Measuring Firm Innovation and its Relationship with IPO and M&A Activities

This paper examines the changes in firms’ innovation performance around initial public offerings (IPO) and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) using innovation data based on patent applications, new product introductions, and scientific article publications. The quantity of innovation is measured by number of innovative outputs and the quality of innovation is measured by a variety of metrics including patent or article citation count and content-based novelty score. Results generally show that innovation quantity increases while innovation quality declines following IPO and M&A events. The findings are consistent among patent-based, product-based, and publication-based metrics, and confirm with the results from previous literature. In addition, innovation performance is found to vary with financial performance and industry characteristics. Firms that exhibit larger asset and cash holdings, higher profitability, and more R&D investments are in general more innovative in terms of both quality and quantity. In post-IPO or post-M&A years, higher industry sales concentration and geographic concentration tend to correlate with lower innovation quantity and higher innovation quality. This paper also attempts to study the mobility of innovative employees around IPO and M&A, but the results lack sufficient insights on whether the observed post-event decline in innovation quality can be explained by changes in the composition of innovators. Overall, despite the ability to produce more innovations after going public or acquiring another company, firms should be mindful of the potential loss in innovation quality

Stock Market Valuation Using Internet Search Volumes: US-China Comparison

Search engine query data, which provide information on individuals’ attention allocation, have been proven by scholars to be useful in interpreting financial market performance. This paper explores the use of search volumes in stock market valuation and seeks to identify underlying stock market differences between the U.S. and China by extracting search volume data from their respective dominant search engines – Google and Baidu. On the overall market level, this paper investigates how search terms about financial markets relate to weekly returns of important market indices in each country; on the individual stock level, search volumes of selected company names in each country’s stock market are used to study fluctuations in stock prices. Finally, a set of trading strategies are recommended after combining research results in this paper with search-based strategies proposed in previous studies

Photostimulated reactions of organomercurials with alkenes and alkynes

Photostimulated reactions of alkylmercury chlorides with electronegatively substituted alkenes followed by NaBH[subscript]4 reduction afford the hydroalkylation products in good yields. The reactions occur by a free radical chain process involving an intermediate RCH[subscript]2CH(HgCl)Q which has been trapped with molecular iodine to form the iodide RCH[subscript]2CH(I)Q. The relative reactivity of RHgCl in this addition reaction has been measured as t -BuHgCl \u3e i -PrHgCl ~ c -C[subscript]6H[subscript]11HgCl \u3e\u3e n -BuHgCl. The iodide, RCH[subscript]2CH(I)Q, can easily eliminate HI with 1,8-diazabicyclo(5,4,0) undec-7-ene (DBU) to accomplish the conversion of CH[subscript]2=CHQ into RCH=CHQ with high yields. tert -Butyl-mercury chloride reacted with alkynes to give (E) and (Z) adduct olefins in excellent yields. The intermediate t -Bu(X)C=C(HgCl)Y involved in a free radical chain sequence has been converted into t -Bu(X)C=C(I)Y;The determination of the initial kinetic chain lengths indicates that these reactions are definitely radical chain processes. The kinetic study found that the reaction of tert -butylmercury chloride with diethyl vinylphosphonate is a first-order reaction in which the reaction rate only depends on the concentration of t -BuHgCl;The reactions of alkylmercury chlorides with haloalkenes and dihaloalkenes have been studied. Dialkylmercurials were found to react with some haloalkenes to form the alkylated coupled olefins and alkylmercury halide

Optimal 1->M universal quantum cloning via spin networks

We present a scheme that transform 1 qubit to M identical copies with optimal fidedelity via free dynamical evolution of spin star networks. We show that the Heisenberg XXZ coupling can fulfill the challenge. The initial state of the copying machine and the parameters of the spin Hamiltonian are discussed in detail. Furthermore we have proposed a feasible method to prepare the initial state of the copying machine.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

The Impact of Government Intervention on Municipal Bond Liquidity Premium: Evidence from China

Government intervention is an important factor which restricts the development of municipal bond market in China. Based on the revenue bond innovation pilot policy implemented by the Ministry of Finance in 2017, this paper uses municipal bond trading data of Chinese inter-bank bond market from May 2017 to June 2018 and the two-stage least squares method to study the impact of government intervention on the liquidity premium of municipal bonds. The results of the empirical research show: (1) The liquidity risk of municipal bonds is a factor that affects the yield spread, and the marginal impact of liquidity risk on the yield spread is about 4.6 basis points. (2) After the implementation of the revenue bond innovation pilot policy, the reduction of local government intervention significantly reduced the liquidity premium level of municipal bonds. Based on the above conclusions, we propose policy recommendations for the development of the municipal bond market in the short and long term