National science foundation funding in economics and chemistry

Conclusion Despite equivalent success rates, the probability of obtaining an NSF grant is substantially higher for chemists than for economists. The evidence indicates that NSF funds are more scarce for economists and that the quality of funded proposals as measured by institutional affiliation is greater for economists than for chemists. Administrators should be aware that when the supply of funds varies among disciplines, the probability of being funded and the expected value of an award will also vary among departments.     

Responding to ‘Skill Shortages’: Recruitment and Retention In A High Technology Labour Market

Gordon Causer, who is a Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Southampton, and Carol Jones, who is Senior Lecturer in Employee Relations in the Lancashire Business School, University of Central Lancashire, explore the responses of twenty electronics companies in central Southern England to problems of recruitment and retention of professional engineers employed in research, design and development functions. They argue that organisations might be expected to treat such staff as a long-term resource, subject to processes of careful selection, extensive training and flexible utilisation. In practice these tendencies are modified to a greater or lesser degree by a variety of structural constraints, including the volatile nature of the electronics industry, the disciplinary heterogeneity of its labour force, the funding of research and development activities and the labour market conditions faced by organisations.     

Accessing other people’s technology for non–profit research

As patents and other forms of intellectual property become more pervasive in the next generation of biotechnologies, designing policies and practices to ensure sufficient freedom to operate (i.e., the ability to practice or use an innovation) will be crucial for non–profit research agencies, especially those intent on developing technologies destined for commercial release. Are non–profit organisations exempt from intellectual property claims? What constitutes infringement of a patent? How does a non–profit establish its freedom to operate? We address these issues in this paper and evaluate various options for accessing other people’s technologies. Options include cross–licensing agreements, research–only or cost–free licences, market segmentation strategies, mergers or joint ventures, and patent pooling or clearinghouse mechanisms. Responding creatively to the new intellectual property environment will have far reaching consequences for the future of non–profit research.     

Eating at School: How the National School Lunch Program Affects Children's Diets

This article examines the impact of participation in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) on children's dietary intake at lunchtime and over 24 hours. Using a fixed effects model to control for selection bias, we find that NSLP participation leads to increased 24-hour intake of six vitamins and minerals—calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, vitamin B12, and riboflavin—as well as dietary fiber. Participation also leads to a trade-off between children's intake of dietary fat and added sugars whereby participants have higher intakes of dietary fat than nonparticipants but lower intakes of added sugars.     

HRD involvement in merger and acquisition decisions and strategy development: four organizational portraits

Although the financial and strategic aspects of mergers and acquisitions are well researched, little work has been done on the human resource development implications of this popular topic. The purpose of this case study research project was to explore the timing and scope of HRD involvement in four organizations recently involved in a merger or acquisition, by using three theoretical models as lenses. The results demonstrated that HRD normally was not involved in the initial decision‐making to merge or acquire, even though post‐deal HRD initiatives, particularly related to change management, were perceived as critical indicators of success.     

Artificial neural networks in accounting and finance: modeling issues

This article reviews the literature on artificial neural networks (ANNs) applied to accounting and finance problems and summarizes the ‘suggestions’ from this literature. The first section reviews the basic foundation of ANNs to provide a common basis for further elaboration and suggests criteria that should be used to determine whether the use of an ANN is appropriate. The second section of the paper discusses development of ANN models including: selection of the learning algorithm, choice of the error and transfer functions, specification of the architecture, preparation of the data to match the architecture, and training of the network The final section presents some general guidelines and a brief summary of research progress and open research questions. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Crypto quanto and inverse options

Over 90% of exchange trading on crypto options has always been on the Deribit platform. This centralized crypto exchange only lists inverse products because they do not accept fiat currency. Likewise, other major crypto options platforms only list crypto–stablecoin trading pairs in so-called direct options, which are similar to the standard crypto options listed by the CME except the US dollar is replaced by a stablecoin version. Until now a clear mathematical exposition of these products has been lacking. We discuss the sources of market incompleteness in direct and inverse options and compare their pricing and hedging characteristics. Then we discuss the useful applications of currency protected “quanto” direct and inverse options for fiat-based traders and describe their pricing and hedging characteristics, all in the Black–Scholes setting.