Did the market overreact to the mandatory switch to IFRS in Europe?

Despite studies which indicate that mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) reduced the cost of capital for adopting firms and improved analysts’ forecasts, the evidence supporting any improvement in accounting quality is mixed. In a European wide country study, we calculate a broadly based measure of earnings management defined as accruals which are unrelated to current activity or past-current-future cash flows. At the individual country level we find that accounting quality improved only in France, Germany and Netherland, which are categories as ‘legal origin countries’. Moreover, based on an equity valuation model adjusted for earnings quality, we find that, in most European countries, the market overreacted to the impact of mandatory IFRS adoption. Further test shows that investors do not seem to understand the exact components of the financial statements that IFRS will have impact on

Gibbsian Hypothesis in Turbulence

We show that Kolmogorov multipliers in turbulence cannot be statistically independent of others at adjacent scales (or even a finite range apart) by numerical simulation of a shell model and by theory. As the simplest generalization of independent distributions, we suppose that the steady-state statistics of multipliers in the shell model are given by a translation-invariant Gibbs measure with a short-range potential, when expressed in terms of suitable ``spin'' variables: real-valued spins that are logarithms of multipliers and XY-spins defined by local dynamical phases. Numerical evidence is presented in favor of the hypothesis for the shell model, in particular novel scaling laws and derivative relations predicted by the existence of a thermodynamic limit. The Gibbs measure appears to be in a high-temperature, unique-phase regime with ``paramagnetic'' spin order.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, greatly expanded content, accepted to appear in J. Stat. Phy

Game Theory Meets Network Security: A Tutorial at ACM CCS

The increasingly pervasive connectivity of today's information systems brings up new challenges to security. Traditional security has accomplished a long way toward protecting well-defined goals such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, and authenticity. However, with the growing sophistication of the attacks and the complexity of the system, the protection using traditional methods could be cost-prohibitive. A new perspective and a new theoretical foundation are needed to understand security from a strategic and decision-making perspective. Game theory provides a natural framework to capture the adversarial and defensive interactions between an attacker and a defender. It provides a quantitative assessment of security, prediction of security outcomes, and a mechanism design tool that can enable security-by-design and reverse the attacker's advantage. This tutorial provides an overview of diverse methodologies from game theory that includes games of incomplete information, dynamic games, mechanism design theory to offer a modern theoretic underpinning of a science of cybersecurity. The tutorial will also discuss open problems and research challenges that the CCS community can address and contribute with an objective to build a multidisciplinary bridge between cybersecurity, economics, game and decision theory

Resonant Interactions in Rotating Homogeneous Three-dimensional Turbulence

Direct numerical simulations of three-dimensional (3D) homogeneous turbulence under rapid rigid rotation are conducted to examine the predictions of resonant wave theory for both small Rossby number and large Reynolds number. The simulation results reveal that there is a clear inverse energy cascade to the large scales, as predicted by 2D Navier-Stokes equations for resonant interactions of slow modes. As the rotation rate increases, the vertically-averaged horizontal velocity field from 3D Navier-Stokes converges to the velocity field from 2D Navier-Stokes, as measured by the energy in their difference field. Likewise, the vertically-averaged vertical velocity from 3D Navier-Stokes converges to a solution of the 2D passive scalar equation. The energy flux directly into small wave numbers in the $k_z=0$ plane from non-resonant interactions decreases, while fast-mode energy concentrates closer to that plane. The simulations are consistent with an increasingly dominant role of resonant triads for more rapid rotation

Microwave method for high-frequency properties of graphene

Graphene is a remarkable material, which is yet to make the transition from unique laboratory phenomenon to useful industrial material. One missing element in the development process is a quick method of quality control of the electrical properties of graphene which may be applied in, or close to, the graphene growth process on an industrial scale. In this study, the authors describe a non-contact method using microwave resonance which potentially solves this problem. They describe the technique, consider its limitations and accuracy and suggest how the method may have future take up.UK NMS Programme, the EU EMRP project ‘GraphOhm’ and ‘MetNEMS’. The EMRP (European Metrology Research Programme