The financing behavior of Dutch firms

This paper investigates the financing behaviour of Dutch firms by testing whether a firm’s financing decisions are determined by certain factors identified in various theories. Since a firm’s financing decision is reflected in the changes of its leverage, our research focuses on the relationship between a firm’s debt ratio change and the changes in certain factors. The approach used in the paper is the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The model identifies various important factors that are related to Dutch firms’ financing decisions. The empirical results provide moderate support for the static trade-off theory, the pecking-order hypothesis, as well as the dynamic capital structure model. However, our data set is insuffi- cient to confirm the static trade-off theory, and our results provide little evidence to back the asymmetric information argument behind the pecking-order hypothesis.

The determinants of Dutch capital structure choice

This paper uses the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique to empirically test the determinants of capital structure choice for Dutch firms. We include major factors identified by capital structure theories and construct proxies for these factors with consideration of specific institutional settings in the Netherlands. We also carefully rescale the observed variables in order to conform with the linear structure of the model and the multivariate normality assumption. Our empirical results shed many important insights on Dutch firms’ financing behavior. In particular, we identified important factors that have so far been ignored in the literature for the Dutch capital structure choice. Furthermore our results provide evidence supporting the “static trade-off" hypothesis. While the “pecking-order" behavior is observed for Dutch firms, our results cast doubt on the rationale of asymmetric information behind the “pecking-order" hypothesis. We also point out that the static cross-section evidence is not sufficient to conclude whether or not the management of Dutch firms is entrenched. Models based on the dynamic behavior of firms’ capital structure choice are called for such tests.

A Petunia homeodomain-leucine zipper protein, PhHD-Zip, plays an important role in flower senescence.

Flower senescence is initiated by developmental and environmental signals, and regulated by gene transcription. A homeodomain-leucine zipper transcription factor, PhHD-Zip, is up-regulated during petunia flower senescence. Virus-induced gene silencing of PhHD-Zip extended flower life by 20% both in unpollinated and pollinated flowers. Silencing PhHD-Zip also dramatically reduced ethylene production and the abundance of transcripts of genes involved in ethylene (ACS, ACO), and ABA (NCED) biosynthesis. Abundance of transcripts of senescence-related genes (SAG12, SAG29) was also dramatically reduced in the silenced flowers. Over-expression of PhHD-Zip accelerated petunia flower senescence. Furthermore, PhHD-Zip transcript abundance in petunia flowers was increased by application of hormones (ethylene, ABA) and abiotic stresses (dehydration, NaCl and cold). Our results suggest that PhHD-Zip plays an important role in regulating petunia flower senescence

Unique Features of Odorant-Binding Proteins of the Parasitoid Wasp Nasonia vitripennis Revealed by Genome Annotation and Comparative Analyses

Insects are the most diverse group of animals on the planet, comprising over 90% of all metazoan life forms, and have adapted to a wide diversity of ecosystems in nearly all environments. They have evolved highly sensitive chemical senses that are central to their interaction with their environment and to communication between individuals. Understanding the molecular bases of insect olfaction is therefore of great importance from both a basic and applied perspective. Odorant binding proteins (OBPs) are some of most abundant proteins found in insect olfactory organs, where they are the first component of the olfactory transduction cascade, carrying odorant molecules to the olfactory receptors. We carried out a search for OBPs in the genome of the parasitoid wasp Nasonia vitripennis and identified 90 sequences encoding putative OBPs. This is the largest OBP family so far reported in insects. We report unique features of the N. vitripennis OBPs, including the presence and evolutionary origin of a new subfamily of double-domain OBPs (consisting of two concatenated OBP domains), the loss of conserved cysteine residues and the expression of pseudogenes. This study also demonstrates the extremely dynamic evolution of the insect OBP family: (i) the number of different OBPs can vary greatly between species; (ii) the sequences are highly diverse, sometimes as a result of positive selection pressure with even the canonical cysteines being lost; (iii) new lineage specific domain arrangements can arise, such as the double domain OBP subfamily of wasps and mosquitoes.Rothamsted Research receives grant-aided support from the BBSRC of the UK. The authors thank Prof. David M. Shuker, University of Edinburgh, UK, who provided us with N. vitripennis. FGV was supported by a predoctoral fellowship SFRH/BD/22360/2005 from the ‘Fundac¸a˜o para a Cieˆncia e a Tecnologı´a’ (Portugal). This work was funded by grants BFU2007-62927 and BFU2010-15484 from the ‘Direccio´n General de Investigacio´n Cientı´fica y Te´cnica’ (Spain) to JR. JR was partially supported by ICREA Academia (Generalitat de Catalunya). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript