THE INCIDENCE AND PERFORMANCE EFFECTS OF INTERLOCKING DIRECTORATES IN EMERGING MARKET BUSINESS GROUPS : EVIDENCE FROM INDIA

The phenomenon of interlocking directorates is widespread among corporate across the world. This paper studies the structure and extent of interlocking directorates within Indian business groups and analyses the performance effects of such interlocks. It finds that large groups tend to have more interlocks and more heterogeneous the group is, lesser are the interlocks. Finance and trading companies are seen to have a higher intensity of interlocks and holding companies occupy important nodes in the directorial network. The paper also shows that directorial interlocks improve the performance of group-affiliated firms.Interlocking directorates, board structure, corporate governance.

Incidence and performance effects of interlocking directorates in emerging market business groups: Evidence from India

The phenomenon of interlocking directorates is widespread among corporate across the world. This paper studies the structure and extent of interlocking directorates within Indian business groups and analyses the performance effects of such interlocks. It finds that large groups tend to have more interlocks and more heterogeneous the group is, lesser are the interlocks. Finance and trading companies are seen to have a higher intensity of interlocks and holding companies occupy important nodes in the directorial network. The paper also shows that directorial interlocks improve the performance of group-affiliated firms.Interlocking directorates, board structure, corporate governance

Characterizing Power Consumption of Dual-Frequency GNSS of a Smartphone

Location service is one of the most widely used features on a smartphone. More and more apps are built based on location services. As such, demand for accurate positioning is ever higher. Mobile brand Xiaomi has introduced Mi 8, the world's first smartphone equipped with a dual-frequency GNSS chipset which is claimed to provide up to decimeter-level positioning accuracy. Such unprecedentedly high location accuracy brought excitement to industry and academia for navigation research and development of emerging apps. On the other hand, there is a significant knowledge gap on the energy efficiency of smartphones equipped with a dual-frequency GNSS chipset. In this paper, we bridge this knowledge gap by performing an empirical study on power consumption of a dual-frequency GNSS phone. To the best our knowledge, this is the first experimental study that characterizes the power consumption of a smartphone equipped with a dual-frequency GNSS chipset and compares the energy efficiency with a single-frequency GNSS phone. We demonstrate that a smartphone with a dual-frequency GNSS chipset consumes 37% more power on average outdoors, and 28% more power indoors, in comparison with a singe-frequency GNSS phone.Comment: Published in IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM

Evidence Factors For Observational Studies: Design, Analysis And Computation

This thesis includes five chapters on evidence factors analysis of causal effect in various observational study settings. Each of these chapters can be read independently without knowledge of the content of any of the other chapters. Evidence factors allow for two independent analyses to be constructed from the same data set. When combining the evidence factors, the type-I error rate must be controlled to obtain valid inference. A powerful method is developed for controlling the familywise error rate for sensitivity analyses to unmeasured confounding with evidence factors. It is shown that the Bahadur efficiency of sensitivity analysis for the combined evidence is greater than for either evidence factor alone. The popular strategy of matching, for controlling the observed covariates, before inferring about the treatment effect, requires solving an optimization problem. This problem can be solved in polynomial time. In an evidence factors analysis we must consider multiple comparisons, thus the matching problem is often of matching at least three groups. This slightly different problem is much more difficult to solve. The third chapter proposes an approximation algorithm to solve this (and more practical versions of this) problem. We prove that the proposed algorithm provides a solution fast, that is provably not a lot further than the optimal solution that is difficult calculate. Two chapters that follow show the applicability of evidence factors analysis in more complicated study designs. The first of these two chapters considers a case-control study with multiple case definitions and the latter one considers studies with instrumental variables, where the instrument(s) may become invalid. The final chapter of the thesis develops a frequentist method for quantification of the degree of corroboration of causal hypothesis using the tool of evidence factors

Budget Making Process in Urban Local Government: A Study of Savar Pourashava

Local government commenced with the beginning of ancient civilization for the welfare of people living in different civilizations in the world even before the emergence of national government. City government in ancient roman civilization. In the Indian sub-continent or particularly in this region the town government was developed through the hands of Mughal dynasty. In urban areas of Bangladesh people depend a lot on the urban local government bodies for the daily basic amenities. There is Pourashava (municipality in small town) and city corporation in big towns in our country for this purpose of civic service delivery to the citizens. The proper provision of services and continuous development of the local urban area largely depend on the preparation of an efficient budget at the beginning of the fiscal year and effective execution of it throughout the year. Most of the local government bodies in Bangladesh are in constant shortage of funds, on the other hand, it is seen in the research that the urban local government bodies specially, pourashavas continuously prepare “surplus” budget. That means, there is inefficiency in the budget expenditure and implementation of budget. In fact, the overall development of the town or pourashava depends on the efficiency of the budget.Urbanization accelerates social development in terms of increasing higher literacy rate, improvement of quality of education, improving security issues and other social development factors that enhance our urban life comfortable. Keywords: Local government, Urban local government, Mughal dynasty, Bangladesh, Pourashava, Citizen, development, Budget

Hilbert von Neumann modules

We introduce a way of regarding Hilbert von Neumann modules as spaces of operators between Hilbert space, not unlike [Skei], but in an apparently much simpler manner and involving far less machinery. We verify that our definition is equivalent to that of [Skei], by verifying the `Riesz lemma' or what is called `self-duality' in [Skei]. An advantage with our approach is that we can totally side-step the need to go through $C^*$-modules and avoid the two stages of completion - first in norm, then in the strong operator topology - involved in the former approach. We establish the analogue of the Stinespring dilation theorem for Hilbert von Neumann bimodules, and we develop our version of `internal tensor products' which we refer to as Connes fusion for obvious reasons. In our discussion of examples, we examine the bimodules arising from automorphisms of von Neumann algebras, verify that fusion of bimodules corresponds to composition of automorphisms in this case, and that the isomorphism class of such a bimodule depends only on the inner conjugacy class of the automorphism. We also relate Jones' basic construction to the Stinespring dilation associated to the conditional expectation onto a finite-index inclusion (by invoking the uniqueness assertion regarding the latter).Comment: 20 page

A Novel Feature Maps Covariance Minimization Approach for Advancing Convolutional Neural Network Performance

We present a method for boosting the performance of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) by reducing the covariance between the feature maps of the convolutional layers. In a CNN, the units of a hidden layer are segmented into the feature/activation maps. The units within a feature map share the weight matrix (filter), or in simple terms look for the same feature. A feature map is the output of one filter applied to the previous layer. CNN search for features such as straight lines, and as these features are spotted, they get reported to the feature map. During the learning process, the convolutional neural network defines what it perceives as important. Each feature map is looking for something else: one feature map could be looking for horizontal lines while the other for vertical lines or curves. Reducing the covariance between the feature maps of a convolutional layer maximizes the variance between the feature maps out of that layer. This supplements the decrement in the redundancy of the feature maps and consequently maximizes the information represented by the feature maps