An Empirical Study of the Relationship between Macroeconomic Variables and Stock Price: A Study on Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE)

Literature strongly supports vibration of the stock price as a consequence of various macroeconomic factors (Darrat, 1990; Fama & Schwert, 1977; Jaffe & Mandelker, 1976; Nelson, 1976; Pearce & Roley, 1985; Ripley, 1973). This study has investigated the explanatory power of various macro-factors such as inflation rate, exchange rate, interest rate, money supply and production index on the variability of the stock price in Bangladesh. Multiple regression analysis has been conducted to asses the relationship between the stated macro economic factors with stock price. All share price index of the Dhaka Stock Exchange has been used as a proxy for stock price, the dependent variable of the study. No significant relationship has been found between the stock price and any of the macroeconomic factors. The study bodes well for advanced empirical models with additional macroeconomic variables.

Students’ Choice Criteria to select a Private University for their Higher Education in Bangladesh

With the increasing demand of higher education in Bangladesh, first time the Private University Act (Bangladesh) was passed in 1992 to regulate the standard of higher education. The students, those who get admitted in the private universities consider few factors to select the institution. This paper evaluates some key factors in order to scrutinize the students’ choice on the basis of some significant factors. By using Convenient Sampling Technique the data has been collected randomly from 100 students of 10 private universities. In this case various tests have been conducted such as Factor Analysis, Multiple Regression Analysis, and ANOVA. Study reveals that education quality of the university is the first important criteria to choose the private university and subsequently cost of the study factor and student politics factor are also important among them. This paper also shows the Socio-cultural background of the students studying at the Private Universities in Bangladesh. Keywords: Public University, Private University, Socio-cultural Environment, UGC (University Grant Commission)

An empirical investigation of failing companies and their determinants using the hazard model in an emerging capital market

The purpose of this study is to highlight the predictors of financial distress during the period 1990 to 2000. Previous studies highlight the inadequacies of the MDA and the log it models and suggest that a hazard model gives a more accurate result due to its consideration of time varying co-variates. By applying the hazard model, we find that leverage, profit, cash flow, liquidity, size and growth play a significant role in explaining financial distress with 83% accuracy rate. This rate did not change much when the model is applied to the hold-out sample. We also find that multicollinearity problem is not a threat in our analysis

Application of particle swarm optimization for solving optimal generation plant location problem

The global demand for energy especially-in-developing-countries,-has-been witnessing a tremendous growth due to rapid population growth, economic growth and developing industrial sectors. Therefore, it is necessary to forecast the future energy needs and expand generation capacity to meet the increasing peak demand.-This-paper-presents-an-optimization approach to determine the optimal location for installing a new generator in which the technical, economic and environmental aspects are all taken into consideration. The location that yields the minimum fuel costs, total emission and system loss is considered as the optimal generation plant location. The- formulated- objective- function- and- its constraints compose an optimization problem is solved using particle swarm optimization (PSO). The proposed PSO based optimization approach is tested on IEEE 14-bus system and IEEE 30-bus system to illustrate the potential of the new approach. The simulation results have shown that the proposed approach is indeed capable of determining the optimal generation location that can save much overall fuel cost as well as reduce the total emissions of generators and losses in the network

Engineering the Hardware/Software Interface for Robotic Platforms - A Comparison of Applied Model Checking with Prolog and Alloy

Robotic platforms serve different use cases ranging from experiments for prototyping assistive applications up to embedded systems for realizing cyber-physical systems in various domains. We are using 1:10 scale miniature vehicles as a robotic platform to conduct research in the domain of self-driving cars and collaborative vehicle fleets. Thus, experiments with different sensors like e.g.~ultra-sonic, infrared, and rotary encoders need to be prepared and realized using our vehicle platform. For each setup, we need to configure the hardware/software interface board to handle all sensors and actors. Therefore, we need to find a specific configuration setting for each pin of the interface board that can handle our current hardware setup but which is also flexible enough to support further sensors or actors for future use cases. In this paper, we show how to model the domain of the configuration space for a hardware/software interface board to enable model checking for solving the tasks of finding any, all, and the best possible pin configuration. We present results from a formal experiment applying the declarative languages Alloy and Prolog to guide the process of engineering the hardware/software interface for robotic platforms on the example of a configuration complexity up to ten pins resulting in a configuration space greater than 14.5 million possibilities. Our results show that our domain model in Alloy performs better compared to Prolog to find feasible solutions for larger configurations with an average time of 0.58s. To find the best solution, our model for Prolog performs better taking only 1.38s for the largest desired configuration; however, this important use case is currently not covered by the existing tools for the hardware used as an example in this article.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2013 (arXiv:cs/1312.5952

Evaluation of the Customer Perception on the Company's Marketing Mix Effort: A Case Study of Government and Private Cement Company Ltd. in Bangladesh

Specifically, strategic issues like customer perception on the company's marketing mix analysis, demand analysis, competitor analysis, analysis of market situation, production process have so far not been analyzed adequately. Therefore, the main objective of this study was to evaluate the customer perception on the company's marketing mix effort of Chhatak Cement Company (Government) and Shah Cement Industries Ltd. (Private). By integrating primary and secondary data, different statistical analyses were conducted. The author has also identified through factor analysis techniques in this study that, product quality, product availability, product weight, packaging, repackaging, reasonable price, transportation facilities, promotional activities, credit facilities, technical facilities, delivery in time are the significant competitive factors in the market. The analysis and findings suggest that the strategy of Shah Cement Industries Ltd. is much better than the Chhatak Cement Company. Every success of an organization depends upon effective business strategy. Customer's perception on the company's marketing mix efforts shows that for all of the factors are favorable to Shah Cement Industries Ltd. than Chhatak Cement Company. So Shah Cement Industries Ltd. can maintain the existing strategy but Chhatak Cement Company should redesign its strategy