Growth of Incumbent Firms and Entrepreneurship in Vietnam

This paper analyzes the relationship between the performance of incumbent firms and the net entry of new firms by combining different theoretical views of entrepreneurship. It shows that new knowledge and ideas created but not commercialized by incumbents are an important source of entrepreneurial opportunities for nascent firms. Different regression models to treat dynamics and endogeneity issues are applied to test the research hypothesis that growth of incumbent firms in a region will stimulate start-up activities by creating new profit opportunities for potential entrepreneurs. Vietnam’s regional micro-data from 2000 to 2008 are used for this test. Four controlling indicators – entrepreneurial demand, market structure, regional economic environment, and market innovativeness – are found to exert a statistically significant effect on new entries.

The Interplay of Human and Social Capital in Shaping Entrepreneurial Performance: The Case of Vietnam

This study investigates the effects of human capital, social capital and their interaction on the performance of 1,398 Vietnamese new-born firms. Operating profit is used as the measure of success. Human capital is captured by individual-level professional education, start-up experience, and learning. Whereas the first two dimensions of human capital are measured with traditional indicators, we define learning as ability to accumulate knowledge to conduct innovation activities (new product introduction, product innovation and process innovation). Social capital is measured as benefits obtained from personal strong-tie and weak-tie networks. Key findings are three-fold: (i) human capital strongly predicts firm success, with learning exerting a statistically significant positive impact on operating profit; (ii) benefits from weak ties outweigh those from strong ties; (iii) interaction of human capital and social capital displays a statistically significant positive effect on new-firm performance.

Valence Bond Entanglement and Fluctuations in Random Singlet Phases

The ground state of the uniform antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain can be viewed as a strongly fluctuating liquid of valence bonds, while in disordered chains these bonds lock into random singlet states on long length scales. We show that this phenomenon can be studied numerically, even in the case of weak disorder, by calculating the mean value of the number of valence bonds leaving a block of $L$ contiguous spins (the valence-bond entanglement entropy) as well as the fluctuations in this number. These fluctuations show a clear crossover from a small $L$ regime, in which they behave similar to those of the uniform model, to a large $L$ regime in which they saturate in a way consistent with the formation of a random singlet state on long length scales. A scaling analysis of these fluctuations is used to study the dependence on disorder strength of the length scale characterizing the crossover between these two regimes. Results are obtained for a class of models which include, in addition to the spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain, the uniform and disordered critical 1D transverse-field Ising model and chains of interacting non-Abelian anyons.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Gaseous optical contamination of the spacecraft environment: A review

Interactions between the ambient atmosphere and orbiting spacecraft, sounding rockets, and suborbital vehicles, and with their effluents, give rise to optical (extreme UV to LWIR) foreground radiation which constitutes noise that raises the detection threshold for terrestrial and celestial radiations, as well as military targets. Researchers review the current information on the on-orbit optical contamination. Its source species are created in interaction processes that can be grouped into three categories: (1) Reactions in the gas phase between the ambient atmosphere and desorbates and exhaust; (2) Reactions catalyzed by exposed ram surfaces, which occur spontaneously even in the absence of active material releases from the vehicles; and (3) Erosive excitative reactions with exposed bulk (organic) materials, which have recently been identified in the laboratory though not as yet observed on spacecraft. Researchers also assess the effect of optical pumping by earthshine and sunlight of both reaction products and effluents

Fractional Chern Insulators from the nth Root of Bandstructure

We provide a parton construction of wavefunctions and effective field theories for fractional Chern insulators. We also analyze a strong coupling expansion in lattice gauge theory that enables us to reliably map the parton gauge theory onto the microsopic Hamiltonian. We show that this strong coupling expansion is useful because of a special hierarchy of energy scales in fractional quantum Hall physics. Our procedure is illustrated using the Hofstadter model and then applied to bosons at 1/2 filling and fermions at 1/3 filling in a checkerboard lattice model recently studied numerically. Because our construction provides a more or less unique mapping from microscopic model to effective parton description, we obtain wavefunctions in the same phase as the observed fractional Chern insulators without tuning any continuous parameters.Comment: 9+3 pages, 6 figures; v2: added refs, amplified discussion of deconfinement, improved discussion of translation invarianc

Euclidean-signature Supergravities, Dualities and Instantons

We study the Euclidean-signature supergravities that arise by compactifying D=11 supergravity or type IIB supergravity on a torus that includes the time direction. We show that the usual T-duality relation between type IIA and type IIB supergravities compactified on a spatial circle no longer holds if the reduction is performed on the time direction. Thus there are two inequivalent Euclidean-signature nine-dimensional maximal supergravities. They become equivalent upon further spatial compactification to D=8. We also show that duality symmetries of Euclidean-signature supergravities allow the harmonic functions of any single-charge or multi-charge instanton to be rescaled and shifted by constant factors. Combined with the usual diagonal dimensional reduction and oxidation procedures, this allows us to use the duality symmetries to map any single-charge or multi-charge p-brane soliton, or any intersection, into its near-horizon regime. Similar transformations can also be made on non-extremal p-branes. We also study the structures of duality multiplets of instanton and (D-3)-brane solutions.Comment: Latex, 50 pages, typos corrected and references adde

U-duality as General Coordinate Transformations, and Spacetime Geometry

We show that the full global symmetry groups of all the D-dimensional maximal supergravities can be described in terms of the closure of the internal general coordinate transformations of the toroidal compactifications of D=11 supergravity and of type IIB supergravity, with type IIA/IIB T-duality providing an intertwining between the two pictures. At the quantum level, the part of the U-duality group that corresponds to the surviving discretised internal general coordinate transformations in a given picture leaves the internal torus invariant, while the part that is not described by internal general coordinate transformations can have the effect of altering the size or shape of the internal torus. For example, M-theory compactified on a large torus T^n can be related by duality to a compactification on a small torus, if and only if n\ge 3. We also discuss related issues in the toroidal compactification of the self-dual string to D=4. An appendix includes the complete results for the toroidal reduction of the bosonic sector of type IIB supergravity to arbitrary dimensions D\ge3.Comment: Latex, 28 page