Liquidity management around seasoned equity offerings

We investigate firms' liquidity practices around seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). We broadly classify issuers on the basis of whether the firm belongs to an industry deemed to be financially constrained or unconstrained. We find that constrained-industry issuers tend to save more cash to conserve funding capacity in anticipating investment. Unconstrained industry issuers, in contrast, carry high debt and limited cash reflecting a sizable financial leash. We also find that the former firms experience significant cash stockpiling following new equity issues, whereasforthe lattergroup, there is a significant decline in long-term debt. In the long run, unconstrained issuers who aggressively manage liquidity pre-issue have lower operating profit. However, the relation does not hold for market-based performance because investors, observingthe liquidity information, quickly discount stock value at the time of the offering. Rather, post-issue market underperformance can be attributed to investors' downward revisions relating to the transitory nature of investment opportunities

Strain-facilitated process for the lift-off of a Si layer of less than 20 nm thickness

We report a process for the lift-off of an ultrathin Si layer. By plasma hydrogenation of a molecular-beam-epitaxy-grown heterostructure of SiSb-doped-SiSi, ultrashallow cracking is controlled to occur at the depth of the Sb-doped layer. Prior to hydrogenation, an oxygen plasma treatment is used to induce the formation of a thin oxide layer on the surface of the heterostructure. Chemical etching of the surface oxide layer after hydrogenation further thins the thickness of the separated Si layer to be only 15 nm. Mechanisms of hydrogen trapping and strain-facilitated cracking are discussed

Quantum dilaton gravity as a linear dilaton conformal field theory

A model of matter-coupled gravity in two dimensions is quantized. The crucial requirement for performing the quantization is the vanishing of the conformal anomaly, which is achieved by tuning a parameter in the interaction potential. The spectrum of the theory is determined by mapping the model first onto a field theory with a Liouville interaction, then onto a linear dilaton conformal field theory. In absence of matter fields a pure gauge theory with massless ground state is found; otherwise it is possible to minimally couple up to 11 matter scalar fields: in this case the ground state is tachyonic and the matter sector decouples, like the transverse oscillators in the critical bosonic string.Comment: 7 pages, RevTeX4 file. v2: some comments and one reference adde

BRST Analysis of Physical States for 2D (Super) Gravity Coupled to (Super) Conformal Matter

We summarize some recent results on the BRST analysis of physical states of 2D gravity coupled to c<=1 conformal matter and the supersymmetric generalization.Comment: 11 page