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Explaining the Surge in M&A as an Entry Mode: Home Country and Cultural Influences
No full textPrior studies examining the effects external factors on international market expansion have focused on host country factors with scant attention being given to home country factors. This study examines the trends, patterns and the impact of cultural and home country macroeconomic influences on Chinese cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBM&A) as an entry strategy for the period of 1998-2011. Our findings indicate that CBM&A is the preferred mode of market entry by the Chinese emerging market firms. The regression results indicate that home country macroeconomic and cultural variables, including GDP, money supply, interest rates, inflation, acquisitions in resource seeking sectors and cultural distance play an important role in explaining the foreign market expansion of Chinese firms
The uneasy partnership of feminism and ageing in Carol Shields’s Unless
Get PDFUnless (2002) is Canadian author Carol Shields’s final novel, a text concerned with the mother-daughter relationship and a woman’s place in a patriarchal world. It is also a novel about ageing and, particularly, with its forty-three to forty-four-year-old protagonist, about middle age. Attention to the novel’s representation of time, ageing, and generational identity suggests that this text, which is usually read as Shields’s most feminist work, does not propound a clear and certain feminist narrative. Reta’s story demonstrates that, despite the often strident feminist politics of this novel, the implications and effects of the intersection of ageing and gender cannot be fully articulated. Following on from the proliferation of writing in English about women and ageing in the 1990s, Unless can be seen as part of an emerging – and not necessarily coherent – conversation about ageing and gender in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century
Structural defect accumulation in tungsten and tungsten-5wt.% tantalum under incremental proton damage
Get PDFWe have performed proton irradiation of W and W-5wt.%Ta materials at 350 °C with a step-wise damage level increase up to 0.7 dpa and using two beam energies, namely 40 keV and 3 MeV, in order to probe the accumulation of radiation-induced lattice damage in these materials. Interstitial-type a/2 dislocation loops form under irradiation, and their size increases in W-5Ta up to a loop width of 21(4) nm at 0.3 dpa, where loop saturation takes place. In contrast, the loop length in W increases progressively up to 183(50) nm at 0.7 dpa, whereas the loop width remains relatively constant at 29(7) nm and ≥0.3 dpa, giving rise to dislocation strings. The dislocation loops and networks observed in both materials at later stages act as effective hydrogen trapping sites, so as to generate hydrogen bubbles and surface blisters. Ta doping delays the evolution of radiation-induced dislocation structures in W, and consequently the appearance of hydrogen blisters
Output Power Enhancement for Hot Spotted Polycrystalline Photovoltaic Solar Cells
Get PDFHot spotting is a reliability problem in photovoltaic (PV) panels where a mismatched cell heats up significantly and degrades PV panel output power performance. High PV cell temperature due to hot spotting can damage the cell encapsulate and lead to second breakdown, where both cause permanent damage to the PV panel. Therefore, the development of two hot spot mitigation techniques are proposed using a simple and reliable method. PV hot spots in the examined PV system was inspected using FLIR i5 thermal imaging camera. Multiple experiments have been tested during various environmental conditions, where the PV module I-V curve was evaluated in each observed test to analyze the output power performance before and after the activation of the proposed hot spot mitigation techniques. One PV module affected by hot spot was tested. The output power during high irradiance levels is increased by approximate to 1.26 W after the activation of the first hot spot mitigation technique. However, the second mitigation technique guarantee an increase in the power up to 3.97 W. Additional test has been examined during partial shading condition. Both proposed techniques ensure a decrease in the shaded PV cell temperature, thus an increase in the PV output power
Successes and challenges in developing a hybrid approach to sentiment analysis
Get PDFThis article covers some success and learning experiences attained during the developing of a hybrid approach to Sentiment Analysis (SA) based on a Sentiment Lexicon, Semantic Rules, Negation Handling, Ambiguity Management and Linguistic Variables. The proposed hybrid method is presented and applied to two selected datasets: Movie Review and Sentiment Twitter datasets. The achieved results are compared against those obtained when Naïve Bayes (NB) and Maximum Entropy (ME) supervised machine learning classification methods are used for the same datasets. The proposed hybrid system attained higher accuracy and precision scores than NB and ME, which shows its superiority when applied to the SA problem at the sentence level. Finally, an alternative strategy to calculating the orientation polarity and polarity intensity in one step instead of the two steps method used in the hybrid approach is explored. The analysis of the yielded mixed results achieved with this alternative approach shows its potential as an aid in the computation of semantic orientations and produced some lessons learnt in developing a more effective mechanism to calculating the orientation polarity and polarity intensity
Cave acoustics in prehistory: exploring the association of Palaeolithic visual motifs and acoustic response
No full textDuring the 1980s, acoustic studies of Upper Palaeolithic imagery in French caves—using the technology then available— suggested a relationship between acoustic response and the location of visual motifs. This paper presents an investigation, using modern acoustic measurement technology, into such relationships within the caves of La Garma, Las Chimeneas, La Pasiega, El Castillo and Tito Bustillo, in Northern Spain. It addresses methodological issues concerning acoustic measurement at enclosed archaeological sites and outlines a general framework for extraction of acoustic features that may be used to support archaeological hypotheses. The analysis explores possible associations between the position of visual motifs (which may be up to 40,000 years old) and localized acoustic responses. Results suggests that motifs, in general, and lines and dots, in particular, are statistically more likely to be found in places where reverberation is moderate and where the low frequency acoustic response might have audible resonances. The work presented suggests that an association of the location of Palaeolithic motifs with acoustic features is a weak but tenable hypothesis, and that an appreciation of sound could have influenced behavior among Palaeolithic societies of this region
Corporate governance and CEO pay: Evidence from UK Travel and Leisure listed firms
Get PDFThis paper investigates from the UK context, the impact of board and CEO characteristics on CEO compensation in Travel and Leisure firms. Namely we employ, board size, board independence and board meetings to reflect board characteristics. We also include two CEO features, CEO tenure and CEO age into our models. Using panel data analysis, the findings in this paper indicate that board size, board independence and CEO age are important factors affecting CEO pay. In addition, we report a positive non-linear relationship between CEO tenure and firm performance. Hence, using Travel and Leisure listed firms; we provide new evidence of the relationship between corporate governance and CEO compensation
Profitability of Commercial Banks revisited: New Evidence from oil and non-oil exporting countries in the MENA region
No full textThis paper investigates the determinants of commercial bank profitability in oil and non-oil countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region using data from 11 countries over the period 2004–2014. Since banks are under no obligation to fill reports to Bankscope database, irregular reporting banks are omitted from the sample and the model is re-estimated using only regular reporting banks, and a comparative analysis between total banks' sample and regular reporting banks' sample is provided. Using the two-step system GMM and fixed effects models, the results indicate that credit risk is negative and highly significant when irregular reporting banks are omitted from the sample particularly in non-oil countries unlike the oil countries case, which indicates that adding irregular reporting banks to the sample could lead to bias in some estimated coefficients if they constitute a considerable percentage of the total banks' sample. Diversification is a key determinant for profitability in oil countries. No enough evidence to support the impact of financial inclusion and financial openness on bank profitability. In addition, the global financial crisis has significantly affected bank profitability in oil countries. Several policy implications are provided to the bank management to follow based on each country group
Maximising the local impact of anchor institutions: A case study of Leeds City Region
No full textAnchor organisations such as local authorities, hospitals, universities, housing associations and large private sector organisations can play an important role in supporting growth and reducing poverty. Through their employment and procurement practices they can directly deliver more inclusive growth and they can also be examples of good practice to inspire other local organisations to act, helping set the tone for the local economy
On the Evolution of Planner-Specific Macro Sets
No full textIn Automated Planning, generating macro-operators (macros) is a well-known reformulation approach that is used to speed-up the planning process. Most of the macro generation techniques aim for using the same set of generated macros on every problem instance of a given domain. This limits the usefulness of macros in scenarios where the environment and thus the structure of instances is dynamic, such as in real-world applications. Moreover, despite the wide availability of parallel processing units, there is a lack of approaches that can take advantage of multiple parallel cores, while exploiting macros.
In this paper we propose the Macro sets Evolution (MEvo) approach. MEvo has been designed for overcoming the aforementioned issues by exploiting multiple cores for combining promising macros –taken from a
given pool– in different sets, while solving continuous streams of problem instances. Our empirical study, involving 5 state-of-the-art planning engines and a large number of planning instances, demonstrates the effectiveness
of the proposed MEvo approac
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