Mammary metabolic activity in pregnant rats is significantly increased in response to spaceflight. To determine whether changes in mammary metabolism are related to gravity load, we exposed pregnant rats to hypergravity and measured mammary metabolic activity. From days 11-20 of gestation (G), animals were centrifuged (20 rpm; 1.5, 1.75, or 2.0 x gravity) or were maintained at 1 G. On G20, five...

As the pace of automation is picking up, the challenge for governments is to make the digital revolution inclusive by helping workers shift into new and better paid jobs. This report has identified three complementary approaches for achieving this. First, governments must support the reallocation process by providing additional incentives for businesses to invest for new job creation, while red...

This paper examines the performance and diversification properties of active Australian equity fund-of-funds (FoF). Simulation analysis is employed to examine portfolio performance as a function of the number of funds in the portfolio. The paper finds that as the number of funds in a FoF portfolio increases, performance improves in a mean-variance setting, however measures of skewness and kurto...

This paper establishes that the profit-seeking activities of private intermediaries can ensure Pareto efficiency in the standard pure-exchange monetary overlapping generations economy without the need for government monetary or fiscal policy intervention. Moreover, these profit-seeking activities are shown to rule out all aperiodic and kperiodic cycles for k greater than 2. Contrary to much rec...

By the methods of bioinformatics, the sequences of HCV E2 protein from all the genotypes are studied on the variation and the B-cell epitopes. We find that even in the HVR1 and HVR2 regions, there are also some conservative sites, such as T2, G6, G23, and Q26, all of which belong to polar R-base amino acids without charge, and can lost proton to conform hydrogen bond. Meanwhile, we find the con...

Little is known about the molecular genetic diversity of most Passiflora species. We used RAPD markers to evaluate the genetic diversity of 24 genotypes of the 'sleep' passion fruit (Passiflora setacea). Twelve primers generated 95 markers, 88% of which were polymorphic. The genetic distance estimated by the complement of the Dice index ranged from 0.29 (among accessions Ps-G1 and Ps-G13) ...

This questionnaire survey of fund managers in the United States, Germany and Switzerland documents a distinctly positive influence of bonus payments on investment behavior on both sides of the Atlantic. Higher bonus payments are significantly related to higher working effort but not to risk taking. They also seem to induce fund managers to rely more on fundamental information. Findings within r...

We document that in M&As a significant proportion of targets’ equity is owned by financial institutions that simultaneously own targets’ bonds (“dual holders”). Targets with larger equity ownership by dual holders have lower M&A equity premia and larger abnormal bond returns, particularly when dual holders stand to benefit more from appreciation of their bond stakes, e.g., when their bond owner...

Shadow banking in China is mainly conducted by banks to evade the excessive credit control, which constitutes a dual-track approach to liberalize the country’s rigid interest rate policy. The market track of shadow banking can lead to efficiency gain by allowing credit resale to fund the more productive yet credit-deprived private enterprises (PEs). Pareto improvement can be achieved as the ban...

This chapter focuses on institutional investors in the German financial markets. Institutional investors are specialized financial intermediaries who collect and manage funds on behalf of small investors toward specific objectives in terms of risk, return and maturity. The major types of institutional investors in Germany are insurance companies and investment funds. We will examine the nature ...