CEO GENDER AND FIRM PERFORMANCE

Based on data collected from the Execucomp database concerning S&P 1,500 U.S. firms over the period 1992 to 2013, we evaluate whether CEO gender affects firm performance. We also examine CEO performance in terms of company risk. Our research reveals that on average the gender of the CEO has no significant effect on firm performance. Specifically, our research shows that the gender of CEO does not affect the firm risk level, and in terms of stock return, the difference is not significant between female and male CEOs. Furthermore, We divide firms into high risk and low risk groups based on their β, where β greater than one is considered high risk and β less than one is considered low risk. As a result of this analysis there is no evidence that CEO gender has a significant impact on firm performance regardless of the company risk level

Effects of Cryogenic Treatment after Annealing of Ti-6Al-4V Alloy Sheet on Its Formability at Room Temperature

© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This is an Open Access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.In this article, the effects of cryogenic treatment after annealing on the formability of Ti-6Al-4V alloy sheet were experimentally studied. The Ti-6Al-4V titanium alloy was treated by cryogenic treatment after annealing (ACT). Tensile tests were carried out using a universal machine at room temperature. The microstructure evolution of Ti-6Al-4V subjected to ACT was also investigated using an optical microscope (OM). Both the shearing performance and drawing formability were analyzed by punch shearing tests and deep drawing tests, respectively. Results showed that after ACT, the tendency of the β phase can be apparently changing into stable β’ and α’ phases. The elastic modulus is lower than that of the untreated material. It was found that both the yield strength and tensile strength are declined slightly, whereas the ductility is increased significantly. The shear strength in punch shearing is decreased at room temperature and cryogenic temperature. The ratio of smooth zone on the section after ACT3 is much larger than the others. The rollover diameters are not obviously greater than those of the untreated. Additionally, the height of the burr shows a decreasing trend after ACT. During deep drawing, drawing depth is deeper than that of the untreated material, the drawing load after ACT is reduced, and the decreasing tendency of the drawing load slows down. It is noted that the micro-cracks occur at the bottom of the sample.Peer reviewe

A 5-Gb/s 66 dB CMOS variable-gain amplifier with reconfigurable DC-offset cancellation for multi-standard applications

This paper proposes a variable gain amplifier (VGA) with reconfigurable DC-offset cancellation (DCOC) for multi-standard applications. In this design, a cell-based design method and some bandwidth extension technologies are adopted to achieve a high data rate and a wide gain control range simultaneously. In addition, the DCOC having a tunable lower-cutoff frequency can make an optimum compromise between BER and SNR according to the specified baseband standard. The measurements show that the VGA achieves a gain control range from −6 dB to 60 dB, a bandwidth beyond 3 GHz, and a tunable lower-cutoff frequency from 0 to 300 kHz. When entering a 2 23 −1 pseudo-random bit sequence signal at 5 Gb/s, the VGA consumes 17 mW from a 1.2-V supply and the output data peak-to-peak jitter is less than 40 ps. The VGA is fabricated in a 90-nm CMOS process with a chip size (including all pads) of 0.52×0.5 mm 2