Investor Protection and the Value Effects of Bank Merger Announcements in Europe and the US

Investor protection regimes have been shown to partly explain why the same type of corporate event may attract different investor reactions across countries. We compare the value effects of large bank merger announcements in Europe and the US and find an inverse relationship between the level of investor protection prevalent in the target country and abnormal returns that bidders realize during the announcement period. Accordingly, bidding banks realize higher returns when targeting low protection economies (most European economies) than bidders targeting institutions which operate under a high investor protection regime (the US). We argue that bidding bank shareholders need to be compensated for an increased risk of expropriation by insiders which they face in a low protection environment where takeover markets are illiquid and there are high private benefits of control

Quantization effects in Viterbi decoding rate 1/n convolutional codes

A Viterbi decoder's performance loss due to quantizing data from the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel is studied. An optimal quantization scheme and branch metric calculation method are presented. The uniformly quantized channel capacity C(sub u)(q) is used to determine the smallest number of quantization bits q that does not cause a significant loss. The quantizer stepsize which maximizes C(sub u)(q) almost minimizes the decoder bit error rate (BER). However, a slightly larger stepsize is better, like the value that minimizes the Bhattacharyya bound. The range and renormalization of state metrics is analyzed, in particular for K = 15 decoders such as the Big Viterbi Decoder (BVD) for the Galileo mission. These results are required to design reduced hardware complexity Viterbi decoders with a negligible quantization loss

Charles M. Breder, Jr.: Atlantis Expedition, 1934

Dr. Charles M. Breder participated on the 1934 expedition of the Atlantis from Woods Hole, Massachusetts to Panama and back and kept a field diary of daily activities. The Atlantis expedition of 1934, led by Prof. A. E. Parr, was a milestone in the history of scientific discovery in the Sargasso Sea and the West Indies. Although naturalists had visited the Sargasso Sea for many years, the Atlantis voyage was the first attempt to investigate in detailed quantitative manner biological problems about this varying, intermittent ‘false’ bottom of living, floating plants and associated fauna. In addition to Dr. Breder, the party also consisted of Dr. Alexander Forbes, Harvard University and Trustee of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI); T. S. Greenwood, WHOI hydrographer; M. D. Burkenroad, Yale University’s Bingham Laboratory, carcinology and Sargasso epizoa; M. Bishop, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Zoology Dept., collections and preparations and H. Sears, WHOI ichthyologist. The itinerary included the following waypoints: Woods Hole, the Bermudas, Turks Islands, Kingston, Colon, along the Mosquito Bank off of Nicaragua, off the north coast of Jamaica, along the south coast of Cuba, Bartlett Deep, to off the Isle of Pines, through the Yucatan Channel, off Havana, off Key West, to Miami, to New York City, and then the return to Woods Hole. During the expedition, Breder collected rare and little-known flying fish species and developed a method for hatching and growing flying fish larvae. (PDF contains 48 pages

A systematic review of pedagogical approaches that can effectively include children with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms with a particular focus on peer group interactive approaches

The broad background to this review is a long history of concepts of special pupils and special education, and a faith in special pedagogical approaches. The rise of inclusive schools and some important critiques of special pedagogy (e.g. Hart, 1996; Norwich and Lewis, 2001; Thomas and Loxley, 2001) have raised the profile of teaching approaches that ordinary teachers can and do use to include children with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms. Inclusive education itself is increasingly conceived as being about the quality of learning and participation that goes on in inclusive schools rather than simplistic matters of where children are place

A systematic review of whole class, subject based, pedagogies with reported outcomes for the academic and social inclusion of pupils with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms

Schools across the world have responded to international and national initiatives designed to further the development of inclusive education. In England, there is a statutory requirement for all schools to provide effective learning opportunities for all pupils (QCA, 2000) and children with special educational needs (SEN) are positioned as having a right to be within mainstream classrooms accessing an appropriate curriculum (SENDA, 2001). Previous reviews which have sought to identify classroom practices that support the inclusion of children with SEN have been technically non-systematic and hence a need for a systematic review within this area has been identified (Nind et al., 2004; Rix et al., 2006). This systematic literature review is the last in a series of three

Charles M. Breder, Jr.: Bahamas and Florida

Dr. Charles M. Breder, a well known ichthyologist, kept meticulous field diaries throughout his career. This publication is a transcription of field notes recorded during the Bacon Andros Expeditions, and trips to Florida, Ohio and Illinois during the 1930s. Breder's work in Andros included exploration of a "blue hole", inland ecosystems, and collection of marine and terrestrial specimens. Anecdotes include descriptions of camping on the beach, the "filly-mingoes" (flamingos) of Andros Island, the Marine Studios of Jacksonville, FL, a trip to Havana, and the birth of seahorses. This publication is part of a series of transcriptions of Dr. Breder's diaries. (PDF contains 55 pages

Inelastic final-state interaction

The final-state interaction in multichannel decay processes is sytematically studied with application to B decay in mind. Since the final-state inteaction is intrinsically interwoven with the decay interaction in this case, no simple phase theorem like "Watson's theorem" holds for experimentally observed final states. We first examine in detail the two-channel problem as a toy-model to clarify the issues and to remedy common mistakes made in earlier literature. Realistic multichannel problems are too challenging for quantitative analysis. To cope with mathematical complexity, we introduce a method of approximation that is applicable to the case where one prominant inelastic channel dominates over all others. We illustrate this approximation method in the amplitude of the decay B to pi K fed by the intermediate states of a charmed meson pair. Even with our approximation we need more accurate information of strong interactions than we have now. Nonethless we are able to obtain some insight in the issue and draw useful conclusions on general fearyres on the strong phases.Comment: The published version. One figure correcte

Corporate Boards and Ownership Structure as Antecedents of Corporate Governance Disclosure in Saudi Arabian Publicly Listed Corporations

We investigate whether and to what extent publicly listed corporations voluntarily comply with and disclose recommended good corporate governance (CG) practices, and distinctively examine whether the observed cross-sectional differences in such CG disclosures can be explained by ownership and board mechanisms with specific focus on Saudi Arabia. Our results suggest that corporations with larger boards, a big-four auditor, higher government ownership, a CG committee and higher institutional ownership disclose considerably more than those that are not. By contrast, we find that an increase in block ownership significantly reduces CG disclosure. Our results are generally robust to a number of econometric models that control for different types of disclosure indices, firm-specific characteristics and firm-level fixed-effects. Our results have important implications for policy-makers, practitioners and regulatory authorities, especially those in developing countries across the globe

Hard-scattering factorization with heavy quarks: A general treatment

A detailed proof of hard scattering factorization is given with the inclusion of heavy quark masses. Although the proof is explicitly given for deep-inelastic scattering, the methods apply more generally The power-suppressed corrections to the factorization formula are uniformly suppressed by a power of \Lambda/Q, independently of the size of heavy quark masses, M, relative to Q.Comment: 52 pages. Version as published plus correction of misprint in Eq. (45