Financial Innovation, Firm Size and Growth

Small …rm lending has historically been very costly because of the paucity of information. We study the disproportionate impact of …nancial development (measured as the current level of a …nancial system) and …nancial innovation (measured as its change) on small …rm sectors. We incorporate …nancial innovation and …nancial development into a Schumpeterian endogenous growth model. Entrepreneurial skill on a continuum of types is private information; thereby creating adverse selection problems. In the absence of …nancial innovation, an arrival of new technology frontier renders existing screening technology obsolete; thereby having largely negative impacts on small …rm sectors. Our model suggests that …nancial innovation is more pronounced in small-…rm sectors in more …nancially developed countries. The linkage between …nancial innovation and the disproportionate impact on small …rm-sectors is weak in less …nancially developed countries. At the European industry level, empirical evidence is more consistent with our model prediction

Price volatility and risk management of oil and gas companies: Evidence from oil and gas project finance deals

We investigate how the oil and gas project companies' decisions to hedge the risk of future prices of oil and gas respond to the changes in the price volatility of oil and gas, especially the role of the exposure of the sponsor company's stock returns to the risk of oil and gas prices. With a sample of 328 loans made to oil and gas development projects in 30 countries during 1996–2011 period, we find that the oil (or gas) price volatility increases the oil (or gas) project company's hedging likelihood, especially to a greater extent for the case in which the sponsor company's oil (or gas) exposure is smaller. Our findings suggest that the sponsor company's willingness to reduce its exposure to the risk of oil and gas prices increases the likelihood that the subsidiary project company will hedge the risk of future prices of oil and gas

Feasibility experiments of seismic concrete block walls without joint mortar

The authors developed two types of block systems consisting only of main block and key block without joint mortar in consideration of seismic performance and workability. Two types of block systems have different key block shapes: One is the peanuts shape and the other is the dumbbell shape. In this study, the proposed two types of block walls as well as a typical block wall were experimentally investigated to evaluate the seismic performance. In the tests, full-scale, single-story specimens were tested under static cyclic in-plane loading, and failure patterns and cracks were carefully observed. In this paper, the loading bearing capacity, energy dissipation capacity and reuse ratio of block walls are discussed in detail. As a result, the deformability, energy absorption capacity and reuse ratio of the proposed block systems were considerably higher than those of typical block system

Large-Area Resonance-Tuned Metasurfaces for On-Demand Enhanced Spectroscopy

We show an effective procedure for lateral structure tuning in nanoimprint lithography (NIL) that has been developed as a vertical top-down method fabricating large-area nanopatterns. The procedure was applied to optical resonance tuning in stacked complementary (SC) metasurfaces based on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrates and was found to realize structure tuning at nm precision using only one mold in the NIL process. The structure tuning enabled us to obtain fine tuning of the optical resonances, offering cost-effective, high-throughput, and high-precision nanofabrication. We also demonstrate that the tuned optical resonances selectively and significantly enhance fluorescence (FL) of dye molecules in a near-infrared range. FL intensity on a SC metasurface was found to be more than 450-fold larger than the FL intensity on flat Au film on base SOI substrate

Enhanced High Performance of a Metasurface Polarizer Through Numerical Analysis of the Degradation Characteristics

Abstract This study focuses on the experimental and numerical investigations for the degradation characteristics of a metasurface polarizer. The metasurface has a stacked complementary structure that exhibits a high extinction ratio of the order of 10,000 in the near-infrared region. However, its performance has significantly degraded over time. To clarify the origin of this degradation, the effects of surface roughness and metallic loss are investigated numerically. The degradation is mainly attributed to increase in the loss. These numerical calculations also reveal that the extinction ratio is enhanced by adjusting the thicknesses of the complementary structures to different values. This study paves a way to realize a metasurface polarizer that has a low sensitivity to the time degradation and has a high extinction ratio

Low-complexity super-resolution detection for range-vital Doppler estimation FMCW radar

This paper proposes low-complexity super-resolution detection for range-vital Doppler estimation frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar. In regards to vital radar, and in order to estimate joint range and vital Doppler information such as the human heartbeat and respiration, two-dimensional (2D) detection algorithms such as 2D-FFT (fast Fourier transform) and 2D-MUSIC (multiple signal classification) are required. However, due to the high complexity of 2D full-search algorithms, it is difficult to apply this process to low-cost vital FMCW systems. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the range and vital Doppler parameters by using 1D-FFT and 1D-MUSIC algorithms, respectively. Among 1D-FFT outputs for range detection, we extract 1D-FFT results based solely on human target information with phase variation of respiration for each chirp; subsequently, the 1D-MUSIC algorithm is employed to obtain accurate vital Doppler results. By reducing the dimensions of the estimation algorithm from 2D to 1D, the computational burden is reduced. In order to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm, we compare the Monte Carlo simulation and root-mean-square error results. The simulation and experiment results show that the complexity of the proposed algorithm is significantly lower than that of an algorithm detecting signals in several regions.1