OBJECTIVE To explore the relation between study concordance, take home message, funding, and dissemination of comparative studies assessing the effects of influenza vaccines. DESIGN Systematic review without meta-analysis. DATA EXTRACTION Search of the Cochrane Library, PubMed, Embase, and the web, without language restriction, for any studies comparing the effects of influenza vaccines aga...

Millions of life scientists across the world rely on bioinformatics data resources for their research projects. Data resources can be very expensive, especially those with a high added value as the expert-curated knowledgebases. Despite the increasing need for such highly accurate and reliable sources of scientific information, most of them do not have secured funding over the near future and o...

Banks may well perform differently in lending to firms according to their funding structure. This paper surveys the relation between Loan volatility and deposit in Iranian banking system. The extent to which bank lending is connected to funding structure is affected by the banks’ characteristics (such as capital structure, profitability, and the measure of non-performing loans). To analyze this...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate changes in the role of academics and the sources of funding for the medical research cited most frequently over the past decade. DESIGN Database analysis. DATA SOURCES Web of Knowledge database. METHODS For each year from 1994 to 2003, articles in the domain of clinical medicine that had been cited most often by the end of 2004 were identified. Changes in authors' af...

BACKGROUND Systematic reporting of funding sources is recommended in the CONSORT Statement for abstracts. However, no specific recommendation is related to the reporting of conflicts of interest (CoI). The objective was to compare physicians' confidence in the conclusions of abstracts of randomized controlled trials of pharmaceutical treatment indexed in PubMed. METHODS We planned a three-arm...

BACKGROUND Evidence regarding the safety profile of drugs may vary depending on study sponsorship. We aimed to evaluate differences between studies funded by the pharmaceutical manufacturer of the drug (PF) and those with no pharmaceutical funding (NoPF) regarding the finding and interpretation of adverse effects of inhaled corticosteroids. METHODS We assessed the safety reporting of inhaled ...

INTRODUCTION AND AIMS There have been no previous quantitative analyses of the possible effects of industry funding on alcohol and health research. This study examines whether findings of alcohol's protective effects on cardiovascular disease may be biased by industry funding. DESIGN AND METHODS Findings from a recent systematic review of prospective cohort studies were combined with public d...

This paper develops a framework for analyzing the impact of macroeconomic conditions on credit risk and dynamic capital structure choice. We begin by observing that when cash flows depend on current economic conditions, there will be a benefit for firms to adapt their default and financing policies to the position of the economy in the business cycle phase. We then demonstrate that this simple ...

This paper studies the behavior of leverage ratios in a dynamic trade-off model with real frictions. Firms underutilize debt when financing investment to retain financial flexibility. Underutilization of debt persists even when firms exercise their last investment options, and it is more (less) severe for more back-loaded (front-loaded) investment opportunities. Thus, leverage dynamics cruciall...