Ownership Structure and Firm Performance: An Empirical Analysis of the Listed Firms in China

The thesis aims to investigate the relationship between the ownership structure and listed firms' performance in the Chinese business group. In this thesis, I firstly contribute to the ownership structure literature by hand-collecting the ownership data and developing a new ownership classification in the listed firms of China. Secondly, I contribute to the corporate finance literature by providing the analysis of the relationship between ownership structure and various firm performances. Thirdly, I contribute to the literature on the business group by providing an empirical analysis of ownership and performance outcomes and contribute to the agency theory literature by showing the agency conflicts between the ultimate controlling shareholders and minority shareholders. The sample in the thesis includes 3,077 firms and 27,077 firm-year observations over the period from 2003 to 2016. To systematically connect the relationship between ownership and performance outcomes with structural characteristics of business groups, I investigate the effects of ownership structure on firm performance from three angles: the types of ultimate controllers, direct controlling ownership and administrative levels and functions of state ultimate control. The results in the thesis present that with the support of the government, the listed firms controlled by Central State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) and Asset Bureau have higher firm outputs than others. Few of largest shareholders in the state-owned enterprises have a significant impact on firm performance. The SASAC and high administrative-level governmental agencies as ultimate controllers positively impact firm output. The state controllers at Central or Municipal levels have positive impacts on firm employment. From the findings of this thesis, the policymakers could know privatisations decline the employment and output of large state-owned listed firms. The investors should give great attention to the state-owned listed firms since the largest shareholders cannot decide the development direction of the firms and must follow the instruction from the ultimate controllers

Development of an intuitive sound manipulation tool for in-vehicle human-machine interaction design

Intuitive sounds such as auditory icons are known to be more efficient than abstract sounds (earcons) in conveying driver relevant information. Further, different traffic situations may be of different urgency levels and also related to the driver’s performance. Hence auditory information may have to be changed or manipulated in order to convey the appropriate level of urgency. However, very few authors address the problem of appropriately designing auditory icons and how they should be manipulated to convey different urgency levels. This thesis work has been conducted in order to develop a signal processing tool which could be used for such design and evaluation. The tool is designed to take different sensory data (as distance to a leading vehicle) as the input and use that data to manipulate a catalogue of sound signals. The goal of the thesis is to let these sound signals inform the driver about the current traffic situation with the right level of urgency

Cosmic ray propagation with high dimensional finite element method

The Galactic synchrotron emission contains abundant physics related to not only the Galactic magnetized interstellar medium but also has prominent effect on understanding the Cosmic microwave background especially the B-mode polarization. To catch up with the growing precision in astrophysical observations, we need to build a consistent numerical framework where simulating the cosmic ray (electron) propagation is a major task. In the master project, we propose to use the finite element method for solving cosmic ray (electron) transport equation within the phase-space of dimension varying from two to six. The numeric package BIFET is developed on top of the deal.II library with support in the adaptive mesh refinement. We mainly introduce the design and methods in solving advection-diffusion problems and demonstrate its capability and precision with physically simplified tests and examples

Numerical Approaches Towards the Galactic Synchrotron Emission

The Galactic synchrotron emission contains abundant physics of the magnetized Galactic interstellar medium and has a non-negligible influence on detecting the B-mode polarization of the Cosmic microwave background radiation and understanding the physics during the re-ionization epoch. To catch up with the growing precision in astrophysical measurements, we need not only better theoretical modelings, but also more powerful numerical simulations and analyzing pipelines for acquiring deeper understandings in both the Galactic environment and the origin of the Universe. In this dissertation, we focus on the Galactic synchrotron emission which involves the turbulent and magnetized interstellar medium and energetic cosmic-ray electrons. To study the Galactic synchrotron emission consistently we need a non-trivial Bayesian analyzer with specially designed likelihood function, a fast and precise radiative transfer simulator, and cosmic ray electron propagation solver. We first present version X of the hammurabi package, the HEALPix-based numeric simulator for Galactic polarized emission. Two fast methods are proposed for realizing divergence-free Gaussian random magnetic fields either on the Galactic scale where a field alignment and strength modulation are imposed or on a local scale where more physically motivated models like a parameterized magneto-hydrodynamic turbulence can be applied. Secondly, we present our effort in using the finite element method for solving the cosmic ray (electron) transport equation within the phase-space domain that has a number of dimensions varying from two to six. The numeric package BIFET is developed on top of the deal.ii library with support in the adaptive mesh refinement. Our first aim with BIFET is to build the basic framework that can support a high dimensional PDE solving. Finally, we introduce the work related to the complete design of IMAGINE, which is proposed particularly with the ensemble likelihood for inferring the distributions of Galactic components