Connections and Performance in Bankers' Turnover: Better Wed over the Mixen than over the Moor

In this paper we study top executive turnover in Italian Banks over the period 1993-2001. We relate the probability of survival of top executives (Presidents, CEOs and General Managers) to bank performance and the manager’s local connections, controlling for (observable and unobservable) bank and manager characteristics by exploiting longitudinal information on bank-manager appointments. We measure the extent? of managers’ local connections by the distance between the province of the bank’s headquarters and the manager’s province of birth. We show that top managers tend to be local in the sense that the distribution of this distance is heavily skewed towards zero. On the basis of this evidence, we address two questions. First, we investigate whether connections affect the duration of the appointment at the bank. Second, we ask whether connections entrench managers at the expense of the bank’s performance. We find that connections generally increase the probabilities of managerssurviving at their banks, and that the positive effect of performance on tenure (as amply documented by the executive turnover literature) disappears once connections are taken into account. On the other hand, we provide evidence against the hypothesis that managerial connections contain information valuable for enhancing a bank’s performance. In particular, we find that highly connected boards cause the shorter survival of banks, and that those who benefit from connections are top managers themselves (mostly Presidents and General Managers). This suggests that connections may be collusion devices with which to maintain and share rents.connections, executive turnover, commercial and cooperative banks

The particulars about particulates : metal exposure and self-regulation of children living near coal ash.

The use of coal combustion for electricity and the storage of coal combustion by-products known as coal ash occur across the United States and around the world. The most abundant type of coal ash, fly ash, contains small particles with metals, some of which are known neurotoxins. Fly ash is currently stored in open-air landfills and surface impoundments that allow fugitive dust to escape into surrounding communities, potentially exposing children to small neurotoxic particles. This dissertation uses preliminary data from a larger cross-sectional study to investigate the relationship between particulate matter exposure, metal exposure, and problems with self-regulation. Recruitment of this study sample, the first 78 of 300 participants, occurred between September 2015 and December 2016. Exploratory spatial data analysis was used to assess how living near fly ash storage is related to indoor particulate matter concentration and exposure to metals. Linear regression models were used to assess the relationship between fly ash exposure, particulate matter exposure, and self-regulation. Furthermore, Bayesian kernel machine regression for variable selection and regression models were used to explore the relationship between metal concentration in particulate matter and children’s self-regulation. The most abundant metal found in fly ash particles was aluminum. The concentration of aluminum in indoor PM10 was significantly related to distance from the fly ash landfills and an Environmental Justice Index used to identify vulnerable populations. In addition, children with higher aluminum exposure were found to perform more poorly on the Behavioral Assessment and Research System Continuous Performance and Selective Attention Tests, indicating general inattention problems. These results are based on a small preliminary sample and should therefore be interpreted with caution. Future studies will further investigate the relationship between aluminum exposure, children’s metal body burden, and cognitive control

Foreign language teachers\u27 use of technology in instruction: An exploratory study

The purpose of this exploratory, qualitative study was to develop an initial understanding of how and why high school foreign language teachers use technology in instruction. Six high school foreign language teachers, each from a different district in a Midwestern state, participated in the study. The data consisted of a Preliminary Information Form, teacher interviews and 40 classroom observations

The Translation Process in Interaction between Purpose and Context

This paper examines the translation process between a 16th century German religious text and Modern English. The text in question is a religious dialogue published by Lutheran Hans Sachs in 1524, to be translated for the purpose of allowing modern readers to gain a greater understanding of the issues of the time period as they were understood by those living at that time. Based on the tenets of Skopos theory, this purpose interacted with the source text context and target text context to support translation decisions based on accuracy of content, maintaining a consistent and helpful linguistic style, and including historical explanation. The result was a completed translation that fulfills the purpose established at the outset, though still requiring revision and further work in historical background before eventual publication

Alien Registration- Clark, Clara G. (Bridgewater, Aroostook County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/26126/thumbnail.jp

Micro Effects of Macro Announcements: Real-Time Price Discovery in Foreign Exchange

Using a new dataset consisting of six years of real-time exchange rate quotations, macroeconomic expectations, and macroeconomic realizations (announcements), we characterize the conditional means of U.S. dollar spot exchange rates versus German Mark, British Pound, Japanese Yen, Swiss Franc, and the Euro. In particular, we find that announcement surprises (that is, divergences between expectations and realizations, or "news") produce conditional mean jumps; hence high-frequency exchange rate dynamics are linked to fundamentals. The details of the linkage are intriguing and include announcement timing and sign effects. The sign effect refers to the fact that the market reacts to news in an asymmetric fashion: bad news has greater impact than good news, which we relate to recent theoretical work on information processing and price discovery.

Real-Time Price Discovery in Stock, Bond and Foreign Exchange Markets

We characterize the response of U.S., German and British stock, bond and foreign exchange markets to real-time U.S. macroeconomic news. Our analysis is based on a unique data set of high-frequency futures returns for each of the markets. We find that news surprises produce conditional mean jumps; hence high-frequency stock, bond and exchange rate dynamics are linked to fundamentals. The details of the linkages are particularly intriguing as regards equity markets. We show that equity markets react differently to the same news depending on the state of the U.S. economy, with bad news having a positive impact during expansions and the traditionally-expected negative impact during recessions. We rationalize this by temporal variation in the competing "cash flow" and "discount rate" effects for equity valuation. This finding also helps explain the apparent time-varying correlation between stock and bond returns, and the relatively small equity market news announcement effect when averaged across expansions and recessions. Hence, while our results confirm previous unconditional rankings suggesting that bond markets almost uniformly react most strongly to macroeconomic news, followed by foreign exchange and then equity markets, importantly when conditioning on the state of the economy the foreign exchange and equity markets appear equally responsive. Lastly, relying on the pronounced heteroskedasticity in the new high-frequency data, we also document important contemporaneous linkages across all markets and countries over-and-above the direct news announcement effects.

Coal ash and children\u27s sleep : a community-based study.

Kentucky is the fifth largest producer of coal ash, a by-product of coal combustion. The small spherical coal ash particles contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury, and cadmium. Coal ash is currently classified as nonhazardous by the EPA, which allows it to be stored in open-air impoundments near low-income communities. The primary object of the study is to determine the prevalence of sleep disruptive behaviors in children exposed to coal ash, compared to a group of demographically similar non-exposed children. Parents or guardians from five neighborhoods surrounding a coal ash storage facility, and one non-exposed community, participated in a cross-sectional survey about the health and sleep of children living in their home. Delay in sleep onset (p= 0.007), frequent night awakenings (p= 0.0001), teeth grinding (p= 0.03), lip smacking (p=0.006), snoring (p= 0.002), and complaint of leg cramps while resting (p= 0.0004) were significantly greater in the exposed group compared to the non-exposed group. When controlling for both health and environmental factors, the odds of frequent night awakenings were significantly greater in the exposed group compared to the non-exposed group (OR= 6.9, CI= 2.2-21). It is important to further evaluate the association between frequent night awakenings and coal ash exposure because of the potential long-term cognitive and biological impacts on children

Real-Time Price Discovery in Stock, Bond and Foreign Exchange Markets

We characterize the response of U.S., German and British stock, bond and foreign exchange markets to real-time U.S. macroeconomic news. Our analysis is based on a unique data set of high frequency futures returns for each of the markets. We find that news surprises produce conditional mean jumps; hence high-frequency stock, bond and exchange rate dynamics are linked to fundamentals. The details of the linkages are particularly intriguing as regards equity markets. We show that equity markets react differently to the same news depending on the state of the economy, with bad news having a positive impact during expansions and the traditionally-expected negative impact during recessions. We rationalize this by temporal variation in the competing “cash flow” and “discount rate” effects for equity valuation. This finding helps explain the time-varying correlation between stock and bond returns, and the relatively small equity market news effect when averaged across expansions and recessions. Lastly, relying on the pronounced heteroskedasticity in the high-frequency data, we document important contemporaneous linkages across all markets and countries over-and-above the direct news announcement effects.Asset Pricing, Macroeconomic News Announcements, Financial Market Linkages, Market Microstructure, High-Frequency Data, Survey Data, Asset Return Volatility, Forecasting