Image Subset Selection Using Gabor Filters and Neural Networks

An automatic method for the selection of subsets of images, both modern and historic, out of a set of landmark large images collected from the Internet is presented in this paper. This selection depends on the extraction of dominant features using Gabor filtering. Features are selected carefully from a preliminary image set and fed into a neural network as a training data. The method collects a large set of raw landmark images containing modern and historic landmark images and non-landmark images. The method then processes these images to classify them as landmark and non-landmark images. The classification performance highly depends on the number of candidate features of the landmark.Comment: 14 page

What do internal capital markets do ? Redistribution vs. incentives

In this paper we explain the apparent "diversification discount” of conglomerates without assuming inefficient-cross subsidisation through internal capital markets. Instead we assume that internal capital market efficiently redistributes scare resources across a conglomerate’s divisions between sucessive production periods. The need for redistribution arises from the fact that resources may sometimes be produced by divisions which happen to be successful in an earlier production stage but which do not have the best investment opportunities in future production stages. In contrast to the existing literature we consider explicitly the incentive problem between corporate headquater and divisional managers using a standard Moral-Hazard framework. We show that although a complete incentive contract can be written bi-laterally between headquarter and divisional managers, the redistribution of resources across divisions creates additional agency costs in a conglomerate. Moreover, assuming that no complete contract can govern the interim redistribution policy by the headquarter, we show how the agency problem with divisional managers constrains headquarters interim redistribution to be ex ante inefficient.

Market based compensation, price informativeness and short-term trading

This paper shows that there is a natural trade-off when designing market based executive compensation. The benefit of market based pay is that the stock price aggregates speculators’ dispersed information and there-fore takes a picture of managerial performance before the long-term value of a firm materializes. The cost is that informed speculators’ willingness to trade depends on trading that is unrelated to any information about the firm. Ideally, the CEO should be shielded from shocks that are not informative about his actions. But since information trading is impossible without non- nformation trading (due to the ”no-trade” theorem), shocks to prices caused by the latter are an unavoidable cost of market based pay. This trade-off generates a number of insights about the impact of market conditions, e.g. liquidity and trading horizons, on optimal market based pay. A more liquid market leads to more market based pay while short-term trading makes it more costly to provide such incentives leading to lower CEO effort and worse firm performance on average. The model is consistent with recent evidence showing that market based CEO incentives vary with market conditions, e.g. bid-ask spreads, the probability of informed trading (PIN) or the dispersion of analysts’ forecasts. JEL Classification: G39, D86, D82Executive compensation, liquidity, Moral Hazard, stock price informativeness, trading

The Benefit and Cost of Winner Picking: Redistribution Vs Incentives

The Benefit and Cost of Winner Picking: Redistribution Vs Incentives |AB| A multi-divisional firm can engage in "winner-picking" to redistribute scarce funds efficiently across divisions. But there is a conflict between rewarding winners (investing) and producing resources internally to reward winners (incentives). Managers in winning divisions are tempted to free-ride on resources produced by managers in loosing divisions whose incentives to produce resources, anticipating their loss, are also weakened. Corporate headquarter's investment and incentive policy are therefore inextricably linked and have to be treated as jointly endogenous. The analysis links corporate strategy, compensation and the value of diversification to the characteristics of multi-divisional firms.Conglomerate, Internal capital market

The determinants of bank capital structure

The paper shows that mispriced deposit insurance and capital regulation were of second order importance in determining the capital structure of large U.S. and European banks during 1991 to 2004. Instead, standard cross-sectional determinants of non-financial firms’ leverage carry over to banks, except for banks whose capital ratio is close to the regulatory minimum. Consistent with a reduced role of deposit insurance, we document a shift in banks’ liability structure away from deposits towards non-deposit liabilities. We find that unobserved time-invariant bank fixed effects are ultimately the most important determinant of banks’ capital structures and that banks’ leverage converges to bank specific, time invariant targets. JEL Classification: G32, G21bank capital, capital regulation, capital structure, leverage

MARKET BASED COMPENSATION, TRADING AND LIQUIDITY

This paper examines the role of trading and liquidity in a large competitive market with dispersed heterogenous information on market-based managerial compensation. The paper recognizes the endogenous nature of a firm’s stock price - it is the outcome of self-interested speculative trading motivated by imperfect information about future firm value. Using the stock price as performance measure means bench-marking the manager’s performance against the market’s expectation of that performance. We obtain two main results: first, the degree of market-based compensation is proportional to the market depth, which is a measure of the ease of information trading. Secondly, using the dynamic trading model of Vives (1995) we show that if the investment horizon of informed traders decreases, at equilibrium the managerial e.ort reduces, and the optimal contract prescribes stock-compensation with longer vesting period.

The Determinants of Capital Structure: Some Evidence from Banks

This paper documents that standard cross-sectional determinants of firm leverage also apply to the capital structure of large banks in the United States and Europe. We find a remarkable consistency in sign, significance and economic magnitude. Like non-financial firms, banks appear to have stable capital structures at levels that are specific to each individual bank. The results suggest that capital requirements may only be of second-order importance for banks? capital structures and confirm the robustness of current corporate finance findings in a holdout sample of banks. --capital structure,corporate finance,leverage,bank capital,banking regulation

Body dissatisfaction revisited : on the importance of implicit beliefs about actual and ideal body image

Body dissatisfaction (i.e., a negative attitude towards one’s own physical appearance) is assumed to originate from a perceived discrepancy between the actual physical appearance (i.e., actual body image) and the desired ideal state of the body (i.e., ideal body image). We assessed implicit beliefs about these two aspects of the body image independently using two Relational Responding Tasks (RRT) in a sample of participants who were either low or high in explicitly reported body dissatisfaction. As hypothesized, differences in body dissatisfaction exerted a differential influence on the two RRT scores. The implicit belief that one is thin was less pronounced in participants who were strongly dissatisfied with their body relative to participants who were more satisfied with their body. The implicit desire to be thin (i.e., thin ideal body image), in contrast, tended to be more pronounced in participants who exhibited a high degree of body dissatisfaction as compared to participants who exhibited a low degree of body dissatisfaction. Hierarchical regression analyses also revealed that the RRT scores were predictive of self-reported body dissatisfaction, even over and above the predictive validity of some (but not all) explicit predictors of body dissatisfaction that were included in the present study. More generally, these findings contribute to the empirical validation of the RRT as a measure of implicit beliefs in the context of body dissatisfaction

Social Balance on Networks: The Dynamics of Friendship and Enmity

How do social networks evolve when both friendly and unfriendly relations exist? Here we propose a simple dynamics for social networks in which the sense of a relationship can change so as to eliminate imbalanced triads--relationship triangles that contains 1 or 3 unfriendly links. In this dynamics, a friendly link changes to unfriendly or vice versa in an imbalanced triad to make the triad balanced. Such networks undergo a dynamic phase transition from a steady state to "utopia"--all friendly links--as the amount of network friendliness is changed. Basic features of the long-time dynamics and the phase transition are discussed.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures, paper based on an invited talk at Dyonet06, Dynamics on Complex Networks and Applications, Dresden, Germany, Feburary 200