Residual State Ownership, Foreign Ownership and Firms’ Financing Patterns

Employing the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) dataset, which covers over 130 thousand firms in 139 economies from 2006 to 2017, we investigate the effect of residual state ownership, with or without the moderating effect of foreign ownership, on firms’ financing patterns. First, we find that residual state ownership is positively related with a firm’s external finance, and foreign ownership is negatively related with a firm’s external finance. Second, residual state ownership’s positive effect on external finance disappears when foreign ownership and the interaction of the two are taken into consideration. The positive effect of the state-foreign interaction on a firm’s external finance is both statistically and economically significant. The increased external finance of firms with both state and foreign ownerships mainly comes from private banks and new equity. Finally, we explore the channels through which residual state ownership or foreign ownership affect firms’ financing patterns. Firms with residual state ownership only or foreign ownership only do not actively expand in market or innovate. While firms with both state and foreign ownerships are engaging in market expansion and innovation eagerly

The Υ(1S)\Upsilon(1S) leptonic decay using the principle of maximum conformality

In the paper, we study the $\Upsilon(1S)$ leptonic decay width $\Gamma(\Upsilon(1S)\to \ell^+\ell^-)$ by using the principle of maximum conformality (PMC) scale-setting approach. The PMC adopts the renormalization group equation to set the correct momentum flow of the process, whose value is independent to the choice of the renormalization scale and its prediction thus avoids the conventional renormalization scale ambiguities. Using the known next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order perturbative series together with the PMC single scale-setting approach, we do obtain a renormalization scale independent decay width, $\Gamma_{\Upsilon(1S) \to e^+ e^-} = 1.262^{+0.195}_{-0.175}$ keV, where the error is squared average of those from $\alpha_s(M_{Z})=0.1181\pm0.0011$, $m_b=4.93\pm0.03$ GeV and the choices of factorization scales within $\pm 10\%$ of their central values. To compare with the result under conventional scale-setting approach, this decay width agrees with the experimental value within errors, indicating the importance of a proper scale-setting approach.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure