Relationship between black ownership, capital structure and company performance

BACKGROUND : The notion that a company's ownership structure may affect performance and capital structure has been the attraction, but few studies have looked at the effect of black ownership (BO). AIM : This paper contributes to the literature by examining the possible interactions between BO, performance, and capital structure. Within an agency cost framework, the study indicated that the distribution of equity ownership among black shareholders might significantly influence the performance and leverage of companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE). SETTING : Altogether 187 companies on the JSE were selected for the period of 2007 to 2014. METHOD : Data on the sampled companies were sourced from the Iress database, a prominent source of financial data in South Africa, as well as annual reports. The research used a pooled fixed-effects model, random effects model and two-step generalised method of moments in the analysis. RESULTS : The findings of the research provided support for the agency cost theory. The empirical findings indicated that BO was negatively correlated with debt ratio (long-term debt) and performance (Tobin's Q [TQ]). Surprisingly, BO was positively and significantly correlated with return on assets. Finally, the empirical findings indicated that the proportion of long-term debt and total debt based on market value was lower for BO than for total ownership, while TQ was higher for BO than for total ownership. The finding supports the prediction that companies with a relatively small proportion of black ownership cannot support high leverage and high performance. CONCLUSION : Although the introduction of BO by way of government intervention has been partially successful, more can be done to improve the relationship between the proportion of BO, performance and capital structure in a developing economy.http://www.sajems.orgam2023Financial Managemen

A Pyramid Scheme for Particle Physics

We introduce a new model, the Pyramid Scheme, of direct mediation of SUSY breaking, which is compatible with the idea of Cosmological SUSY Breaking (CSB). It uses the trinification scheme of grand unification and avoids problems with Landau poles in standard model gauge couplings. It also avoids problems, which have recently come to light, associated with rapid stellar cooling due to emission of the pseudo Nambu-Goldstone Boson (PNGB) of spontaneously broken hidden sector baryon number. With a certain pattern of R-symmetry breaking masses, a pattern more or less required by CSB, the Pyramid Scheme leads to a dark matter candidate that decays predominantly into leptons, with cross sections compatible with a variety of recent observations. The dark matter particle is not a thermal WIMP but a particle with new strong interactions, produced in the late decay of some other scalar, perhaps the superpartner of the QCD axion, with a reheat temperature in the TeV range. This is compatible with a variety of scenarios for baryogenesis, including some novel ones which exploit specific features of the Pyramid Scheme.Comment: JHEP Latex, 32 pages, 1 figur

The Intentional Use of Service Recovery Strategies to Influence Consumer Emotion, Cognition and Behaviour

Service recovery strategies have been identified as a critical factor in the success of. service organizations. This study develops a conceptual frame work to investigate how specific service recovery strategies influence the emotional, cognitive and negative behavioural responses of . consumers., as well as how emotion and cognition influence negative behavior. Understanding the impact of specific service recovery strategies will allow service providers' to more deliberately and intentionally engage in strategies that result in positive organizational outcomes. This study was conducted using a 2 x 2 between-subjects quasi-experimental design. The results suggest that service recovery has a significant impact on emotion, cognition and negative behavior. Similarly, satisfaction, negative emotion and positive emotion all influence negative behavior but distributive justice has no effect

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp. Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02

Search for leptophobic Z ' bosons decaying into four-lepton final states in proton-proton collisions at root s=8 TeV

Peer reviewe

Operation and performance of the ATLAS semiconductor tracker

The semiconductor tracker is a silicon microstrip detector forming part of the inner tracking system of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. The operation and performance of the semiconductor tracker during the first years of LHC running are described. More than 99% of the detector modules were operational during this period, with an average intrinsic hit efficiency of (99.74±0.04)%. The evolution of the noise occupancy is discussed, and measurements of the Lorentz angle, δ-ray production and energy loss presented. The alignment of the detector is found to be stable at the few-micron level over long periods of time. Radiation damage measurements, which include the evolution of detector leakage currents, are found to be consistent with predictions and are used in the verification of radiation background simulations

Search for black holes and other new phenomena in high-multiplicity final states in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

Peer reviewe

Search for H→γγ produced in association with top quarks and constraints on the Yukawa coupling between the top quark and the Higgs boson using data taken at 7 TeV and 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A search is performed for Higgs bosons produced in association with top quarks using the diphoton decay mode of the Higgs boson. Selection requirements are optimized separately for leptonic and fully hadronic final states from the top quark decays. The dataset used corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 4.5 fb−14.5 fb−1 of proton–proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and 20.3 fb−1 at 8 TeV recorded by the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. No significant excess over the background prediction is observed and upper limits are set on the tt¯H production cross section. The observed exclusion upper limit at 95% confidence level is 6.7 times the predicted Standard Model cross section value. In addition, limits are set on the strength of the Yukawa coupling between the top quark and the Higgs boson, taking into account the dependence of the tt¯H and tH cross sections as well as the H→γγ branching fraction on the Yukawa coupling. Lower and upper limits at 95% confidence level are set at −1.3 and +8.0 times the Yukawa coupling strength in the Standard Model