"Convertible Bond Underpricing: Renegotiable Covenants, Seasoning and Convergence"

We investigate the long-standing puzzle on the underpricings of convertible bonds. We hypothesize that the observed underpricing is induced by the possibility that a convertible bond might renegotiate on some of its covenants, e.g., an imbedded put option, in financial difficulties. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that the initial underpricing is larger for lower rated bonds. The underpricing worsens if the issuer experiences subsequent financial difficulties. However, conditional on no rating downgrades, our main empirical result shows that convertible bond prices do converge to their theoretical prices within two years. This seasoning period is shorter for higher rated convertible bonds.

Convertible Bond Underpricing: Renegotiable Covenants, Seasoning and Convergence (Published in "Management Science", Vol. 53, No. 11, November 2007, pp. 1793.1814. )

We investigate the long-standing puzzle on the underpricings of convertible bonds. We hypothesize that the observed underpricing is induced by the possibility that a convertible bond might renegotiate on some of its covenants, e.g., an imbedded put option, in financial difficulties. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that the initial underpricing is larger for lower rated bonds. The underpricing worsens if the issuer experiences subsequent financial difficulties. However, conditional on no rating downgrades, our main empirical result shows that convertible bond prices do converge to their theoretical prices within two years. This seasoning period is shorter for higher rated convertible bonds.

Changing Risk, Changing Risk Premiums, and Dividend Yield Effects

We investigate the cross-sectional relation between dividend yield and expected return and attempt to include various effects of changing risk measures and changing risk premiums. A stock\u27s risk is measured by its sensitivities to two factors, a market factor and a changing-risk-premium factor. After analyzing dividend-related changes in risk measures, we investigate the presence of dividend effects in expected returns using four methods, each imposing a different structure on the temporal behavior of risk measures and risk premiums. For each method, we find no reliable cross-sectional relation between dividend yield and risk-adjusted expected return

EPCFormer: Expression Prompt Collaboration Transformer for Universal Referring Video Object Segmentation

Audio-guided Video Object Segmentation (A-VOS) and Referring Video Object Segmentation (R-VOS) are two highly-related tasks, which both aim to segment specific objects from video sequences according to user-provided expression prompts. However, due to the challenges in modeling representations for different modalities, contemporary methods struggle to strike a balance between interaction flexibility and high-precision localization and segmentation. In this paper, we address this problem from two perspectives: the alignment representation of audio and text and the deep interaction among audio, text, and visual features. First, we propose a universal architecture, the Expression Prompt Collaboration Transformer, herein EPCFormer. Next, we propose an Expression Alignment (EA) mechanism for audio and text expressions. By introducing contrastive learning for audio and text expressions, the proposed EPCFormer realizes comprehension of the semantic equivalence between audio and text expressions denoting the same objects. Then, to facilitate deep interactions among audio, text, and video features, we introduce an Expression-Visual Attention (EVA) mechanism. The knowledge of video object segmentation in terms of the expression prompts can seamlessly transfer between the two tasks by deeply exploring complementary cues between text and audio. Experiments on well-recognized benchmarks demonstrate that our universal EPCFormer attains state-of-the-art results on both tasks. The source code of EPCFormer will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lab206/EPCFormer.Comment: The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lab206/EPCForme

Rethinking '100% Money': Challenges from New Financial Technology (Revised in November 2006)

Although bank loans themselves are illiquid because of inside information, most of their cashflows are not. Recent financial innovations allow most bank loans to be liquefied via credit derivatives and actual and synthetic securitizations. The loan originating-monitoring bank holds the remaining illiquid residual tranche that contains the concentrated credit risk and information rent. We find that in securitizing a representative commercial loan portfolio, the average residual tranche is about 3%, which is the "market determined capital" necessary to support the liquefaction. These innovations turn risky bank loans into liquid securities to be funded by institutional investors and non-guaranteed deposits. If we also restrict transaction accounts with access to the payment system to be backed by 100% reserve, the banking system is perfectly safe without sacrificing a bank's traditional financial intermediary role. The idea of "100% money", which is known to be advocated by Irvine Fisher in 1930's, is now revived with the challenge from new financial technologies. The new system is clearly superior to the current disaster-prone convoluted fractional reserve banking system with deposit insurance and moral hazard.

Similarity Evaluation of Different Origins and Species of Dendrobiums by GC-MS and FTIR Analysis of Polysaccharides

GC-MS method combined with FTIR techniques by the analysis of polysaccharide was applied to evaluate the similarity between wild (W) and tissue-cultured (TC) Dendrobium huoshanense (DHS), Dendrobium officinale (DO), and Dendrobium moniliforme (DM) as well as 3 wild Dendrobium spp.: Dendrobium henanense (DHN), Dendrobium loddigesii (DL), and Dendrobium crepidatum (DC). Eight monosaccharides involving xylose, arabinose, rhamnose, glucose, mannose, fructose, galactose, and galacturonic acid were identified in the polysaccharide from each Dendrobium sample while the contents of the monosugars varied remarkably across origins and species. Further similarity evaluation based on GC-MS data showed that the rcor values of different origins of DHS, DO, and DM were 0.831, 0.865, and 0.884, respectively, while the rcor values ranged from 0.475 to 0.837 across species. FTIR files of the polysaccharides revealed that the similarity coefficients between W and TC-DHS, DO, and DM were 88.7%, 86.8%, and 88.5%, respectively, in contrast to the similarity coefficients varying from 57.4% to 82.6% across species. These results suggested that the structures of polysaccharides between different origins of the investigated Dendrobiums might be higher than what we had supposed

Clearance of Free Silica in Rat Lungs by Spraying with Chinese Herbal Kombucha

The effects of spraying with kombucha and Chinese herbal kombucha were compared with treatments with tetrandrine in a rat silicosis model. Silica dust (50 mg) was injected into the lungs of rats, which were then treated with one of the experimental treatments for a month. The rats were then killed and the effects of the treatments were evaluated by examining the extent and severity of the histopathological lesions in the animals’ lungs, measuring their organ coefficients and lung collagen contents, determining the dry and wet weights of their lungs, and measuring the free silica content of the dried lungs. In addition, lavage was performed on whole lungs taken from selected rats, and the numbers and types of cells in the lavage fluid were counted. The most effective treatment in terms of the ability to reduce lung collagen content and minimize the formation of pulmonary histopathological lesions was tetrandrine treatment, followed by Chinese herbal kombucha and non-Chinese herbal kombucha. However, the lavage fluid cell counts indicated that tetrandrine treatment had severe adverse effects on macrophage viability. This effect was much less pronounced for the kombucha and Chinese herbal kombucha treatments. Moreover, the free silica levels in the lungs of animals treated with Chinese herbal kombucha were significantly lower than those for any other silica-exposed group. These preliminary results indicate that spraying with Chinese herbal kombucha preparations can effectively promote the discharge of silica dust from lung tissues. Chinese herbal kombucha inhalation may thus be a useful new treatment for silicosis and other pneumoconiosis diseases

B5, a thioredoxin reductase inhibitor, induces apoptosis in human cervical cancer cells by suppressing the thioredoxin system, disrupting mitochondrion-dependent pathways and triggering autophagy

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