

We assess the relative importance of individual macroeconomic variables in explaining the time series variation of a broad range of characteristic-sorted portfolios. Employing an optimal orthogonalization approach, the explained variation in each characteristic-sorted portfolio is decomposed into components associated with individual macroeconomic variables. When examined unconditionally, the set of macroeconomic variables account for only limited explained variation. This low explained variation is partially resolved by allowing for dynamic and non-linear macroeconomic exposure. Finally, we highlight a degree of commonality in the explained macroeconomic variation associated with various characteristic-sorted portfolios, indicating that they proxy for particular macroeconomic characteristics simultaneously.

The extant research has often examined the work-related experiences of corporate executives, but their off-the-job activities could be just as insightful. This study employs a novel proxy for the risky hobbies of chief executive officers (CEOs)—CEOs’ hobby of piloting a private aircraft—and investigates its effect on credit stakeholders’ evaluation of the firms led by the CEOs as reflected in bank loan contracting. Using a longitudinal data set on CEOs of large United States-listed firms across multiple industries between 1993 and 2010, we obtain strong evidence that bank loans to firms steered by CEOs who fly private jets as a hobby tend to incur a higher cost of debt, to be secured, to have more covenants, and to be syndicated. These effects are mainly driven by banks, which perceive such firms as having a higher default risk. These relationships become stronger when the CEO is more important to the firm and/or can exercise stronger control over decision making. Supplemented by field interviews, our results are also robust to various endogeneity checks using different experimental designs, the Heckman two-stage model, a propensity score-matching approach, a difference-in-differences test, and the impact threshold of confounding variables.

Personal choices can be changed by educating citizens. Education and learning are decisive factors in shaping the society and its spatial forms, where higher education level is an important proxy to assess the awareness level of people about current issues, such as sustainable transportation. Linking education and travel behaviour can inspire future urban policies to provide modal shift towards sustainable modes. The paper aimed to evaluate the influence of education level on mode choices for 45 cities from 29 countries. In general, education level was controlled by population density and GDP per capita, which are the parameters significantly influencing travel behavior. The main result has demonstrated that an increase in the higher education level is connected with dropping the modal share of driving in cities more than any change in other studied factors, while an increase in population density reduces driving more than an increase in GDP per capita. The results have been assessed and it was showed that higher education level considerably affects travel mode choice in cities. Thus, educating citizens is an important path to reduce car dependency.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate safe-haven properties of environmental, social and governance (ESG) stocks in global and emerging ESG stock markets during the times of COVID-19 so that portfolio managers and equity market investors could decide to use ESG stocks in their portfolio hedging strategies during times of health and market crisis similar to COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach The study uses a wavelet coherence framework on four major ESG stock indices from global and emerging stock markets, and two proxies of COVID-19 fear over the period from 5 February 2020 to 18 March 2021. Findings The results of the study show a positive co-movement of the global COVID-19 fear index (GFI) with ESG stock indices on the frequency band of 32 to 64 days, which confirms hedging and safe-haven properties of ESG stocks using the health fear proxy of COVID-19. However, the relationship between all indices and GFI is mixed and inconclusive on a frequency of 0–8 days. Further, the findings do not support the safe-haven characteristics of ESG indices using the market fear proxy (IDEMV index) of COVID-19. The robustness analysis using the CBOE VIX as a proxy of market fear supports that ESG indices do not possess safe-haven properties. The results of the study conclude that the safe-haven properties of ESG indices during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is contingent upon the proxy of COVID-19 fear. Practical implications The findings have important implications for the equity investors and assetty managers to improve their portfolio performance by including ESG stocks in their portfolio choice during the COVID-19 pandemic and similar health crisis. However, their investment decisions could be affected by the choice of COVID-19 proxy. Originality/value The authors believe in the originality of the paper due to following reasons. First, to the best of the knowledge, this is the first study investigating the safe-haven properties of ESG stocks. Second, the authors use both health fear (GFI) and market fear (IDEMV index) proxies of COVID-19 to compare whether safe-haven properties are characterized by health fear or market fear due to COVID-19. Finally, the authors use the wavelet coherency framework, which not only takes both time and frequency dimensions of the data into account but also remains unaffected by data stationarity and size issues.

This study presents new ecomorphological models for the cervid calcaneus that can be used to make predictions about the nature of ancient environments. Using geometric morphometrics to quantitatively assess the length of the articular surface supporting the malleolus, the length and orientation of the tuber calcanei, and the position of the articular facets, we aimed to establish correlations between morphological traits, locomotor behavior, and environmental parameters in extant cervids. The morphology of the calcaneus was found to primarily vary with locomotor strategy and habitat, along a continuum from habitats with an open vegetation structure to habitats with a closed vegetation structure. Confounding factors, including sexual dimorphism, allometry, and phylogeny were accounted for using Principal Component Analysis, regressions and phylogenetic comparative methods. The results of our analyses suggested that these factors did not substantially obscure habitat predictions. As such, the calcaneus provides a valuable proxy for paleoenvironmental reconstruction that is broadly applicable to Quaternary fossil assemblages with a sufficiently large sample of cervids.

Many studies use GAAP effective tax rates (ETRs) as a proxy for tax avoidance and assume that very low (high) ETRs represent the greatest (least) tax avoidance, yet ETRs can be affected by items unrelated to tax avoidance. Despite awareness of the potential limitations of ETRs as a measure of tax avoidance, the literature lacks consistent evidence on the extent to which ETRs capture tax avoidance versus other factors. We take a step toward filling this void using income tax footnote disclosures from 2008 through 2016 to investigate how well ETRs capture cross-sectional differences in tax avoidance versus other factors. We document that ETRs below 5% and above 40% are significantly influenced by items largely unrelated to tax avoidance, such as valuation allowances and goodwill impairments. Truncating ETRs at zero and one, controlling for standard determinants of tax avoidance, and using industry-size-adjusted ETRs or multiyear GAAP ETRs do not eliminate the clustering of factors largely unrelated to tax avoidance in the tails of the ETR distribution. Cash ETRs attenuate but do not eliminate this clustering. Researchers can use ETR rate reconciliation data to construct an adjusted ETR that removes the influence of factors largely unrelated to tax avoidance. Our findings inform researchers about factors largely unrelated to tax avoidance that drive significant deviations in ETRs from the statutory tax rate. This is of increasing importance as the number of studies examining the consequences of very high and very low ETRs grows.

Advocates for older central cities increasingly refer to them as “legacy cities” in an attempt to shift policy discussions from their social liabilities to their economic assets. In examining this concept, we place U.S. central cities within the context of their regions and use cluster-discriminant analysis to distinguish between groups of regional economies. The cluster analysis subsets metropolitan areas according to their shared position on several theory-driven dimensions. The discriminate analysis identifies the variables that are most closely associated with the statistical grouping of each subset. The results are used to answer a series of questions: 1) Is population size a good proxy for agglomeration? 2) Do small legacy regions exist? 3) Does the typology of legacy regions provide insights about the economic performance of the clusters? Our findings suggest that the economic development paths of regional economies have to change before the future of central cities that experienced severe population losses can shift to a positive trajectory.

PURPOSE Authorship is a proxy indicator of research capacity. Understanding the research capacity is imperative for developing population-specific cancer control strategies. This is particularly apropos for African nations, where mortality from cancer is projected to surpass that from infectious disease and the populations are critically under-represented in cancer and genomics studies. Here, we present an analysis and discussion of the patterns of authorship in Africa as they pertain to cancer genomics research across African countries. METHODS PubMed metadata of relevant cancer genomics peer-reviewed publications on African populations, published between January 1, 1990, and December 31, 2019, were retrieved and analyzed for patterns of authorship affiliation using R packages, RISmed, and Pubmed.mineR. RESULTS The data showed that only 0.016% (n = 375) of cancer publications globally were on cancer genomics of African people. More than 50% of the first and last authors of these publications originated from the North African countries of Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and Algeria. South Africa (13.6% and 12.7%) and Nigeria (2.2% and 1.9%) were the Sub-Saharan African countries most represented by first and last authorship positions, respectively. The United States contributed 12.6% of first and last authored papers, and nearly 50% of all African countries had no contributing author for the publications we reviewed. CONCLUSION This study highlights and brings awareness to the paucity of cancer genomics research on African populations and by African authors and identifies a need for concerted efforts to encourage and enable more research in Africa, needed for achieving global equity in cancer outcomes.