Estimating the Lock-in Effects of Switching Costs from Firm-Level Data

This paper proposes a simple method for estimating the lock-in effects of switching costs from firm-level data. We compare the behavior of already contracted consumers to the behavior of new consumers as the latter can serve as contrafactual to the former. In panel regressions on firms' incoming and quitting consumers, we look at the differential response to price changes and identify the lock-in effect of switching costs from the difference between the two. We illustrate our method by analyzing the Hungarian personal loan market and find strong lock-in effects.switching costs, lock-in, panel data

Separating the ex post effects of mergers: an analysis of structural changes on the Hungarian retail gasoline market

This paper develops an empirical method to identify the price effects of simultaneous mergers and to separate the different effects on the prices of the buyer and seller firms and on the prices of their respective competitors. Our difference-in-differences approach exploits variation in the presence of merging firms across local markets to form different treatment-control group pairs in order to estimate separate effects for each type of firms affected by the mergers. We apply this method to provide an ex post evaluation of two almost simultaneous mergers in the Hungarian retail gasoline market. We show that both mergers resulted in a significantly positive but economically negligible price effect, but while the first merger affected only the prices of buyer firm's stations, the second had an effect on the prices of seller's stations and of its competitors. We also demonstrate that the results are not sensitive to the assumed dates when the mergers effectively change the firms' pricing policy.ex post evaluation, mergers, difference-in-differences estimation, treatment effects, retail gasoline

Multiple host-switching of Haemosporidia parasites in bats

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>There have been reported cases of host-switching in avian and lizard species of <it>Plasmodium </it>(Apicomplexa, Haemosporidia), as well as in those infecting different primate species. However, no evidence has previously been found for host-swapping between wild birds and mammals.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This paper presents the results of the sampling of blood parasites of wild-captured bats from Madagascar and Cambodia. The presence of Haemosporidia infection in these animals is confirmed and cytochrome <it>b </it>gene sequences were used to construct a phylogenetic analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Results reveal at least three different and independent Haemosporidia evolutionary histories in three different bat lineages from Madagascar and Cambodia.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Phylogenetic analysis strongly suggests multiple host-switching of Haemosporidia parasites in bats with those from avian and primate hosts.</p

Spektroskopski pristup ishrani i zaštiti ozime pšenice (Triticum aestivum L.)

Laboratory reflectance spectroscopy is a routine evaluation technique in many scientific areas. The objective is to present the capabilities of a portable spectro-radiometer which can be used both for field and laboratory examinations. In this study an ASD FieldSpec 3 Max spectro-radiometer was used in two different application forms to analyze the reflected electromagnetic radiation in the wavelength range of 350 to 2500 nm. The study introduces some preliminary results of nutrient sensitive changes in winter wheat spectra and brings on the necessity of high resolution spectral testing of insect luring, repelling illuminants.Laboratorijska refleksna spektroskopija je uobičajena tehnika evaluacije u mnogim naučnim oblastima. Cilj je da se predstave mogućnosti portabl spektro-radiometra koji može da se koristi kako za poljska, tako i za laboratorijska ispitivanja. U ovom istraživanju upotrebljen je spektro-radiometar ASD FieldSpec 3 Max u dve različite aplikacione forme za analizu reflektovanog elektromagnetnog zračenja u opsegu talasnih dužina od 350 do 2500 nm. U radu su predstavljeni neki preliminarni rezultati osetljivih promena nutrijenata u spektru ozime pšenice i doprinos neophodnosti visoke rezolucije spektralnog testiranja svetlećih tela za privlačenje i odbijanje insekata

A Taxonomic Revision of the Kerivoula hardwickii Complex (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae) with the Description of a New Species

FIG. 2. PCA of Kerivoula spp. based on seven craniodental measurements, showing projections of individual specimens and variable loadings on the first two principal components. Scales for the projections are displayed on the bottom and left axes while those for variable loadings are displayed on the top and right axes. Specimens are recognized as K. kachinensis (black diamonds), K. titania (black triangles) and K. hardwickii as well as its allies (dots). The last group is further classified into a new species (green dots, with those from the India-Myanmar boundary bordered in red), K. depressa (orange dots) and K. hardwickii (blue dots) based on thePublished as part of Kuo, Hao-Chih, Soisook, Pipat, Ho, Ying-Yi, Csorba, Gabor, Wang, Chun-Neng & Rossiter, Stephen J., 2017, A taxonomic revision of the Kerivoula hardwickii complex (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae) with the description of a new species, pp. 19-39 in Acta Chiropterologica 19 (1) on page 25, DOI: 10.3161/15081109ACC2017.19.1.002, http://zenodo.org/record/394480

Bats (Mammalia: Chiroptera) of the southeastern Truong Son Mountains, Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam

Bat communities of mainland Southeast Asia can be highly diverse. Many are under threat. Despite this, regional faunal composition is not well documented for many areas, including regions of Vietnam.  We assessed the biodiversity of bats in a watershed protection forest in the southeastern Truong Son (Annamite) Mountains, southwestern Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam in 2011–2013.  Twenty species of insectivorous bats were documented including a high diversity of Murina species Tube-nosed Bats.  Diversity and abundance indices were compared with that recorded previously in two nature reserves and one national park in Vietnam, and were higher or comparable in several measures despite the lack of a karst substrate for roosts.  Reproduction in the insectivorous bat fauna coincided with the early rainy season.  In the late dry season, pregnant females of several species were observed but volant juveniles were not present, whereas in the early wet season adult females were lactating or post-lactating and volant juveniles of nine species were detected.  We recorded echolocation calls of 14 bat species; for each species, we compared features of calls with those reported previously in other Asian localities.  For some species we found discrepancies in call metrics among studies, perhaps suggesting a greater hidden biodiversity of bats in Southeast Asia.</p

Liberating Biodiversity Data From COVID-19 Lockdown: Toward a knowledge hub for mammal host-virus information

A deep irony of COVID-19 likely originating from a bat-borne coronavirus (Boni et al. 2020) is that the global lockdown to quell the pandemic also locked up physical access to much basic knowledge regarding bat biology. Digital access to data on the ecology, geography, and taxonomy of potential viral reservoirs, from Southeast Asian horseshoe bats and pangolins to North American deer mice, was suddenly critical for understanding the disease's emergence and spread. However, much of this information lay inside rare books and personal files rather than as open, linked, and queryable resources on the internet. Even the world's experts on mammal taxonomy and zoonotic disease could not retrieve their data from shuttered laboratories. We were caught unprepared. Why, in this digitally connected age, were such fundamental data describing life on Earth not already freely accessible online?Understanding why biodiversity science was unprepared—and how to fix it before the next pandemic—has been the focus of our COVID-19 Taskforce since April 2020 and is continuing (organized by CETAF and DiSSCo). We are a group of museum-based and academic scientists with the goal of opening the rich ecological data stored in natural history collections to the research public. This information is rooted in what may seem an unlikely location—taxonomic names and their historical usages, which are the keys for searching literature and extracting linked ecological data (Fig. 1). This has been the core motivation of our group, enabled by the pioneering efforts of Plazi (Agosti and Egloff 2009) to build tools for literature digitization, extraction, and parsing (e.g., Synospecies, Ocellus) without which biodiversity science would be even less prepared. Our group led efforts to build an additional pipeline from Plazi to the Biodiversity Literature Repository at Zenodo, a free and unlimited data repository (Agosti et al. 2019), and then to GloBI, an open-source database of biotic interactions (Poelen et al. 2014, GloBI 2020). We also developed a direct integration from Pensoft Journals to GloBI, leveraging that publisher’s indexing of computer-readable terms (called semantic metadata; Senderov et al. 2018) to extract mammal host and virus information.Overall, considerable progress was made. In total, 85,492 new interactions were added to GloBI from 14 April to 21 May 2020 (see entire dataset on Zenodo: Poelen et al. 2020). Of those, 28,839 interactions are present when subset to "hasHost", "hostOf", "pathogenOf", "virus", and 4,101 unique name combinations are present after considering mammal species synonymies (from Meyer et al. 2015). Of those interactions, 892 species of mammals and 1,530 unique virus names are involved, which compares to 754 mammals and 586 viruses in the most recent data synthesis (Olival et al. 2017). While these liberated data may still include redundancies, they demonstrate the value of our approach and the expanse of known but digitally unconnected data that remains locked in publications.We can liberate host-virus data from publications, but doing so is expensive and does not scale to the continued influx of new articles that are inadequately digitized. Our efforts make it clear that Pensoft-style semantic publishing should be expanded to all major journals. The pandemic has created an opportunity for re-thinking the way we do science in the digital age. Thankfully, our future is not the past, so we do not have to keep wasting resources to digitially 'rediscover' biodiversity knowledge. We collectively call for changes to the publishing paradigm, so that research findings are directly accessible, citable, discoverable, and reusable for creating complete forms of digital knowledge