Guanxi and Corruption Study on the Firm-Level in a Chinese context

China experienced a growing economy with a huge market and business potential and became the second biggest country in terms of GDP. However, because of the limitation of coherent business laws and government supervision, entering the Chinese market became a severe and complicated problem for different kinds of firms. Empirical papers show that networks, called guanxi in China make a primary contribution to the success of the business. This paper contributes to the guanxi in China and discusses what kind of firms are more likely to develop guanxi. Using enterprise- level data on business-government relationships among 2700 firms in China, I reached the conclusion that capital city located firms, foreign-owned firms, national-market- targeted firms and large size firms have demands to build "guanxi" and also have the potential possibility to do the corruption

Do Chinese individuals believe in global climate change and why? An econometric analysis

This paper examines the extent and the determinants of individual global climate change be-liefs. In contrast to former studies, it is focused on China due to its crucial role in global cli-mate policy and its responsibility as the worldwide biggest producer of CO2 emissions. The empirical analysis is based on unique data from a survey among more than 1000 individuals from five cities in China, namely Beijing, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, and Shenyang. In line with previous studies in other countries, our results suggest that the vast majority of al-most 90% of the Chinese respondents believe in the existence of global climate change, which seems to be a convenient basis for ambitious climate policy in China. Our econometric analy-sis reveals that the personal experience with extreme weather events (and particularly heat-waves) alone is already sufficient to increase global climate change beliefs, although conse-quential personal physical or financial damages lead to stronger effects. A rising number of extreme weather events and consequential personal damages in the future might thus further decrease climate change skepticism. Our estimation results additionally reveal that females as well as people in medium ages, with higher household incomes, a lower education, and from Chengdu or Shenyang are more skeptical with respect to global climate change

Bis[2-(pyrrolidin-2-yl)-1H-benzimidazole-κ2 N 2,N 3]copper(II) dinitrate dihydrate

In the title compound, [Cu(C11H13N3)2](NO3)2·2H2O, synthesized by hydro­thermal reaction of Cu(NO3)2 and racemic 2-(pyrrolidin-2-yl)-1H-1,3-benzimidazole, the CuII atom lies on an inversion centre. The distorted octa­hedral CuII environment contains two planar trans-related N,N-chelating 2-(pyrrolidin-2-yl)-1H-1,3-benzimidazole ligands in the equatorial plane and two monodentate nitrate anions, which are in weak inter­action with the Cu atom, in the axial positions. The two benzimidazole ligands have opposite configurations (R/S and S/R) and compound is a meso complex. In the crystal, N—H⋯O and O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds generate an infinite three-dimensional network. One methylene group of the pyrrolidine ring is disordered over two position with a 0.56 (3):0.44 (3) occupancy

Estimating and Predicting Household Expenditures and Income Distributions

A reliable prediction of unconditional welfare distributions, like income or consumption, is essential for welfare analysis, and in particular for inequality, poverty or development studies. Where observations of expenditures or income are missing, the mean prediction based on available covariates is not just a poor estimator of the unconditional distribution; it fails to predict the required information about tails and quantiles. A new estimation method is introduced which can be combined with any mean prediction model. It is used to calculate the income distribution of a survey based on subsample information, to estimate the unconditional income distribution for the non-responding households, and to predict the household expenditures of a future panel wave. It allows for imputing welfare distributions for a census from a survey or for synthetic populations under specific scenarios. Further inference is straight-forward, including prediction of Lorenz curves, indexes like the Gini, or distribution quantiles, including confidence intervals

Estimating and predicting the distribution of the number of visits to the medical doctor

In many countries the demand for health care services is of increasing importance. Especially in the industrialized world with a changing demographic structure social insurances and politics face real challenges. Reliable predictors of those demand functions will therefore become invaluable tools. This article proposes a prediction method for the distribution of the number of visits to the medical doctor for a determined population, given a sample that is not necessarily taken from that population. It uses the estimated conditional sample distribution, and it can be applied for forecast scenarios. The methods are illustrated along data from Sidney. The introduced methodology can be applied as well to any other prediction problem of discrete distributions in real, future or any fictitious population. It is therefore also an excellent tool for future predictions, scenarios and policy evaluation

Social Capital and Analyst Forecasts

This study examines the effect of social capital on analyst forecast accuracy. Using a county-level measure of social capital, I find that firms headquartered in counties with high social capital have greater forecast accuracy than firms headquartered in low social capital counties. In addition, I conduct two cross-sectional tests under conditions where social capital facilitates analyst forecast information collection and where social capital provides more assurance of information reliability. I find that the effect of social capital is more pronounced when firms’ headquarters are close to analyst brokerage firms. This is because geographically proximate analysts may have more channels to collect information. I also show that since high social capital can reduce analysts’ time and effort to verify the reported earnings when a firm has complicated operation, effect of social capital is more pronounced when a firm’s operation is complex. I also find that investors react more strongly to analyst forecast for firms headquartered in counties with low social capital, suggesting that the analyst’s role as an information intermediary is more valuable in this setting. Additionally, I employ the relocation of firms headquarters to better establish causality. The results are robust to regional fixed effect, accounting quality, management guidance, analyst fixed effect, and alternative measure of social capital. In sum, these findings suggest that social capital is an important factor that affects analysts forecast accuracy and informativenesss

Forward Attention in Sequence-to-sequence Acoustic Modelling for Speech Synthesis

This paper proposes a forward attention method for the sequenceto- sequence acoustic modeling of speech synthesis. This method is motivated by the nature of the monotonic alignment from phone sequences to acoustic sequences. Only the alignment paths that satisfy the monotonic condition are taken into consideration at each decoder timestep. The modified attention probabilities at each timestep are computed recursively using a forward algorithm. A transition agent for forward attention is further proposed, which helps the attention mechanism to make decisions whether to move forward or stay at each decoder timestep. Experimental results show that the proposed forward attention method achieves faster convergence speed and higher stability than the baseline attention method. Besides, the method of forward attention with transition agent can also help improve the naturalness of synthetic speech and control the speed of synthetic speech effectively.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Published in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing 2018 (ICASSP2018

2-(2-Pyrrolidinio)-1H-benzimidazol-3-ium dinitrate

In the title compound, C11H15N3 2+·2NO3 −, one of the imidazole N atoms and the N atom of the pyrrolidine ring are protonated. The pyrrolidine ring adopts an envelope conformation, with the C atom carrying the benzoimidazolium substituent as the flap atom. In the crystal structure, cations and anions are linked through N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, forming chains that run parallel to the c axis