Leverage, Growth Opportunities and Firm Investment: The Case of Manufacturing Firms in China

This paper examined the impact of financial leverage on investment decisions offirms using the panel data of publicly traded Chinese firms. We collected data for511 manufacturing companies during the period from 2005 to 2013 to do theresearch. The data shows that financial leverage is negatively correlated with afirm’s investment. Moreover, after we categorized the data into two types: 1)high-growth firms and 2) low-growth firms, it demonstrated that such negativecorrelation is significant for low-growth firms while insignificant for high-growthfirms. Additionally, long-term debt has a more significant negative correlation toinvestment than short-term debt

A Sparse Smoothing Newton Method for Solving Discrete Optimal Transport Problems

The discrete optimal transport (OT) problem, which offers an effective computational tool for comparing two discrete probability distributions, has recently attracted much attention and played essential roles in many modern applications. This paper proposes to solve the discrete OT problem by applying a squared smoothing Newton method via the Huber smoothing function for solving the corresponding KKT system directly. The proposed algorithm admits appealing convergence properties and is able to take advantage of the solution sparsity to greatly reduce computational costs. Moreover, the algorithm can be extended to solve problems with similar structures including the Wasserstein barycenter (WB) problem with fixed supports. To verify the practical performance of the proposed method, we conduct extensive numerical experiments to solve a large set of discrete OT and WB benchmark problems. Our numerical results show that the proposed method is efficient compared to state-of-the-art linear programming (LP) solvers. Moreover, the proposed method consumes less memory than existing LP solvers, which demonstrates the potential usage of our algorithm for solving large-scale OT and WB problems.Comment: 29 pages, 17 figure

Molecular identification of Trichogramma species from South and South-East Asia and natural Wolbachia infection

Trichogramma wasps were collected from the parasitized eggs of lepidopteran pests from 21 sampling sites in East Asia and South-East Asia. Six Trichogramma species were identified based on the molecular identificationmethod using the internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region of the rDNAof Trichogramma chilonis, T. evanescens, T. ostriniae, T. embryophagum, T. dendrolimi and T. japonicum. The results of molecular identification were confirmed by morphological identification. Additionally, natural populations were screened for the prevalence of Wolbachia. Five out of 21 populations were infected by the same Wolbachia strain, which was identified by using Wolbachia wsp gene and multilocus sequencing approach. The phylogenetic analysis of Wolbachia wsp sequences revealed that the Wolbachia strain was classified in the strain wEvaA in the group of EvA of the supergroup A

Human Primordial Germ Cells Are Specified from Lineage-Primed Progenitors.

In vitro gametogenesis is the process of making germline cells from human pluripotent stem cells. The foundation of this model is the quality of the first progenitors called primordial germ cells (PGCs), which in vivo are specified during the peri-implantation window of human development. Here, we show that human PGC (hPGC) specification begins at day 12 post-fertilization. Using single-cell RNA sequencing of hPGC-like cells (hPGCLCs) differentiated from pluripotent stem cells, we discovered that hPGCLC specification involves resetting pluripotency toward a transitional state with shared characteristics between naive and primed pluripotency, followed by differentiation into lineage-primed TFAP2A+ progenitors. Applying the germline trajectory to TFAP2C mutants reveals that TFAP2C functions in the TFAP2A+ progenitors upstream of PRDM1 to regulate the expression of SOX17. This serves to protect hPGCLCs from crossing the Weismann's barrier to adopt somatic cell fates and, therefore, is an essential mechanism for successfully initiating in vitro gametogenesis

Entanglement detection beyond the CCNR criterion for infinite-dimensions

In this paper, in terms of the relation between the state and the reduced states of it, we obtain two inequalities which are valid for all separable states in infinite-dimensional bipartite quantum systems. One of them provides an entanglement criterion which is strictly stronger than the computable cross-norm or realignment (CCNR) criterion.Comment: 11 page