1,721,335 research outputs found
Credit rationing and capital structure: a survey of empirical studies
No full textThis survey is part of a project on The Financial Implications of Environmental Legislation. The purpose of it is to see how the problem of credit rationing, according to borrowers' characteristics, has been empirically estimated in some literature. The survey considers first allocation of credit from the lenders' side, and second demand of credit from the borrowers' side. Both commercial and consumers' loan markets have been considered. For commercial loan the availability of data made it possible to build up more appropriate models, providing a positive answer to the question whether borrowers are discriminated according to their characteristics. The same has not been possible for the commercial loan market, mainly because data on this are scarce. This made modelling of firms' and banks' behaviour more unsatisfactory
Is environmental dumping greater when firms are footloose?
No full textConcerns have been expressed that in a global market place with mobile capital, national governments will have incentives to set weak environmental policies ("environmental dumping") to protect the international competitiveness of their domestic firms and that these incentives are particularly strong in industries where plants may be relatively footloose so that governments are concerned to prevent "capital flight". In this paper we investigate whether the mobility of firms does indeed increase incentives for environmental dumping. We do this by taking a simple model of imperfect competition and comparing the environmental policies that would be set by non-cooperative governments for two different move structures - where governments set environmental policies after firms decide where to locate (the exogenous location case or Market Share Game) and where governments set environmental policies before firms decide where to locate (the endogenous location case or Location Game). This raises an important modelling issue for it is natural in the Market Share Game that governments would set different environmental policies depending on the number of firms that locate in their countries, and if we are to compare just the effect of different move structures then in the Location Game we should also allow governments to condition their environmental policies on the number of firms that locate in them, contrary to previous models of the Location Game where governments set a single instrument independent of the number of firms that locate in their countries. We show that the extent of environmental dumping in the Market Share Game may be greater or less than in the Location Game, depending in particular on the degree of substitution between products of the firms and hence the intensity of market competition. We also show that there is more environmental dumping in the Location Game when governments use a single instrument than when they condition their instruments on the number of firms that locate in their countries
Strength performance and life cycle assessment of high-volume low-grade kaolin clay pozzolan concrete: A Ghanaian scenario
Full text linkAssessing the dimensional stability of alkali-activated calcined clays in the fresh state: a time-lapse X-ray imaging approach
Full text linkAlkali-activated calcined clays are promising candidates for playing a prominent role in the future construction industry. These binders may achieve excellent mechanical performance, but one issue deserving attention is the proneness to plastic shrinkage and surface cracking. Tackling this issue requires the deployment of laboratory techniques that allow shrinkage-inducing mechanisms to be quantitatively assessed. Here, we demonstrate that time-lapse X-ray imaging can be used to quantify shrinkage immediately after mixing, when the binder is still in its fresh state, with excellent time and space resolution. The numeric quantification of strain is complemented by the real time visual inspection of the displacing sample interface and of the bleed aqueous solution layer that may form. Implementation of this method to a set of alkali-activated cement pastes, prepared by combining calcined clays having different mineralogical composition with sodium silicate activating solutions having different SiO 2/Na 2O ratios, suggests that two main mechanisms control the early dimensional stability of alkali-activated calcined clays. These mechanisms are: (a) volumetric contraction occurring in response to capillary stress arising from water evaporation and (b) segregation by particle settling, favoured in the water-saturated regime
Plant location and strategic environmental policy with intersectoral linkages
No full textIn recent debates on trade liberalisation the concern has often been expressed that with more competitive international trade governments will be worried that by setting tougher environmental policies than their trading rivals they will put domestic producers at a competitive disadvantage, and in the extreme case this could lead to firms relocating production in other countries. The response by governments to such concerns will be to weaken environmental policies (‘eco-dumping’). In competitive markets such concerns are ill founded, but there is a small amount of literature which has analysed whether governments will indeed have incentives for eco-dumping in the more relevant case of markets where there are significant scale economies; even here there is no presumption that the outcome will involve eco-dumping.In this paper we extend the analysis of strategic environmental policy and plant location decisions by analysing the location decision of firms in different sectors which are linked through an input-output structure of intermediate production. The reason why we introduce inter-sectoral linkages between firms is that they introduce an additional factor, relative to those already analysed in the literature, in the plant location decision, which is the incentive for firms in different sectors to agglomerate in a single location. This has a number of important effects. First, there is now the possibility of multiple equilibria in location decisions of firms. Following from this there is the possibility of catastrophic effects where a small increase in an environmental tax can trigger the collapse of an industrial base in a country; however there is also the possibility that a country which raises its environmental tax could attract more firms to locate in that country, because of the way the tax affects incentives for agglomeration. Finally, and again related to the previous effects, there is the possibility of a hysteresis effect where raising an environmental tax in one country can cause firms to relocate to another country, but subsequently lowering that tax will not induce firms to relocate back into the original country.We consider a simple model with two countries, two industries, an upstream and a downstream sector, and two firms per industry. The analysis proceeds through a three-stage game: in the first stage the governments of the two countries set their environmental policies; in the second stage the firms in both industries choose how many plants to locate and where; in the third stage firms choose their output levels, with the demand for the upstream firms being determined endogenously by the production decisions of the downstream firms. We assume that there are no limits to production capacity, so that firms do not build more than one plant in any country. However, firms may build plants in different countries because of positive transport costs. Although the model appears very simple, it cannot be solved analytically, so all the conclusions must be drawn from numerical simulations
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Massive Grant-Free Access in Cell-Free Massive MIMO Networks
No full textIn this paper, a grant-free scheme is proposed for massive access from machine-type devices in cell-free massive MIMO networks. The proposed scheme, based on the coded random access approach, features transmission of multiple packet replicas per device and a distributed successive interference cancellation procedure across time slots and access points on the network side, generating very limited traffic on the fronthaul links. Its performance, in terms of packet loss rate versus the number of active devices, is analyzed from several perspectives including the device transmit power, the number of replicas per device, and the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio
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