Asymmetric volatility refers to the stylized fact that stock volatility is negatively correlated to stock returns. Traditionally, this phenomenon has been explained by the financial leverage effect. This explanation has recently been challenged in favor of a risk premium based explanation. We develop a new, unlevering approach to document how well financial leverage, rather than size, beta, boo...

Prion diseases, also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, are fatal neurodegenerative disorders. Low levels of infectious agent and limited, infrequent success of disease transmissibility and PrP(Sc) detection have been reported with urine from experimentally infected clinical cervids and rodents. We report the detection of prion disease-associated seeding activity (PASA) in urin...

Controlling for idiosyncratic volatility, large stocks earn higher returns than small stocks. Idiosyncratic volatility is positively related to return, but negatively related to size. Failure to control for idiosyncratic volatility generates a downward omitted variable bias, leading to the widely documented negative size-return relation. We explain the two contrasting sizereturn relations in a ...

Received: August 08, 2009 Revised: September 10, 2009 Accepted: October 24, 2009

In February 2008, a private physician in North Dakota radiographed hunterharvested venison and found that 60 of 100 packages contained metal fragments. This discovery had implications for public-funded venison donation programs, and it prompted several Midwest states to examine their programs. Approximately 500,000 deer hunters harvest >200,000 deer annually in Minnesota, and the state has a do...

The objectives of the present study were to identify additional genes that may play important roles in the regulation of skeletal muscle growth and development, and to provide fundamental information for understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms. Eighteen cDNA libraries were constructed from the longissimus muscle of Polled Dorset (PD) and Small-tailed Han (SH) fetuses. To reveal the di...

BACKGROUND: The acute phase response is beneficial to theanimal in restoring homeostasis, and measuring the circulatingacute phase proteins, cytokines, and enzymes can be used toevaluate the innate immune system's responses to invader agentssuch as bacterial lipopolysaccharide. Measurement of theseparameters has shown to be useful as diagnostic and prognosticmarkers in animal endotoxemia. OBJEC...