Qualitative Factors as Determinants of Continued Success:An Examination of eBusiness Entrepreneurial Firms Using the NewVenture Template

In this study, we analyze eBusiness entrepreneurs nominated by the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award program to ascertain whether qualitative factors are correlated with success. We find qualitative factors are incrementally informative above and beyond the information provided by quantitative factors. More specifically, firms that are able to maintain their innovative strategies by improving upon the product (or service) they offer and are able to meet the long-term needs of the customer are more likely to experience increased sales growth and have greater access to capital which results in a successful harvest strategy

Has the regulation of non-GAAP disclosures influenced managers' use of aggressive earnings exclusions?

The frequency of non-GAAP (“pro forma”) reporting has continued to increase in the U.S. over the last decade despite preliminary evidence that regulatory intervention led to a decline in non-GAAP disclosures. In particular, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) and Regulation G (2003) impose strict requirements related to the reporting of non-GAAP numbers. More recently, the SEC has renewed its emphasis on non-GAAP reporting and declared it a “fraud risk factor.” Given the SEC’s renewed emphasis on non-GAAP disclosures, we explore the extent to which regulation has curbed potentially misleading disclosures by investigating two measures of aggressive non-GAAP reporting. Consistent with the intent of Congress and the SEC, we find some evidence that managers report adjusted earnings metrics more cautiously in the post-SOX regulatory environment. Specifically, the results suggest that firms reporting non-GAAP earnings in the post-SOX period are less likely to (1) exclude recurring items incremental to those excluded by analysts and (2) use non-GAAP exclusions to meet strategic earnings targets on a non-GAAP basis that they miss based on I/B/E/S actual earnings. However, we also find that some firms exclude specific recurring items aggressively. Overall, the results suggest that while regulation has generally reduced aggressive non-GAAP reporting, some firms continue to disclose non-GAAP earnings numbers that could be misleading in the post-SOX regulatory environment

A finite difference method for pricing European and American options under a geometric Lévy process

In this paper we develop a numerical approach to a fractional-order differential Linear Complementarity Problem (LCP) arising in pricing European and American options under a geometric Lévy process. The LCP is first approximated by a nonlinear penalty fractional Black-Scholes (fBS) equation. We then propose a finite difference scheme for the penalty fBS equation. We show that both the continuous and the discretized fBS equations are uniquely solvable and establish the convergence of the numerical solution to the viscosity solution of the penalty fBS equation by proving the consistency, stability and monotonicity of the numerical scheme. We also show that the discretization has the 2nd-order truncation error in both the spatial and time mesh sizes. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and usefulness of the numerical method for pricing both European and American options under the geometric Lévy process

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Effects of Anacetrapib in Patients with Atherosclerotic Vascular Disease

BACKGROUND: Patients with atherosclerotic vascular disease remain at high risk for cardiovascular events despite effective statin-based treatment of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels. The inhibition of cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) by anacetrapib reduces LDL cholesterol levels and increases high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels. However, trials of other CETP inhibitors have shown neutral or adverse effects on cardiovascular outcomes. METHODS: We conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial involving 30,449 adults with atherosclerotic vascular disease who were receiving intensive atorvastatin therapy and who had a mean LDL cholesterol level of 61 mg per deciliter (1.58 mmol per liter), a mean non-HDL cholesterol level of 92 mg per deciliter (2.38 mmol per liter), and a mean HDL cholesterol level of 40 mg per deciliter (1.03 mmol per liter). The patients were assigned to receive either 100 mg of anacetrapib once daily (15,225 patients) or matching placebo (15,224 patients). The primary outcome was the first major coronary event, a composite of coronary death, myocardial infarction, or coronary revascularization. RESULTS: During the median follow-up period of 4.1 years, the primary outcome occurred in significantly fewer patients in the anacetrapib group than in the placebo group (1640 of 15,225 patients [10.8%] vs. 1803 of 15,224 patients [11.8%]; rate ratio, 0.91; 95% confidence interval, 0.85 to 0.97; P=0.004). The relative difference in risk was similar across multiple prespecified subgroups. At the trial midpoint, the mean level of HDL cholesterol was higher by 43 mg per deciliter (1.12 mmol per liter) in the anacetrapib group than in the placebo group (a relative difference of 104%), and the mean level of non-HDL cholesterol was lower by 17 mg per deciliter (0.44 mmol per liter), a relative difference of -18%. There were no significant between-group differences in the risk of death, cancer, or other serious adverse events. CONCLUSIONS: Among patients with atherosclerotic vascular disease who were receiving intensive statin therapy, the use of anacetrapib resulted in a lower incidence of major coronary events than the use of placebo. (Funded by Merck and others; Current Controlled Trials number, ISRCTN48678192 ; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01252953 ; and EudraCT number, 2010-023467-18 .)