Corporate Social Responsibility and SME Value Creation

Despite small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) ability to contribute in achieving sustainable economic growth, to reduce unemployment, value creation ability of SMEs through CSR remains unexplored. We examine the impact of CSR on SME value in manufacturing and service industries context, the industries ignored by existing research. We also explore the interactive relationship of CSR and access to finance and their impact on CSR-Value relationship. Our key finding is that SMEs value is positively associated with the CSR expenditure and access to finance. The results indicate that current year CSR expenditure creates value for SMEs through improving their access to finance and ultimately improving their sales in the next year but do not moderate the CSR-Value relationship . Our results are robust and reliable because we employed both 2SLS and generalised method of moments (GMM) approaches to address possible endogeneity. Moreover, we use actual CSR spending data from developing country instead of CSR scores as a proxy for CSR expenditures usually used by prior studies concentrating only on large firms. Our results could be used by the policy makers and regulators in other emerging countries to justify the introduction of schemes to improve CSR and access to finance for SMEs

Topological phase transitions induced by varying topology and boundaries in the toric code

One of the important characteristics of topological phases of matter is the topology of the underlying manifold on which they are defined. In this paper, we present the sensitivity of such phases of matter to the underlying topology, by studying the phase transitions induced due to the change in the boundary conditions. We claim that these phase transitions are accompanied by broken symmetries in the excitation space and to gain further insight we analyze various signatures like the ground state degeneracy, topological entanglement entropy while introducing the open-loop operator whose expectation value effectively captures the phase transition. Further, we extend the analysis to an open quantum setup by defining effective collapse operators, the dynamics of which cool the system to distinct steady states both of which are topologically ordered. We show that the phase transition between such steady states is effectively captured by the expectation value of the open-loop operator

A cognate tRNA specific conformational change in glutaminyl-tRNA synthetase and its implication for specificity

Conformational changes that occur upon substrate binding are known to play crucial roles in the recognition and specific aminoacylation of cognate tRNA by glutaminyl-tRNA synthetase. In a previous study we had shown that glutaminyl-tRNA synthetase labeled selectively in a nonessential sulfhydryl residue by an environment sensitive probe, acrylodan, monitors many of the conformational changes that occur upon substrate binding. In this article we have shown that the conformational change that occurs upon tRNAGln binding to glnRS/ATP complex is absent in a noncognate tRNA tRNAGlu-glnRS/ATP complex. CD spectroscopy indicates that this cognate tRNAGln-induced conformational change may involve only a small change in secondary structure. The Van't Hoff plot of cognate and noncognate tRNA binding in the presence of ATP is similar, suggesting similar modes of interaction. It was concluded that the cognate tRNA induces a local conformational change in the synthetase that may be one of the critical elements that causes enhanced aminoacylation of the cognate tRNA over the noncognate ones

Random Separating Hyperplane Theorem and Learning Polytopes

The Separating Hyperplane theorem is a fundamental result in Convex Geometry with myriad applications. Our first result, Random Separating Hyperplane Theorem (RSH), is a strengthening of this for polytopes. \rsh asserts that if the distance between $a$ and a polytope $K$ with $k$ vertices and unit diameter in $\Re^d$ is at least $\delta$, where $\delta$ is a fixed constant in $(0,1)$, then a randomly chosen hyperplane separates $a$ and $K$ with probability at least $1/poly(k)$ and margin at least $\Omega \left(\delta/\sqrt{d} \right)$. An immediate consequence of our result is the first near optimal bound on the error increase in the reduction from a Separation oracle to an Optimization oracle over a polytope. RSH has algorithmic applications in learning polytopes. We consider a fundamental problem, denoted the ``Hausdorff problem'', of learning a unit diameter polytope $K$ within Hausdorff distance $\delta$, given an optimization oracle for $K$. Using RSH, we show that with polynomially many random queries to the optimization oracle, $K$ can be approximated within error $O(\delta)$. To our knowledge this is the first provable algorithm for the Hausdorff Problem. Building on this result, we show that if the vertices of $K$ are well-separated, then an optimization oracle can be used to generate a list of points, each within Hausdorff distance $O(\delta)$ of $K$, with the property that the list contains a point close to each vertex of $K$. Further, we show how to prune this list to generate a (unique) approximation to each vertex of the polytope. We prove that in many latent variable settings, e.g., topic modeling, LDA, optimization oracles do exist provided we project to a suitable SVD subspace. Thus, our work yields the first efficient algorithm for finding approximations to the vertices of the latent polytope under the well-separatedness assumption

Structural organization of cholera toxin gene and its expression in an environmental non-pathogenic strain of Vibrio cholerae

Non-pathogenic, environmental strain ofVibrio cholerae, ELTOR Ogawa EW6 carries a copy of the cholera toxin gene in its chromosome. Restriction enzyme digestion followed by Southern blot analysis revealed that the structure of the cholera toxin gene in this organism is different from that found in the virulent strains. The xbaI site which has been found to be conserved in the cholera toxin of the virulent strains examined so far, is absent here. Results of the RNA dot blot analysis indicated that the cholera toxin gene in EW6 is transcribed much less efficiently compared to the cholera toxin gene present in the virulent strainVibrio cholerae classical Inaba 569B