Textual sentiment of comments and collapse of P2P platforms: Evidence from China's P2P market

Textual sentiment affects the investment activities of investors in traditional financial markets. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending market, as one of the emerging and active Internet financial markets, has recently received considerable attention from academia. However, few related studies are available. This work examines the relationship between the textual sentiment derived from investors’ comments on P2P platforms and probability of platform collapse. We collect comments from an authoritative Chinese third-party P2P lending consulting platform and use a weakly supervised convolutional neural network to calculate the textual sentiment of each comment. Empirical results show that the extracted textual sentiment has a significant influence on a P2P platform's collapse. Furthermore, the “agreement” and “disagreement” from other investors of each comment are pivotal in predicting a P2P platform's failure. We find that the textual sentiment of comments regarding P2P platforms from investor communities provide insights into predicting platforms’ collapse in the near future.     

现代媒体环境对流动人口反抗方式类型极端化趋向的影响

新生代流动人口成长在不同于老一代流动人口的社会情境下，成为社会转型时期研究的关注点，而转型期的中国社会正在逐步适应和完成媒体环境的革新，当前媒体环境的多元化及其内涵特性正在使流动人口群体的反抗方式类型发生转变，新生代流动人口反抗信息获取优于老一代流动人口，反抗方式偏好差别大，有极端化发展倾向。     

Private money and bank runs

Abstract This paper studies bank runs in a model with private money. We show that allowing claims on demand deposits to circulate as a medium of exchange can help prevent bank runs. In our model, there exists a unique banking equilibrium where no one demands early withdrawals of real goods and agents in need of liquidity use private money to finance consumption. With private money, the unique equilibrium not only eliminates bank runs but also improves banking efficiency. The implications of our model are consistent with the evidence from the banking history of the United States.     

The social cost of labor in rural development: job creation benefits re-examined

Job creation effects are examined as they would apply to social analysis of rural development programming by public or private sector agencies. A synthesis and critique are provided of approaches to valuing the social opportunity cost of labor. These approaches vary according to whether or not unemployment is present in the pre‐project state and according to whether or not there is interregional migration in response to project hiring. Graphical, partial equilibrium analysis illustrates why, in general, job creation and project employment give rise to social costs, not benefits. The magnitude of these social costs is shown to depend upon the presence of payroll taxes, wage subsidies and unemployment, in addition to the market's supply and demand elasticities. These social costs may be reduced or offset in specific instances where projects increase the value of labor's productivity or reduce its costs, such as with job training, worker mobility and skill development projects. Careful attention to these approaches can help society choose correctly among alternative development proposals and among alternative (labor‐intensive versus capital‐intensive) technologies.     

What Types of Diversity Benefit Workers? Empirical Evidence on the Effects of Co‐worker Dissimilarity on the Performance of Employees

This study explores the consequences of grouping workers into diverse divisions on the performance of employees using a dataset containing the detailed personnel records of a large U.S. firm from 1989 to 1994. In particular, I examine the effects of demographic dissimilarity among co‐workers, namely differences in age, gender, and race among employees who work together within divisions, and non‐demographic dissimilarity, namely differences in education, work function, firm tenure, division tenure, performance, and wages among employees within divisions. I find evidence that age dissimilarity, dissimilarity in firm tenure, and performance dissimilarity are associated with lower worker performance, while wage differences are associated with higher worker performance. My analysis also reveals that the effects of certain types of dissimilarities get smaller in magnitude the longer a worker is a part of a division. Finally, the paper provides evidence that the relationships between performance and the various measures of dissimilarity vary by occupational area and division size.     

Resource utilisation and costs in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus treated with insulin glargine or conventional basal insulin under real-world conditions in Germany: LIVE-SPP study

Objective: To assess and compare the total costs relevant to diabetes care in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D) treated at specialised diabetes practices with either insulin glargine- or conventional basal insulin (neutral protamine Hagedorn [NPH])-based therapies from the German statutory health insurance (SHI) perspective.

Methods: The Long Acting Insulin Glargine Versus NPH Cost Evaluation in Specialised Practices (LIVE-SPP) study is an observational, retrolective, multicentre longitudinal cost comparison in adults with T2D. Costs were evaluated from the German SHI perspective based on official 2005 prices. Average total costs per patient for insulin glargine-versus NPH-based therapies were compared using multivariate general linear modelling. Sensitivity analyses were performed by varying the main cost factors by ± 25%.

Results: Patients (n=1,024, 512 patients per cohort) were on average 62 years of age, with an average 8-year diabetes history at study start. The average unadjusted total annual costs per patient were €1,868.41 (95% CI 1,744.27–1,992.56) for insulin glargine-based vs. €2,063.72 (95% CI 1,922.91–2,204.54) for NPH-based therapies. Average adjusted total annual costs per patient between insulin glargine- (€1,241.13) and NPH-based therapies (€1,607.86) were statistically significantly different (p=0.0004). The economic advantage for insulin glargine-based therapies resulted mainly from fewer blood glucose measurements and other diabetes-related materials (e.g. needles). The savings remained stable in one-way sensitivity analyses.

Conclusions: The LIVE-SPP study suggests that insulin glargine-based therapies may offer an economic advantage over NPH-based therapies.     

NEWS & EVENTS

Abstract

Seat belt use does not only save lives but prevents the severity of injuries in road traffic crashes (RTCs). Vehicle type and usage have been found to influence the use of seat belt in cities like Kumasi, the host of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) campus. This paper presents a study on an un-obstructive survey of seat belt use by vehicle occupants entering and leaving KNUST campus through the four entrances from 7 to 9 am and 3 to 5?pm on five weekdays. A total of 5489 vehicles with 9542 occupants comprising 5489 drivers, front-right and first back seat and second back seat passengers were observed. The majority of the private and SUV drivers used seat belts. Meanwhile, almost all the commercial drivers did not use seat belts. There is a statistically significant relationship between vehicle type and use and the use of seat belt in KNUST.     

A Bargaining Experiment to Motivate Discussion on Fairness

The author presents a classroom version of the popular research game called the Ultimatum Game. Researchers are placing growing importance on how fairness affects behavior, and this experiment provides a useful, fun, and engaging way in which a day or two of class time can be spent on the topic. The appendix contains all of the materials necessary to conduct this experiment, and the experiment can highlight several items of interest for the instructor. First, different individuals place different subjective weights on concerns for fairness versus money. Second, theories that incorporate concerns for fairness into agents' preferences can often explain behavior better than those that do not. Finally, when it is relatively cheap to purchase fairness (or equality) individuals purchase more of it. The classroom results can motivate discussion of a downward sloping demand curve for fairness.     

Long-term consequences of short-term precipitation shocks: evidence from Brazilian migrant households

We find that large short-term precipitation shocks damage the long-term income of households that have permanently migrated from rural to urban areas. This outcome is consistent with the behavior of credit-constrained rural households who are willing to accept lower long-term income in urban areas following the depletion of their productive assets during an adverse shock. Our empirical evidence suggests that there may be a link between large precipitation shocks in rural areas and urban poverty. Further exploration is warranted on the mechanisms by which natural disasters cause these long-term losses.