The Determinants of Commercial Bank Profitability in Zimbabwe: A Dynamic Panel Data Model

This study examined profitability of 15 commercial banks in Zimbabwe that survived the economic crisis experienced in Zimbabwe from 2003 to 2008. The first objective of the study was to determine whether the profitability of these banks significantly changed over the post crisis period. Using annual financial accounts data, from 2011 to 2014, the results from the one-way repeated measures ANOVA show that the mean profit ratios significantly changed over the four year period. The second objective was to determine factors influencing bank profitability under a multicurrency regime and the results from a dynamic panel data model show that diversification, funding cost and market share significantly affected profitability of commercial banks in Zimbabwe during the period under study. Keywords: bank profitability, dynamic panel data, diversification, funding cost, market share

Financial reform and financing decisions of listed firms in Zimbabwe

We examine the impact of the economic reform programme on the financing choices of Zimbabwean listed companies. Using the published accounts of a sample of companies we show that listed firms rely heavily on external finance, especially short term bank financing. We estimate an eclectic econometric model of firms’ capital structure based on key predictions from the theory of finance, augmented by variables aimed at capturing the impact of Zimbabwe’s reform programme. The analysis shows that an orthodox model has little explanatory power over firms’ capital structure in the pre-reform period, but in the post-reform period it does better. The differences between the pre-reform and post-reform era suggest that the reforms achieved partial success in opening up the capital markets and improving the transparency of firm financing behaviour

The determinants of corporate financial policy in Zimbabwe : empirical evidence from company panel data

This thesis examines the patterns and determinants of corporate financial policy (capital structure and dividend policy) in Zimbabwe. In particular it investigates various aspects of corporate financial behaviour in an emerging market; the evolution of corporate financial structure and dividend payout ratio over the past 25 years (1975-1999), the impact of the reform programme (introduced in 1992) on firm characteristics, the corporate financing patterns during the period 1990-1999, the determinants of corporate capital structures and dividend policy and the interaction between corporate financing and dividend policy decisions. The main results that emerge from the analysis suggest that (i) the debt ratio for the Zimbabwean corporate sector significantly increased after the reform (ii) the Zimbabwean corporate sector mainly depends on external finance (75 % of total financing) especially short-term finance, which contributes 52 % of total financing. Furthermore, the results support the following hypotheses (i) the pecking order hypothesis that firms prefer internal financing to external financing, (ii) the trade-off hypothesis that non-debt tax shields reduce the expected gains from leverage, (iii) firms use liquid assets to finance investments, (iv) the agency cost hypothesis that increasing managerial ownership helps to align the interests of managers and shareholders and therefore reduces the role of debt as an agency-conflict mitigating factor, (v) large firms have lower bankruptcy costs and therefore can support more debt than smaller firms, (vi) debt service limits the amount of cash paid out as dividends, and (vii) high growth firms rely on external finance more than low growth firms (viii) high growth and firms have low payout ratios (iv) Cash flows and institutional investors increase the likelihood that firms will pay dividends (v) capital structure and dividend policy decisions are interdependent and highly leveraged firms have low payout ratios.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

De l’utilité du butorphanol dans la gestion de l’analgésie lors de césarienne chez la brebis

Après un état des lieux sur les pratiques analgésiques actuelles lors de chirurgies chez les ruminants de rente et un inventaire des raisons de la fréquente négligence de la douleur dans ce domaine vétérinaire, nous présentons en détails le tartrate de butorphanol, un dérivé morphinique μ-antagoniste et κ-agoniste, récemment disponible pour les praticiens et potentiellement intéressant en obstétrique ovine. Nous développons ensuite une étude expérimentale du butorphanol, administré à 25mg IV in toto, lors de césariennes sur un échantillon de 34 brebis gravides. Cette étude n’apporte pas la preuve d’un gain d’analgésie, mais démontre que la dose utilisée, trop élevée, peut être préjudiciable en générant une excitation indésirable. Cette étude devrait être complétée par l’évaluation de doses inférieures à 0,2mg/kg de butorphanol, car la majoration du coût des césariennes induite par son utilisation (jusqu’à 10%) implique d’avoir la certitude de son efficacité dans un tel contexte

A systematic evaluation of single cell RNA-seq analysis pipelines

The recent rapid spread of single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) methods has created a large variety of experimental and computational pipelines for which best practices have not yet been established. Here, we use simulations based on five scRNA-seq library protocols in combination with nine realistic differential expression (DE) setups to systematically evaluate three mapping, four imputation, seven normalisation and four differential expression testing approaches resulting in similar to 3000 pipelines, allowing us to also assess interactions among pipeline steps. We find that choices of normalisation and library preparation protocols have the biggest impact on scRNA-seq analyses. Specifically, we find that library preparation determines the ability to detect symmetric expression differences, while normalisation dominates pipeline performance in asymmetric DE-setups. Finally, we illustrate the importance of informed choices by showing that a good scRNA-seq pipeline can have the same impact on detecting a biological signal as quadrupling the sample size

Functional dissection of two amino acid substitutions unique to the human FOXP2 protein

The transcription factor forkhead box P2 (FOXP2) is involved in the development of language and speech in humans. Two amino acid substitutions (T303N, N325S) occurred in the human FOXP2 after the divergence from the chimpanzee lineage. It has previously been shown that when they are introduced into the FOXP2 protein of mice they alter striatal synaptic plasticity by increasing long-term depression in medium spiny neurons. Here we introduce each of these amino acid substitutions individually into mice and analyze their effects in the striatum. We find that long-term depression in medium spiny neurons is increased in mice carrying only the T303N substitution to the same extent as in mice carrying both amino acid substitutions. In contrast, the N325S substitution has no discernable effects.journal articl

The impact of amplification on differential expression analyses by RNA-seq

Currently, quantitative RNA-seq methods are pushed to work with increasingly small starting amounts of RNA that require amplification. However, it is unclear how much noise or bias amplification introduces and how this affects precision and accuracy of RNA quantification. To assess the effects of amplification, reads that originated from the same RNA molecule (PCR-duplicates) need to be identified. Computationally, read duplicates are defined by their mapping position, which does not distinguish PCR-from natural duplicates and hence it is unclear how to treat duplicated reads. Here, we generate and analyse RNA-seq data sets prepared using three different protocols (Smart-Seq, TruSeq and UMI-seq). We find that a large fraction of computationally identified read duplicates are not PCR duplicates and can be explained by sampling and fragmentation bias. Consequently, the computational removal of duplicates does improve neither accuracy nor precision and can actually worsen the power and the False Discovery Rate (FDR) for differential gene expression. Even when duplicates are experimentally identified by unique molecular identifiers (UMIs), power and FDR are only mildly improved. However, the pooling of samples as made possible by the early barcoding of the UMI-protocol leads to an appreciable increase in the power to detect differentially expressed genes

Functional analysis of human and chimpanzee promoters

BACKGROUND: It has long been argued that changes in gene expression may provide an additional and crucial perspective on the evolutionary differences between humans and chimpanzees. To investigate how often expression differences seen in tissues are caused by sequence differences in the proximal promoters, we tested the expression activity in cultured cells of human and chimpanzee promoters from genes that differ in mRNA expression between human and chimpanzee tissues. RESULTS: Twelve promoters for which the corresponding gene had been shown to be differentially expressed between humans and chimpanzees in liver or brain were tested. Seven showed a significant difference in activity between the human promoter and the orthologous chimpanzee promoter in at least one of the two cell lines used. However, only three of them showed a difference in the same direction as in the tissues. CONCLUSION: Differences in proximal promoter activity are likely to be common between humans and chimpanzees, but are not linked in a simple fashion to gene-expression levels in tissues. This suggests that several genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees might be responsible for a single expression difference and thus that relevant expression differences between humans and chimpanzees will be difficult to predict from cell culture experiments or DNA sequences