DePaul University

About: DePaul University is a education organization based out in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 5658 authors who have published 11562 publications receiving 295257 citations.

How do Investors Judge the Risk of Financial Items

Abstract: This paper proposes and tests a new risk model that explains how investors perceive financial risks. The model combines conventional decision theory variables - probabilities and outcomes - with variables from psychology research by Slovic (1987). The latter includes variables such as the extent to which a risky item is new, causes worry, and is controllable. To test our model, we conduct two studies in which financial statement users judge the risk of a broad range of financial items. Our results indicate that both decision theory and Slovic variables are important in explaining investors' risk judgments. Further, we demonstrate that loss outcome information contained in mandated risk disclosures not only directly influences investors' risk judgments but also indirectly affects such judgments via its effect on select Slovic variables. These results provide new theoretical insights that should be useful to accounting and psychology researchers studying how people judge risk. Our results also imply that to fully understand the effects of current and future accounting risk disclosures, managers and regulators must consider the effects of these disclosures on decision theory and Slovic variables.

CARSKit: A Java-Based Context-Aware Recommendation Engine

Abstract: Recommender system has been demonstrated as one of the most useful tools to assist users' decision makings. Several recommendation algorithms have been developed and implemented by both commercial and open-source recommendation libraries. Context-aware recommender system (CARS) emerged as a novel research direction during the past decade and many contextual recommendation algorithms have been proposed. Unfortunately, no recommendation engines start to embed those algorithms in their kits, due to the special characteristics of the data format and processing methods in the domain of CARS. This paper introduces an open-source Java-based context-aware recommendation engine named as CARSKit which is recognized as the 1st open source recommendation library specifically designed for CARS. It implements the state-of-the-art context-aware recommendation algorithms, and we will showcase the ease with which CARSKit allows recommenders to be configured and evaluated in this demo.

Bank stock returns and economic growth

Abstract: Previous research has established (i) that a country’s financial sector influence future economic growth and (ii) that stock market index returns affect future economic growth. We extend and tie together these two strands of the growth literature by analyzing the relationship between banking industry stock returns and future economic growth. Using dynamic panel techniques to analyze panel data from 18 developed and 18 emerging markets, we find a positive and significant relationship between bank stock returns and future GDP growth that is independent of the previously documented relationship between market index returns and economic growth. We also find that much of the informational content of bank stock returns is captured by country-specific and institutional characteristics, such as bank-accounting-disclosure standards, banking crises, enforcement of insider trading law and government ownership of banks.

Synergistic Effects of Imidazolium-Functionalization on fac-Mn(CO)3 Bipyridine Catalyst Platforms for Electrocatalytic Carbon Dioxide Reduction.

Abstract: The electrocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) could be a powerful tool for generating chemical fuels and feedstock molecules relevant to the chemical industry. One of the major challenges for molecular catalysts remains the necessity of high overpotentials, which can be overcome by identifying novel routes that improve the energetic reaction trajectory of critical intermediates during catalysis. In this combined experimental and computational study, we show that imidazolium functionalization of molecular fac-Mn(CO)3 bipyridine complexes results in CO2 reduction at mild electrochemical potentials in the presence of H2O. Importantly, our studies suggest that imidazolium groups in the secondary coordination sphere promote the formation of a local hydration shell that facilitates the protonation of CO2 reduction intermediates. As such, we propose a synergistic relationship between the functionalized catalyst and H2O, which stands in contrast to other systems in which the presence of H2O frequently ha...