4,214 research outputs found
Capital Structure and Investment Behaviour of Malaysian Firms in the 1990s: A Study of Corporate Governance before the Crisis
This is an empirical study analyzing the corporate finance and governance structure in Malaysia before and after the financial crisis of 1997, utilizing the agency cost approach. The contribution of this paper is to link the corporate governance mechanism with the role of banks and corporate ownership structure taking into account the institutional framework and historical background of the Malaysian financial system. Based on data for 375 non-financial KLSE (Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange) listed companies during fiscal years 1995-99, our analysis is organized into three parts. Section 2 outlines characteristics of corporate finance in Malaysia in the 1990s using aggregated time-series data. Section 3 examines determinants of capital structure via cross-sectional regressions in terms of dependency on banks, availability of internal funds, ownership concentration, ethnic ownership structure, industry effects, etc. And in section 4, we estimate simple investment functions with panel data in order to examine the effects of debt financing on corporate investments before the crisis. Empirical results show that the commitment of banks to finance corporate debt as well as lending obviously increased debt ratios. Ownership concentration mitigates conflict between managers and owners. Foreign ownership also contributed to a reduction in the agency costs of equity financing. However, increasing ownership by native Malays (Bumiputera), both the direct and indirect holding of corporate shares, played no significant role in disciplining corporate management. Finally, high dependency on debt led to excessive corporate investment before the crisis. These results imply that the concentration of risks on the banking sector and social policy advocating the dispersion of corporate ownership weakened the corporate governance mechanism, thereby exacerbating the distress of Malaysia's corporate sector during the financial crisis.
Theoretical search for Chevrel phase based thermoelectric materials
We investigate the thermoelectric properties of some semiconducting Chevrel
phases. Band structure calculations are used to compute thermopowers and to
estimate of the effects of alloying and disorder on carrier mobility. Alloying
on the Mo site with transition metals like Re, Ru or Tc to reach a
semiconducting composition causes large changes in the electronic structure at
the Fermi level. Such alloys are expected to have low carrier mobilities.
Filling with transition metals was also found to be incompatible with high
thermoelectric performance based on the calculated electronic structures.
Filling with Zn, Cu, and especially with Li was found to be favorable. The
calculated electronic structures of these filled Chevrel phases are consistent
with low scattering of carriers by defects associated with the filling. We
expect good mobility and high thermopower in materials with the composition
close to (Li,Cu)MoSe, particularly when Li-rich, and recommend this
system for experimental investigation.Comment: 4 two-column pages, 4 embedded ps figure
Short term effect of breaking and cultivation on properties of an Oxbow landscape
Non-Peer ReviewedChanges in soil quality over the first six years of cultivation were studied for an Oxbow landscape dominated by Black Chernozems. Bulk density at shoulder, footslope, and level landforms was found to increase by 15-20 % from 1985 to 1988 and by 3-4 % from 1988 to 1991. Similarly, organic carbon concentration declined by 17-37 % and 0-10 %, respectively, over the same periods. These results demonstrate that cultivation of virgin land has an almost immediate impact on soil quality. 137Cesium measurements indicated that appreciable soil erosion has not occurred in this landscape since cultivation began
Antimicrobial activity of a continuous visible light disinfection system
We evaluated the ability of high-intensity visible violet light with a peak output of 405 nm to kill epidemiologically important pathogens. The high irradiant light significantly reduced both vegetative bacteria and spores at some time points over a 72-hour exposure period
The use of large undisturbed cores to assess soil quality-yield relationships in the greenhouse
Non-Peer ReviewedLarge undisturbed cores were taken from different landscape positions (divergent shoulders, DSH, and convergent footslopes, CFS) at two sites in the Black soil zone. The soils are classified as belonging to the Oxbow association and have been cultivated for 15 and 82 years. The cores were used in a greenhouse experiment to study the effect of soil quality on yield of spring wheat (var. Katepwa) at three levels of simulated growing season precipitation: low (123 mm season-1), mid (189 mm season-1), and high (332 mm season-1). Grain yields in the DSH cores increased with increasing precipitation for both the 15- and 82-year soils. Moreover, the 15-year DSH cores out-yielded their 82-year counterparts by 50, 76, and 85% at the low, mid, and high water levels, respectively. Cores from the CFS positions were watered only at the mid-water level. Grain yields in the 15- and 82-year CFS cores and the 15-year DSH cores were not significantly different (P < 0.05). The results of this study indicate that soil quality is a relatively minor factor when water is limiting but assumes a much greater role in years of normal or above normal growing season precipitation. These initial results also suggest that large cores are a feasible and cost-effective means of studying soil-plant relationships in the greenhouse or growth chamber
Statistical and Dynamical Study of Disease Propagation in a Small World Network
We study numerically statistical properties and dynamical disease propagation
using a percolation model on a one dimensional small world network. The
parameters chosen correspond to a realistic network of school age children. We
found that percolation threshold decreases as a power law as the short cut
fluctuations increase. We found also the number of infected sites grows
exponentially with time and its rate depends logarithmically on the density of
susceptibles. This behavior provides an interesting way to estimate the
serology for a given population from the measurement of the disease growing
rate during an epidemic phase. We have also examined the case in which the
infection probability of nearest neighbors is different from that of short
cuts. We found a double diffusion behavior with a slower diffusion between the
characteristic times.Comment: 12 pages LaTex, 10 eps figures, Phys.Rev.E Vol. 64, 056115 (2001
Interannual variability of Alexandrium fundyense abundance and shellfish toxicity in the Gulf of Maine
Author Posting. © The Authors, 2005. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B. V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography 52 (2005): 2843-2855, doi:10.1016/j.dsr2.2005.06.020.Six years of oceanographic surveys of Alexandrium fundyense concentrations in the Gulf of Maine are combined with shellfish toxicity records from coastal monitoring stations to assess covariations of these quantities on seasonal to interannual time scales. Annual mean gulf-wide cell abundance varies by less than one order of magnitude during the time interval examined (1993-2002). Fluctuations in gulf-wide annual mean cell abundance and shellfish toxicity are not related in a consistent manner. This suggests that interannual variations in toxicity may be regulated by transport and delivery of offshore cell populations, rather than the absolute abundance of the source populations themselves.We gratefully acknowledge the support of the US ECOHAB Program, sponsored by NOAA, NSF, EPA, NASA, and ONR
An Ensemble Kalman-Particle Predictor-Corrector Filter for Non-Gaussian Data Assimilation
An Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF, the predictor) is used make a large change
in the state, followed by a Particle Filer (PF, the corrector) which assigns
importance weights to describe non-Gaussian distribution. The weights are
obtained by nonparametric density estimation. It is demonstrated on several
numerical examples that the new predictor-corrector filter combines the
advantages of the EnKF and the PF and that it is suitable for high dimensional
states which are discretizations of solutions of partial differential
equations.Comment: ICCS 2009, to appear; 9 pages; minor edit
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