Commitment or Entrenchment?: Controlling Shareholders and Board Composition

This paper examines the determinants of board composition and firm valuation as a function of board composition in Taiwan - a country that features relatively weak protection for investors, firms with controlling shareholders, and pyramidal groups. The results suggest that there is poor governance when the board is dominated by members who are affiliated with the controlling family but good governance when the board is dominated by members who are not affiliated with the controlling family. In particular board affiliation is higher when negative entrenchment effects - measured by (1) divergence in control and cash flow rights, (2) family control, and (3) same CEO and Chairman - are strong and lower when positive incentive effects, measured by cash flow rights, are strong. Moreover, relative firm value is negatively related to board affiliation in family-controlled firms. Thus, the proportion of directors represented by a controlling family appears to be a reasonable proxy for the quality of corporate governance at the firm level when investor protection is relatively weak and it is difficult to determine the degree of separation between ownership and control.

What Causes the Volatility of the Balancing Item?

This paper analyzes the impacts of timing errors, capital flows and economic openness on the behavior of the balancing item. We choose Norway, Sweden, Philippines and South Africa as sample countries where the size of the balancing item is often excess the IMF's criterion of ‘smallness'. The empirical results show that the sources of the volatility of the balancing item are different among these four countries.Balancing item, Balance of payments

Control of spiral waves and turbulent states in a cardiac model by travelling-wave perturbations

We propose a travelling-wave perturbation method to control the spatiotemporal dynamics in a cardiac model. It is numerically demonstrated that the method can successfully suppress the wave instability (alternans in action potential duration) in the one-dimensional case and convert spiral waves and turbulent states to the normal travelling wave states in the two-dimensional case. An experimental scheme is suggested which may provide a new design for a cardiac defibrillator.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Prospects for Detecting Neutrino Signals from Annihilating/Decaying Dark Matter to Account for the PAMELA and ATIC results

Recent PAMELA data show that positron fraction has an excess above several GeV while anti-proton one is not. Moreover ATIC data indicates that electron/positron flux have a bump from 300 GeV to 800 GeV. Both annihilating dark matter (DM) with large boost factor and decaying DM with the life around $10^{26} s$ can account for the PAMELA and ATIC observations if their main final products are charged leptons ($e$, $\mu$ and $\tau$). In this work, we calculated the neutrino flux arising from $\mu$ and $\tau$ which originate from annihilating/decaying DM, and estimated the final muon rate in the neutrino telescopes, namely Antares and IceCube. Given the excellent angular resolution, Antares and IceCube are promising to discover the neutrino signals from Galactic center and/or large DM subhalo in annihilating DM scenario, but very challenging in decaying DM scenario.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. V2: references added. V3: the number density of massive subhalo has been discussed in the appendix; accepted by PR

A short constructive proof of A.R. Rao’s characterization of potentially Kr+1-graphic sequences

AbstractLet Kr+1 be the complete graph on r+1 vertices. Rao proved that a non-increasing sequence (d1,d2,…,dn) of nonnegative integers with dr+1≥r has a realization containing Kr+1 as a subgraph if and only if ∑i=1ndi is even and ∑i=1sdi+∑i=1tdr+1+i≤(s+t)(s+t−1)+∑i=s+1r+1min{s+t,di−r+s}+∑i=r+t+2nmin{s+t,di} for all s and t with 0≤s≤r+1 and 0≤t≤n−r−1. In this paper, we give a short constructive proof of this characterization that can be implemented as an algorithm to construct a realization containing Kr+1