National Corporate Governance Institutions and Post-Acquisition Target Reorganization

We examine the characteristics of national systems of corporate governance to theorize about the nature of the shareholders\u27 and employees\u27 interests when it comes to reorganization, under the assumption that the firm is coalitional in nature. We argue that corporate governance institutions prevalent in both the host and the target country of the merging firms enable or constrain the ability of the acquirer to reorganize the target. Using a cross-national dataset of corporate acquisitions and post-acquisition reorganization, we found support for our predictions that stronger legal protection of shareholder rights in the acquirer country compared to the target country increases the acquirer\u27s ability to restructure the target\u27s assets and leverage the target\u27s resources, while the protection of employee rights in the target country restricts the acquirer\u27s ability to restructure the target\u27s assets and redeploy resources to and from the target. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Spatial pattern and temporal evolution of glacial terminations of the last 800 ka

The second QUIGS workshop brought together 28 delegates to assess current knowledge and research needs on the spatio-temporal patterns of climate forcing, responses and feedbacks that characterize glacial terminations, i.e. transitions between glacial and interglacial periods

Factors controlling the last interglacial climate as simulated by LOVECLIM1.3

The last interglacial (LIG), also identified to the Eemian in Europe, began at approximately 130 kyr BP and ended at about 115 kyr BP (before present). More and more proxy-based reconstructions of the LIG climate are becoming more available even though they remain sparse. The major climate forcings during the LIG are rather well known and therefore models can be tested against paleoclimatic data sets and then used to better understand the climate of the LIG. However, models are displaying a large range of responses, being sometimes contradictory between them or with the reconstructed data. Here we would like to investigate causes of these differences. We focus on a single climate model, LOVECLIM, and we perform transient simulations over the LIG, starting at 135 kyr BP and run until 115 kyr BP. With these simulations, we test the role of the surface boundary conditions (the time-evolution of the Northern Hemisphere (NH) ice sheets) on the simulated LIG climate and the importance of the parameter sets (internal to the model, such as the albedos of the ocean and sea ice), which affect the sensitivity of the model. The magnitude of the simulated climate variations through the LIG remains too low compared to reconstructions for climate variables such as surface air temperature. Moreover, in the North Atlantic, the large increase in summer sea surface temperature towards the peak of the interglacial occurs too early (at ∼128 kyr BP) compared to the reconstructions. This feature as well as the climate simulated during the optimum of the LIG, between 131 and 121 kyr BP, does not depend on changes in surface boundary conditions and parameter sets. The additional freshwater flux (FWF) from the melting NH ice sheets is responsible for a temporary abrupt weakening of the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which causes a strong global cooling in annual mean. However, the changes in the configuration (extent and albedo) of the NH ice sheets during the LIG only slightly impact the simulated climate. Together, configuration of and FWF from the NH ice sheets greatly increase the magnitude of the temperature variations over continents as well as over the ocean at the beginning of the simulation and reduce the difference between the simulated climate and the reconstructions. Lastly, we show that the contribution from the parameter sets to the climate response is actually very modest

Life cycle sustainability assessment : a tool for exercising due diligence in life cycle management

Starting from the output ‘The Future We Want’ of the Rio+20 conference 2012, the main focus of this chapter is on social responsibility (SR) in the value chain. The historical context of SR is discussed, related to the international standards as are the Guidance on Social Responsibility and the Global Reporting Initiative, linked with the management of organizations and enterprises. It is emphasized that due diligence along the value chain is seen as a requirement for claiming ‘social responsibility’. Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) contributes to the assessment and life cycle management (LCM) to the follow-up of exercising due diligence, all within the context of sustainable development. The over-arching LCSA is a combination of three different life cycle assessment techniques allowing to assess the impacts along the value chain: environmental LCA, social LCA and life cycle costing

Decadal-scale progression of the onset of Dansgaard–Oeschger warming events

During the last glacial period, proxy records throughout the Northern Hemisphere document a succession of rapid millennial-scale warming events, called Dansgaard–Oeschger (DO) events. A range of different mechanisms has been proposed that can produce similar warming in model experiments; however, the progression and ultimate trigger of the events are still unknown. Because of their fast nature, the progression is challenging to reconstruct from paleoclimate data due to the limited temporal resolution achievable in many archives and cross-dating uncertainties between records. Here, we use new high-resolution multi-proxy records of sea-salt (derived from sea spray and sea ice over the North Atlantic) and terrestrial (derived from the central Asian deserts) aerosol concentrations over the period 10–60&thinsp;ka from the North Greenland Ice Core Project (NGRIP) and North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) ice cores in conjunction with local precipitation and temperature proxies from the NGRIP ice core to investigate the progression of environmental changes at the onset of the warming events at annual to multi-annual resolution. Our results show on average a small lead of the changes in both local precipitation and terrestrial dust aerosol concentrations over the change in sea-salt aerosol concentrations and local temperature of approximately one decade. This suggests that, connected to the reinvigoration of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation and the warming in the North Atlantic, both synoptic and hemispheric atmospheric circulation changes at the onset of the DO warming, affecting both the moisture transport to Greenland and the Asian monsoon systems. Taken at face value, this suggests that a collapse of the sea-ice cover may not have been the initial trigger for the DO warming.</p

Electronic structure of wurtzite and zinc-blende AlN

The electronic structure of AlN in wurtzite and zinc-blende phases is studied experimentally and theoretically. By using x-ray emission spectroscopy, the Al 3p, Al 3s and N 2p spectral densities are obtained. The corresponding local and partial theoretical densities of states (DOS), as well as the total DOS and the band structure, are calculated by using the full potential linearized augmented plane wave method, within the framework of the density functional theory. There is a relatively good agreement between the experimental spectra and the theoretical DOS, showing a large hybridization of the valence states all along the valence band. The discrepancies between the experimental and theoretical DOS, appearing towards the high binding energies, are ascribed to an underestimation of the valence band width in the calculations. Differences between the wurtzite and zinc-blende phases are small and reflect the slight variations between the atomic arrangements of both phases

Effect of Disorder on the Quantum Coherence in Mesoscopic Wires

We present phase coherence time measurements in quasi-one-dimensional mesoscopic wires made from high mobility two-dimensional electron gas. By implanting gallium ions into a GaAs/AlGaAs heterojunction we are able to vary the diffusion coefficient over 2 orders of magnitude. We show that in the diffusive limit, the decoherence time follows a power law as a function of diffusion coefficient as expected by theory. When the disorder is low enough so that the samples are semi-ballistic, we observe a new and unexpected regime in which the phase coherence time is independent of disorder. In addition, for all samples the temperature dependence of the phase coherence time follows a power law down to the lowest temperatures without any sign of saturation and strongly suggests that the frequently observed low temperature saturation is not intrinsic.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure