Although this report was commissioned by the Department for Transport (DfT), the findings and recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the DfT. While the DfT has made every effort to ensure the information in this document is accurate, DfT does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of that information; and it cannot accept liability...

The concept's potential is certainly attractive. "Suppose you could link Environmental Protection Agency data about the chemicals found in some location to a database of chemical effects on various genes to PubMed articles on those genes and the diseases that affect them," says James Hendler, director of the University of Maryland's Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery (http://zaphod.mindlab...

The early awareness of a potential financial distress is crucial to firm’s managers for understanding their clients, suppliers and their own firms, and crucial to fund suppliers for assessing the construction firm’s credit worthiness. The purpose of this paper is to develop a dynamic prediction model for financial distress in construction industry using Data Mining. This research expects to pro...

Over the last three decades the role of banking in the process of financial intermediation has been undergoing a profound transformation, owing to changes in the global financial system. India’s banking system has seen some major financial innovations in the past decade as well as steps to promote financial inclusion, schemes that aim to take banking services to yet-to-be-banked areas. The vari...

In contexts where banks have strong control over firms, banking crisis may be associated with merger activity. This is because banks’ risk is reduced when their clients merge, and financial trouble creates strong incentive for banks to facilitate mergers of clients to improve banks’ risk standing. During Japan’s banking crisis in the 1990s, corporate merger activity was correlated with banks’ f...

We investigate the long-standing puzzle on the underpricings of convertible bonds. We hypothesize that the observed underpricing is induced by the possibility that a convertible bond might renegotiate on some of its covenants, e.g., an imbedded put option, in financial difficulties. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that the initial underpricing is larger for lower rated bonds. The underp...

As discussed in Merton (1993, Sections 5 and 6) and here in the section to follow, the effective delivery of many financial services depends critically on the credit-worthiness of the provider financial institution. Such service activities are said to be 'credit-sensitive'. The intermediary's credit standing can cause significant extemality-like effects on the various business activities of the...

PRE- AND POSTRETIREMENT EXPENSES: Before retirement, people pay FICA taxes, incur work-related expenses, and set aside money for retirement. But after retirement, most people have different financial obligations, and, as a result, retirees may still be able to maintain their level of preretirement well-being with very different income levels. Studying income, expenditures, and wealth-holding pa...

At the last EULAR congress in Nice this standing committee held an educational symposium on “Clinical Epidemiology in Practice”. This initiative was very well received and highly appreciated by the participants. Therefore, the committee organised a similar symposium at this congress. The standing committee will together with the standing committee chairmen of “Education and Training” (Professor...

Pregnant women and their infants are at increased risk for severe influenza-associated illness (1), and since 2004, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has recommended influenza vaccination for all women who are or might be pregnant during the influenza season, regardless of the trimester of the pregnancy (2). To assess influenza vaccination coverage among pregnant women dur...