Dividend Policy of German Firms

German firms pay out a lower proportion of their cash flows than UK and US firms.However, on a published profits basis, the pattern is reversed.Company law provisions and accounting policies account for these conflicting results.A partial adjustment model is used to estimate the implicit target payout ratio and the speed of adjustment of dividends towards a long run target payout ratio. We find that German firms do not base their dividend decisions on published earnings, but on cash flows.The reasons for the use of a cash flow-based payout policy are: (i) published earnings figures do not correctly reflect corporate performance as German firms tend to retain a significant part of their earnings to build up legal reserves, (ii) the conservative nature of German accounting policies, (iii) published earnings are subject to a higher degree of smoothing than cash flows.Regarding the speed of adjustment of dividends towards the long term target payout ratio, UK and US companies only slowly adjust their dividend policy whereas German are more willing to cut the dividend in the wake of a temporary decrease in profitability.This causes a higher degree of 'discreteness' in the dividends-pershare time series as opposed to the 'smoothness' (i.e., frequent annual small adjustments in the dividend per share) observed in the US and the UK.Dividend policy;payout policy;Lintner dividend model;dividend smoothing;partial adjustment model;corporate governance

Complexity in forecasting and predictive models

Te challenge of this special issue has been to know the state of the problem related to forecasting modeling and the creation of a model to forecast the future behavior that supports decision making by supporting real-world applications. Tis issue has been highlighted by the quality of its research work on the critical importance of advanced analytical methods, such as neural networks, sof computing, evolutionary algorithms, chaotic models, cellular automata, agent-based models, and fnite mixture minimum squares (FIMIX-PLS).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Existential Psychotherapies: Similarities and Differences Among the Main Branches

Authors agree that a range of different existential therapies exist. However, not much has been written about what is characteristic and distinctive of each existential therapy, and the few claims that have been made are mainly hypothetical. Practitioners from the four main branches of existential therapy were asked about the authors and texts that have most influenced their practice and the practices they considered most characteristic of existential therapy. From all over the world, 29 daseinsanalysts, 82 existential-humanistic, 573 existential-phenomenological, and 303 logotherapy and/or existential analysis practitioners participated in this study. Data show that the scope of influence of an author is pretty much limited to the branch he or she is related to and only a few authors, in particular Frankl and Yalom, influence practitioners from all four branches. Five categories of practice are shared among the main existential branches as the most characteristics of existential therapy, with phenomenological practices being the most shared category: But the frequency of each of these categories of practice differs significantly depending on respondents’ training or affiliated branch. Data corroborate the idea of different existential therapies, with logotherapy and/or existential analysis being the most markedly different branch of them all

When do German Firms Change their Dividends?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the dividend policy of German firms is more flexible than the one of their Anglo-American counterparts.This paper analyses the decision to change the dividend for a panel of 221 German firms from 1984 to 1994.The choice of the period of study is motivated by the fact that at the start of this period there was an economic boom which was followed by a recession.Consistent with the traditional dividend literature, e.g.Lintner (1956), net earnings are key determinants of the decision to change the dividend.However, the study comes up with two findings which are contrary to Lintner (1956) and Miller and Modigliani (1961).First, the level of net earnings is not the only key determinant of the dividend decision, as the occurrence of a loss - whatever its magnitude - has an explanatory power exceeding the one of the level of the loss.Second, dividend cuts or omissions tend to be temporary and the majority of German firms quickly (within two years) revert to their initial dividend level.This stands in marked contrast with DeAngelo et al.(1992) who find that US firms are more likely to reduce their dividend when earnings deteriorate on a permanent basis.Furthermore, the fact that German firms frequently omit and cut their dividend and quickly return to their initial dividend suggests that dividends in Germany have less of a signalling role than dividends in the US and the UK.Our findings also contradict Bhattacharya's (1979) argument that the costs of dividend changes are asymmetric with dividend reductions being more costly to the firm than dividend increases.Finally, we find evidence that firms with banks as their major shareholder are more willing to omit their dividend than firms controlled by other types of shareholder.corporate control;dividend policy;corporate governance;corporate ownership

A Serious Complication of Uterine Artery Embolisation

Uterine artery embolisation has been used as a therapeutic alternative for symptomatic uterine myomas. It is considered a safe and effective procedure, with very few cases published involving complications. The authors present a case of a 35-year-old nulliparous woman with an intramural myoma with 161x143x85mm, submitted to an uterine artery embolisation complicated by uterine necrosis. A hysterectomy was performed. This casereport reinforces the idea that artery embolization is not a riskfree procedure and serious complications may occur. Therefore, patients should be carefully selected

Online hyper-evolution of controllers in multirobot systems

In this paper, we introduce online hyper-evolution (OHE) to accelerate and increase the performance of online evolution of robotic controllers. Robots executing OHE use the different sources of feedback information traditionally associated with controller evaluation to find effective evolutionary algorithms and controllers online during task execution. We present two approaches: OHE-fitness, which uses the fitness score of controllers as the criterion to select promising algorithms over time, and OHE-diversity, which relies on the behavioural diversity of controllers for algorithm selection. Both OHE-fitness and OHE-diversity are distributed across groups of robots that evolve in parallel. We assess the performance of OHE-fitness and of OHE-diversity in two foraging tasks with differing complexity, and in five configurations of a dynamic phototaxis task with varying evolutionary pressures. Results show that our OHE approaches: (i) outperform multiple state-of-the-art algorithms as they facilitate controllers with superior performance and faster evolution of solutions, and (ii) can increase effectiveness at different stages of evolution by combining the benefits of multiple algorithms over time. Overall, our study shows that OHE is an effective new paradigm to the synthesis of controllers for robots.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Evolutionary Robotics

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio