Competition and Relationship Lending: Friends or Foes?

Competition and quality: friends or foes?

The extensive promotion and proliferation of articles and learned essays on Total Quality Management (TQM) have filled the pages of magazines, conference proceedings and academic journals such as this over the past few years. A limited number of commentators have stuck their necks out to question some of the supposed gains that such a managerial revolution can have in terms of the intended bene...

Bank Competition and Financial Stability: Friends or Foes?

Theory makes ambiguous predictions about the relationship between market structure and competitiveness of the banking system and banking sector stability. Empirical studies focusing on individual countries provide similarly ambiguous results, while cross-country studies point mostly to a positive relationship between competition and stability in the banking system. Where liberalization and unfe...

Phytoestrogens. Friends or foes?

BioInformatics Pipeline Alternative Splicing Services (BIPASS) offer support to scientists interested in gathering information related to alternative splicing (AS) events. The service BIPAS–SpliceDB provides access to AS information that has been extracted a priori from various public databases and stored in a data warehouse. In contrast, the BIPAS– Align&Splice service allows scientists to sub...

Beta-agonists--friends or foes?

Bacterial toxins: friends or foes?

Many emerging and reemerging bacterial pathogens synthesize toxins that serve as primary virulence factors. We highlight seven bacterial toxins produced by well-established or newly emergent pathogenic microbes. These toxins, which affect eukaryotic cells by a variety of means, include Staphylococcus aureus alpha-toxin, Shiga toxin, cytotoxic necrotizing factor type 1, Escherichia coli heat-sta...