The Long-run and Short-run Impact of Exchange Rate Devaluation on Pakistan's Trade Performance

In estimating trade elasticities for Pakistan, most previous researchers have employed non-stationary data and OLS or 2SLS techniques. In this paper we use Johansen’s cointegration methodology to re-investigate the long-run trade elasticities and existence of the Marshall-Lerner condition. Using quarterly data, the trade performance with Pakistan’s ten major trading partners is empirically tested. Moreover, we also investigate the short-run exchange rate dynamics by constructing an error-corrrection model to trace the j-curve.

Bricks and urbanism in the Indus Valley rise and decline

The Indus Civilization, often denoted by its major city Harappa, spanned almost two millennia from 3200 to 1300 BC. Its tradition reaches back to 7000 BC: a 5000 year long expansion of villages and towns, of trading activity, and of technological advancements culminates between 2600 and 1900 BC in the build-up of large cities, writing, and political authority; it emerges as one of the first great civilizations in history. During the ensuing 600 years, however, key technologies fall out of use, urban centers are depopulated, and people emigrate from former core settlement areas. Although many different hypotheses have been put forward to explain this deurbanization, a conclusive causal chain has not yet been established. We here combine literature estimates on brick typology, and on urban area for individual cities. In the context of the existing extensive data on Harappan artifact find sites and put in their chronological context, the combined narratives told by bricks, cities, and spatial extent can provide a new point of departure for discussing the possible reasons for the mysterious "decline".Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, Supplementary Material. Submitted to PLOS On

Economic Policies and the Impact of Natural Disasters on Economic Growth: A Threshold Regression Approach

This paper investigates the impact of natural disasters on the long-term macroeconomic performance of a country. More specifically, we want to see whether the impact of natural disasters on economic growth is uniform across countries or it is differentiated according to the macroeconomic policy environment and other structural characteristics of the countries at hand. In order to test this empirically we use the Threshold Regression (TR) approach of Hansen (2000) and data from 90 countries over the period of 1970 to 2001. Our analysis reveals several interesting patterns such as: countries with higher per capita income, higher government spending, higher degree of openness to trade, less fiscal imbalances and greater financial stability are better able to withstand the disaster shock and further prevent its impact on long-term economic growth.Natural Disasters, Economic Policies, Economic Growth, Threshold Regression

Work Family Conflict and Organizational Citizenship Behavior in Bank Employees

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of work family conflict on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) of employees. The study was conducted on the banks employees of Peshawar and data was collected from the employees of the banks. Results of the study showed the significant effect of work family conflict on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Keywords: Work family conflict, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB

Impact of Celebrity Endorsement on Customer’s Purchase Intention: Evidence from University Students of Karachi

The research objective is to investigate the relationship between the celebrity endorsed in advertisement and the customers buying behavior, and how do the celebrity’s physical attractiveness, expertise, trustworthiness and its attitude to word the brand and its advertisement can influence the purchase intension of customer. As celebrity endorsement is the latest marketing strategy to make the advertisement more attractive and effective for the organization. The collected data of 100 people was analyzed by regression in SPSS .which will help to analyze the hypothesis, that celebrity endorsements really have impact on customer purchase intension, if it has impact so how much the impact is savior. Further study can be conducted by increasing the demographic population and research horizon which may give a different result or a different direction which will be helpful for advertisement industry. Keywords: Celebrity Endorsement, Customer Behavior, Brand Perception, Purchase Intention, Celebrity endorsed ad

Lexico-thematic Coherence in the Waste Land

The general accusation against most of the post war literature regarding its incoherent and fragmentary nature has been widely accepted. Contrary to this allegation, I understand that despite being sketchy or fractional at the outset, modern literature does have internal unity. Without such an integrated organizational pattern, no piece of literature can qualify the test of time. The same applies to the Waste Land, a landmark in the 20th Century. Deeper level analyses at the aesthetic and semantic levels highlight an explicit coherent pattern in the poem. The specific lexical choice within the five parts of the poem demonstrates thematic development both at the individual parts and the entire poem as a whole. Thus, one observes that the Waste Land is an organic body composed of five disproportionate parts, all made up of the same lexico-thematic constituents. </p

Sentiment Classification of Online Customer Reviews and Blogs Using Sentence-level Lexical Based Semantic Orientation Method

ABSTRACT Sentiment analysis is the process of extracting knowledge from the peoples‟ opinions, appraisals and emotions toward entities, events and their attributes. These opinions greatly impact on customers to ease their choices regarding online shopping, choosing events, products and entities. With the rapid growth of online resources, a vast amount of new data in the form of customer reviews and opinions are being generated progressively. Hence, sentiment analysis methods are desirable for developing efficient and effective analyses and classification of customer reviews, blogs and comments. The main inspiration for this thesis is to develop high performance domain independent sentiment classification method. This study focuses on sentiment analysis at the sentence level using lexical based method for different type data such as reviews and blogs. The proposed method is based on general lexicons i.e. WordNet, SentiWordNet and user defined lexical dictionaries for sentiment orientation. The relations and glosses of these dictionaries provide solution to the domain portability problem. The experiments are performed on various data sets such as customer reviews and blogs comments. The results show that the proposed method with sentence contextual information is effective for sentiment classification. The proposed method performs better than word and text level corpus based machine learning methods for semantic orientation. The results highlight that the proposed method achieves an average accuracy of 86% at sentence-level and 97% at feedback level for customer reviews. Similarly, it achieves an average accuracy of 83% at sentence level and 86% at feedback level for blog comment

Studies Of Cells Within Three Chemosensory Structures In The Sea Lamprey (Petromyzon marinus)

Chemosensory systems play an important role in any organism collecting and processing information to regulate behaviours such as feeding, homing, avoidance and reproduction. In this thesis, I investigated the cells within the olfactory system and the diffuse chemosensory system of the sea lamprey. Calcium imaging of olfactory epithelial cellular responses to the polyamine odorants spermine and spermidine showed that separate cells responded to these odorants. The secondary goal of this thesis was focused on the loading of cells in the accessory olfactory organ (AOO) with neural activity indicators to examine the odorant response profiles of these cells. Multiple in vivo and electroporation dye loading strategies were attempted, with no successful loading of these cells. Investigating the AOO is still critical as it may provide insight into the importance of having more than one olfactory pathway. The third goal of this study was to investigate the location of nerve fibers on dermal papillae that contain solitary chemosensory cells (SCCs) of the diffuse chemosensory system. The findings show that nerve fibres entered the dermal papillae and, in many cases, were seen adjacent to SCCs in oral larval papillae and in nasal, gill and fin papillae following metamorphosis and in adults. This finding indicates that SCCs communicate with nerve fibers located in the cutaneous dermal papillae and that these fibers may be involved in processing sensory information that stimulates specific behavioural responses. Overall, this thesis examines the function of specific cells associated with lamprey chemosensory systems which may provide insight to appropriate behavioural responses necessary for survival and reproduction

The Long-run and Short-run Impact of Exchange Rate Devaluation on Pakistan’s Trade Performance

In estimating trade elasticities for Pakistan, most previous researchers have employed non-stationary data and OLS or 2SLS techniques. In this paper we use Johansen’s cointegration methodology to re-investigate the long-run trade elasticities and existence of the Marshall-Lerner condition. Using quarterly data, the trade performance with Pakistan’s ten major trading partners is empirically tested. Moreover, we also investigate the short-run exchange rate dynamics by constructing an error-corrrection model to trace the j-curve