Capital structure and firms performance: Evidence from Kuwait

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of capital structure on the performance of 192 firms listed on the stock exchange of Kuwait, covering from year 2009 to 2013. There are very little empirical studies in the existing literature that investigate the influence of capital structure on performance of Kuwaiti firms. Following previous studies, this study hypothesizes that capital structure will positively influence the performance of Kuwaiti firms. In this respect, capital structures are measured by the total debt to equity ratio (TDE) and total debt to assets ratio (TDA). Meanwhile, the performance variables are measured by the return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE). This study also includes firm specific variables as control variables such as capital expenditure to sales, sales growth, and firm size. By using pooled OLS estimation, the results indicate that there is a positive and significant relationship between TDE and ROE, while TDA is negatively but significantly related with the ROE. Then, the findings show a positive but insignificant impact between TDE and ROA, whereas TDA is negatively and insignificantly related with ROA. The findings also reveal that firm specific variables such as capital expenditure to sales, firm size, and sales growth demonstrate a significant and positive relationship with the ROA and ROE

Parametric Analysis of the Effect of Engine Speed and Load on the Hydrodynamic Performance of the Lubricant in Diesel Engine

The oil consumption in an internal combustion engine is an important source of pollution and particulate emissions, main efforts are done by the manufacturers to reduce to the maximum the impact of the oil consumption on the emissions of the engine, and to satisfy the increasingly rigorous standards of pollution. The losses by friction due to piston ring friction explain 20 % of the total mechanical losses in internal combustion engines. A reduction in piston ring friction would therefore result in higher efficiency, lower fuel consumption and reduced emissions. The goal of this study is to develop a numerical method by using of GT-Suite software to analyze the influence of engine speed and engine load during the working cycle on oil film thickness, frictional force, power losses. Our predicted results were validated with the experimental data of a previous study, and they have shown a good agreement. The results in the current analysis demonstrated that the engine speed and load have a remarkable effect on oil film thickness, friction force and friction power losses between the top ring and cylinder liner. So, it would help in reducing friction as well as making a contribution towards the improvement of engine performance such as torque, efficiency and fuel consumption

COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN SENSORLESS VECTOR CONTROL AND NONLINEAR CONTROL FOR PMSM BASED ON EXTENDED KALMAN FILTER (EKF)

AbstractThis paper presents the performance of sensorless nonlinear control compared with vector control of permanent magnets synchronous machine using Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is used for estimating the speed. The robustness of the control is tested for the parameter variation and for the machine operating at low speed. The simulation results show the robustness of the filter and the overall drive system.Keywords: permanent magnets synchronous machine, vector control, input/output control, estimation, EKF

The impact of capital structure on Islamic banks performance: evidence from gulf cooperation council (GCC) countries

Many past studies on capital structure were on conventional financial firms; research on Islamic banks (IBs) on the topic is almost silent. The extant scant literature on IBs capital structure has explored on theoretical grounds, while empirical investigation is still in the infancy stage. Accordingly, it is evident that based on the Islamic profit and loss trade-off perspective, theoretical hypotheses and empirical findings provide a novel addition to the capital structure literature for IBs. Using a panel-corrected standard error model, this study examines the effect of capital structure on the performance of 25 fullfledged IBs in GCC countries over the period 2005-2017. To investigate the reverse causality between performance and capital structure, Granger causality has also been used. Overall, the results show that there is a significant impact of capital structure on the performance of IBs. More specifically, long term debt has a negative and significant impact, while debt ratio, equity ratio, and financial leverage have positive significant impact on IBs’ performance. The Granger Causality Test shows that the effect of capital structure on bank performance cannot be completely determined due to the mixed results. In terms of theories, the study finds evidence to support the Pecking Order Theory, Trade-off Theory, and Causality Theory. The results are also robust when excluding the periods of the global financial crisis and Arab Spring. The findings of this study have major policy implications. Long-term debt should be kept at a low amount to increase bank performance since the lower the long-term debt the higher the bank performance. IBs need to maintain higher equity as they will provide more durability and strengthen their financial position and ability to deal with financial risks. The level of financial leverage committed by the IBs should depend on their flexibility in adjusting their debt value and earning power

A market-oriented agent-based model for information retrieval

International audienceInformation Retrieval in the World Wide Web (Web IR) is essential for a number of activities and it is an active domain of research and development. The main challenges concern the relevance of the results provided to users' queries and the performance regarding respond-time. On the other hand, agent-based market systems prove to be efficient for implementing e-commerce or B2B applications on the internet, thanks to inherent properties such as prominency of interactions, scalability, flexibility, interoperability, etc. Although the use of agents in other application domains is not yet widespread, the integration of mobile agents into market mechanisms bring clear and efficient solutions to Quality of Service issues encountered in most distributed applications and notably in Web IR systems. Mobility allows defining the seller – buyer model of interaction, where agents act on behalf of final users or devices providing re-sources, while the generic Market Place architecture provides an organizational setting for the matching of demands and offers. The paper shows how this framework applies to Web IR and provides experimental validation results from a Jade implementation

Closed-Loop Drive Detection and Diagnosis of Multiple Combined Faults in Induction Motor Through Model-Based and Neuro-Fuzzy Network Techniques

In this paper, a fault detection and diagnosis approach adopted for an input-output feedback linearization (IOFL) control of induction motor (IM) drive is proposed. This approach has been employed to detect and identify the simple and mixed broken rotor bars and static air-gap eccentricity faults right from the start its operation by utilizing advanced techniques. Therefore, two techniques are applied: the model-based strategy, which is an online method used to generate residual stator current signal in order to indicate the presence of possible failures by means of the sliding mode observer (SMO) in the closed-loop drive. However, this strategy is not able to recognise the fault types and it can be affected by the other disturbances. Therefore, the offline method using the multi-adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (MANAFIS) technique is proposed to identify the faults and distinguish them. However, the MANAFIS required a relevant database to achieve satisfactory results. Hence, the stator current analysis based on the HFFT combination of the Hilbert transform (HT) and Fast Fourier transform (FFT) is applied to extract the amplitude of harmonics due to defects occur and used them as an input data set for the MANFIS under different loads and fault severities. The simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed techniques and its ability to detect and diagnose any minor faults in a closed-loop drive of IM

Investigating data sharing in speech recognition for an underresourced language: the case of algerian dialect

International audienceThe Arabic language has many varieties, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and its spoken forms, namely the dialects. Those dialects are representative examples of under-resourced languages for which automatic speech recognition is considered as an unresolved issue. To address this issue, we recorded several hours of spoken Algerian dialect and used them to train a baseline model. This model was boosted afterwards by taking advantage of other languages that impact this dialect by integrating their data in one large corpus and by investigating three approaches: multilingual training, multitask learning and transfer learning. The best performance was achieved using a limited and balanced amount of acoustic data from each additional language, as compared to the data size of the studied dialect. This approach led to an improvement of 3.8% in terms of word error rate in comparison to the baseline system trained only on the dialect data

The Impact of the Tourism Sector on Economic Growth in Algeria: An Analytical and Econometric Study (1990-2014)

يتميز القطاع السياحي بتدفقات مالية سريعة وكبيرة، وكذا فرص عمل التي يمكنها أن تحل مشكل البطالة المنتشر في المجتمعات وذلك لتحقيق التنمية. يعالج المقال أثر الإيرادات السياحية على النمو الاقتصادي في الجزائر باستخدام نموذج VAR واختبار السببية في الفترة 1997-2014، الهدف من دراستنا هو تقييم النشاط السياحي للجزائر وتحليل العلاقة بينه وبين بعض المتغيرات المرتبطة بالنمو. نتائجنا توحي الى عدم وجود أثر معنوي للقطاع على النمو والمعبر عنه بالناتج المحلي، وهذا نظرا لإهمال جانب الاستثمارات الخاصة بالسياحة بحيث يبقى الاقتصاد الجزائري رهين قطاع المحروقات. تصنيف  جال: O11، C22.The tourism sector is characterized by rapid and large financial flows, as well as job opportunities that can solve the problem of unemployment prevalent in societies to achieve development. The article addresses the impact of tourism revenues on economic growth in Algeria using the VAR model and causation test in 1997-2014. The objective of our study is to evaluate the tourism activity of Algeria and analyze the relationship between it and some variables related to growth. Our results suggest that there is no significant effect on the growth and expressed by the local product, due to the neglect of the investments side of the tourism so that the Algerian economy remains dependent on the hydrocarbons sector

Analysis of the Impact of Tax on Companys Investment Strategy: Case of the Biovarm Drug Company

The aim of the study is to identify and clarify the extent of the impact of the tax legislation on the investment strategy of the institution. Further, it attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of the tax incentives created by a legislator to pay positively for an economic institution. Lastly, the study looked at the outcomes that the organization can draw upon in implementing its investment strategy. Indeed, the state seeks to reduce the tax burden on the companies and tries to encourage them to make more investment. The results show that tax variable influences an enterprises investment strategy through its imposed tax mix, rates of tax subjugation, legal provisions of the tax legislation that specify the procedures to be followed by an enterprise to determine taxable profit, and the calculations of the value of the taxes and fees to be paid. The study showed that the tax legislator sought to support the economic institution by reducing the tax burden on it by granting tax exemptions and tax breaks, especially for corporate profits. On the other hand, it has limited it to the set of legal texts regulating the procedure for determining the tax base, such as the provisions, the revaluation of assets and the accounting treatment of deductible costs