Property rights protection and access to bank loans: Evidence from private enterprises in China

Poor protection of private property has limited the access to bank loans by private enterprises in developing and transition economies. Under those circumstances, private entrepreneurs have resorted to various ways of enhancing the de facto protection of private property. Using a dataset of 3,073 private enterprises in China, this paper empirically investigates the impact of political participation and philanthropic activities - informal substitutes for the lack of formal protection of private property - on the access to bank loans. © 2006 The Authors Journal compilation © 2006 The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.published_or_final_versio

Excludable public goods: Pricing and social welfare maximization

We compare two pricing strategies - buffet pricing and usage pricing - of excludable public goods for social welfare maximization. Buffet pricing is better than usage pricing for low consumer heterogeneity, while the opposite holds for high consumer heterogeneity. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.preprin

Alternating Multiple Mixed Values

In this paper, we define and study a variant of multiple zeta values (MZVs) of level four, called alternating multiple mixed values or alternating multiple $M$-values (AMMVs), which forms a subspace of the space of colored MZVs of level four as ${\mathbb Q}[i]$-vector spaces. This variant includes the alternating version of Hoffman's multiple $t$-values, Kaneko-Tsumura's multiple $T$-values, and the multiple $S$-values studied by the authors previously as special cases. We exhibit nice properties similar to the ordinary MZVs such as the duality, integral shuffle and series stuffle relations. After setting up the algebraic framework we derive the regularized double shuffle relations of the AMMVs. We also investigate several alternating multiple $T$- and $S$-values by establishing some explicit relations of integrals involving arctangent function. In the end, we discuss the explicit evaluations of a kind of AMMVs at depth three and compute the dimensions of a few interesting subspaces of AMMVs for weight less than 7.Comment: 40 pages, 3 figure

Prevalence of sexual harassment/victimization of female students in Ebonyi State University Abakaliki, southeast Nigeria

Objective: To assess the prevalence, types and consequences of sexual harassment/victimization of female students in the University. Methodology: This was a cross sectional descriptive study. Using a cluster sampling method, 295 female students resident in the four campuses of the university were recruited and interviewed with a structured interviewer-administered questionnaire. Results: One hundred and eight (36.7%) of the respondents had experienced sexual harassment/victimization at least once on campus. Out of this, 35 (32.4%) were forced sexual intercourse while 73 (67.6%) were other forms of unwanted sexual contact including indecent touch, romance and kisses. Majority 53 (49.1%) of the perpetrators were fellow students. Similarly, majority 55 (50.9%) of the harassment/victimization took place in the student's residence, 27 (25.0%) took place at staff offices while 26 (24%) took place in other venues including hotels. The most common adverse consequence of the sexual harassment/victimization was psychosocial distress (89.8%) followed by poor academic performance (56.5%) and sexually transmitted infection (6.5%). However, 12 (11%) of the victims claimed that the harassment resulted to an improved academic performance. Being older (= 30 years) and being married were significantly more associated with being victimized. Conclusions: About a third of female students in Ebonyi State University had been sexually victimized or harassed. Fellow students were responsible for most of the incidents followed by academic staff and other university employees. Most incidents occurred in the students' hostels or residences and older students and those who were married had higher risk of being harassedJournal of Community Medicine & Primary Health vol 23 (1-2) 201

An implicit boundary finite element method with extension to frictional sliding boundary conditions and elasto-plastic analyses

Implicit boundary methods, which enrich the interpolation structure with implicit weight functions, are straightforward methods for the enforcement of Dirichlet boundary conditions. In this article, we follow the implicit boundary method that uses approximate step functions (the step boundary method) developed by Kumar et al. and provide modifications that have several advantages. Roller boundary conditions have wide practical applications in engineering, however, the step boundary method for roller boundary conditions with inclinations has yet to be fully formulated through to the final linear system of equations. Thus we provide a complete derivation that leads to simplified sti↵ness matrices compared to the original approach, which can be implemented directly in fictitious domain finite element analysis. The approach is then extended, we believe for the first time, to the nonlinear cases of frictional boundary conditions and elasto-plastic material behaviour. The proposed formulation and procedures are validated on a number of example problems that test di↵erent aspects of the method

A Lightweight Graph Transformer Network for Human Mesh Reconstruction from 2D Human Pose

Existing deep learning-based human mesh reconstruction approaches have a tendency to build larger networks in order to achieve higher accuracy. Computational complexity and model size are often neglected, despite being key characteristics for practical use of human mesh reconstruction models (e.g. virtual try-on systems). In this paper, we present GTRS, a lightweight pose-based method that can reconstruct human mesh from 2D human pose. We propose a pose analysis module that uses graph transformers to exploit structured and implicit joint correlations, and a mesh regression module that combines the extracted pose feature with the mesh template to reconstruct the final human mesh. We demonstrate the efficiency and generalization of GTRS by extensive evaluations on the Human3.6M and 3DPW datasets. In particular, GTRS achieves better accuracy than the SOTA pose-based method Pose2Mesh while only using 10.2% of the parameters (Params) and 2.5% of the FLOPs on the challenging in-the-wild 3DPW dataset. Code will be publicly available

Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks

We introduce Florence-2, a novel vision foundation model with a unified, prompt-based representation for a variety of computer vision and vision-language tasks. While existing large vision models excel in transfer learning, they struggle to perform a diversity of tasks with simple instructions, a capability that implies handling the complexity of various spatial hierarchy and semantic granularity. Florence-2 was designed to take text-prompt as task instructions and generate desirable results in text forms, whether it be captioning, object detection, grounding or segmentation. This multi-task learning setup demands large-scale, high-quality annotated data. To this end, we co-developed FLD-5B that consists of 5.4 billion comprehensive visual annotations on 126 million images, using an iterative strategy of automated image annotation and model refinement. We adopted a sequence-to-sequence structure to train Florence-2 to perform versatile and comprehensive vision tasks. Extensive evaluations on numerous tasks demonstrated Florence-2 to be a strong vision foundation model contender with unprecedented zero-shot and fine-tuning capabilities