The impact of exporting on SME capital structure and debt maturity choices. National Bank of Belgium Working Paper No. 311

Using a longitudinal dataset comprising of detailed financial and exporting data from Belgian small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) between 1998 and 2013, this article examines the manner in which firms manage to finance their export activities and the resulting impact on corporate capital structure. We find that exporters have to finance relatively more working capital as compared to their non-exporting peers and that they resolve this financing need by carrying more short-term debt. In addition, we evidence that the relationship between pledgeable short-term assets, such as working capital, and short-term debt financing is more pronounced for exporters. In particular, we show that the ties between pledgeable short-term assets and short-term debt financing are stronger for export- intensive firms and firms that serve distant and risky export destinations. Overall, what our empirical findings seem to suggest is that developing tools that facilitate the pledging of assets is likely to boost SME export activities by widening access to bank financing and reducing financial constraints

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Untersuchungen zur in vivo und in vitro Expression des Membranproteins Bacteriorhodopsin in Mitochondrien

The light-driven proton pump bacteriorhodopsin (bR) from Halobacterium salinarum was fused to the mitochondrial signal sequence of Neurospora crassa 's ATPase subunit 9 and parts of bR were fused to the mitochondrial signal sequence of the subunit IV of the cytochrorne-c-oxidase of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. During expression of these geneconstructs in the cytoplasm of Schizosaccharomyces pombe only a small fraction of the fusion protein was imported into the mitochondria. The same constructs were tested for import into isolated mitochondria from Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces pombe. This in vitro assay gave no evidence for an import of these proteins into the mitochondria. For the expression of bR in the mitochondrial matrix of Saccharomyces cerevisiae a gene for bR was adapted to the genetic code of these mitochondria. The gene was brought into the mitochondria via biolistic transformation and integrated into a complete mitochondrial DNA at the gene location for the subunit III of the cytochrome-c-oxidase, using homologous recombination. The transcription of the gene for bR in the mitochondrial matrix has been shown, but no translation product was detected. In summary, these experiments demonstrate that important problems about the import of very hydrophobic proteins into mitochondria are still unsolved. Transcription of bR in the matrix of yeast mitochondria is the first demonstrated transcription of a heterologous gene encoding a membrane protein in mitochondria

Broadening the awareness and communicating long term strategies towards sustainability - some insights from the REFLEX project

QC 20201102</p

Broadening the awareness and communicating long term strategies towards sustainability - some insights from the REFLEX project

QC 20201102</p

Broadening the awareness and communicating long term strategies towards sustainability - some insights from the REFLEX project

QC 20201102</p