Firms’ financial flexibility and the profitability of style investing

This thesis examines how firms’ financial flexibility affects the profitability of three of the most commonly used style investing strategies. They are the value-growth trading strategy (going long on stocks with high Book-to-Market ratio and short on stocks with low Book-to-Market ratio), the momentum trading strategy (going long on stocks that have performed well and short on stocks that have performed poorly recently), and the accruals based trading strategy (going long on stocks with low accruals and short on stocks with high accruals). The findings suggest the value premium exists when controlling for risks using the Fama and French three factor model. However, it is explained when the risk factors are conditioned on firms’ investment irreversibility and the business cycle. Next, the momentum profit can be explained by (a) adjusting returns for risks using the Fama and French model that is conditioned on firms’ financial constraints and the business cycle, and (b) accounting for the interaction between the momentum profit and firms’ investments beyond the risk-return relationship. Finally, the accruals based trading strategy is most successful at the two ends of the financial inflexibility spectrum, supporting both an explanation based on the risk-return relationship and an explanation based on the catering theory. When controlling for the cyclicality in stock returns, the strategy ceases to be profitable. The results suggest that the understanding of corporate investment decisions can help improve the understanding of securities markets and portfolio investment strategies. There are a few lessons that investors can learn from the findings of this thesis. Value-growth investors should focus on value and growth firms with high investment irreversibility gap. Momentum investors should pursue the trading strategy among firms with high financial constraints and during economic upturns. They could also benefit from forming their portfolio from past winners and past losers with high investment gaps. Accruals based investors would benefit from pursuing the strategy among firms with high investment and financing flexibility and during economic upturns

A study on the economic efficiency of the offshore long line fishery in Khanh Hoa province, Vietnam

Since the 1990s, Vietnam’s government has made great efforts to develop the offshore fisheries development program. Study on the economic efficiency of the offshore long-line fishery is needed to evaluate and improve the program’s effectiveness. This thesis presents findings based on survey data collected through a representative sample of 37 registered offshore vessels operating in the Vietnam’s Exclusive Economic Zone and in the international waters. The empirical results show that excluding the government fuel subsidy, the owner of an average long-liner earns a profit of 63.363 million VND - equivalent to profit margin of 7.5% and return on investment of 16.0%. With subsidies, profits increased to 93.111 million VND and the two corresponding economic ratios also went up to 10.6% and 23.5%, respectively. This paper also discovered that the fishery in 2008 was less economically efficient than in 2004. However, the average monthly crew share is 1.8 million VND, higher than the average income per labor working in the gill net fishery in Khanh Hoa Province. A closer inspection of the economic data reveals that direct subsidy to compensate partly for fuel costs increase affected the overall fishery. Furthermore, this study provides evidence to support why an average longliner is still able to generate profits in the open access regime if vessels can capture more cost efficiency while the average revenue of relative standardised effort for all vessels is the same. Finally, this study also demonstrates, the surprising result, that the vessel group with the biggest engines, larger than 150 hp, are least cost efficient, whereas the vessels with the smallest engines, less than 90 HP, are most cost efficient and have the highest return on investment

Economic performance, technical efficiency and fishers’ perceptions of factors affecting fishing activities. A study of a Vietnamese purse seine fleet

The focus of this thesis is on the economic performance and technical efficiency of a Vietnamese fishing fleet by the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA). The double bootstrap method has been used to overcome some of the limitations of DEA. In addition, the dissertation evaluates fishers’ perceptions of negative events affecting the fishing activities. The first of three papers presents the investigated fleet and the economic performance in 2016 under open access conditions. Fixed and variable costs, and revenue have been used for estimating the technical efficiency. By adopting double bootstrap DEA under the hypothesis of variable returns to scale, the average technical efficiency of the fleet is found to be relatively high. Nevertheless, the DEA calculations showed that the current catch level could be obtained by a fishing effort 24–35% lower than the actual vessel activity. Vessel size and fishing experience are all factors affecting the technical efficiency. The second paper measures and compares the technical efficiency using physical vs. economic measures. The study focuses on the same 52 Nha Trang purse seiners as in the first paper. Adopting the double bootstrap DEA method, the findings show that economic measures give a lower level of technical efficiency than that which is obtained by physical measures. However, there is significant difference in the technical efficiency between these two measures. The skipper’s experience and interest payment significantly affects the physically based technical efficiency at the 5% level. This study concludes that physical variables, which are often more accessible, are capable of capturing essential economic differences between vessels. The third paper studies the same purse seine fishers’ perceptions of how environmental and socio-economic factors influence their life and fishing activities. The findings are that storms/cyclones, severe floods, heavy rains, high temperature, big waves and bad weather reduce fish density, and the poor availability of capital, health conditions and crew access all negatively affect fishing activities. The fishers’ perceptions of the increased temperature and declining fish stocks over time are in line with available data, whereas their perceptions of the frequencies of storms, floods and heavy rains differ from the observations. Despite increasing frequencies of storms and precipitation not actually observed, the fishers perceive such factors as creating problems for their current fishing activities. Almost all the fishers in the sample expected the frequency and severity of rainfalls and the average temperature to increase in the future, while fish stock availability will decline. However, climate change is not expected to be among the most important negative factors in the future. Cost of fishing, health conditions, efficient fishing gear and boats, as well as the resource situation, represent important factors causing greater concern among fishers regarding future fishing activities

Channel estimation and detection for multi-input multi- output (MIMO) systems

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN

The Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2017

We describe a new challenge aimed at discovering subword and word units from raw speech. This challenge is the followup to the Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2015. It aims at constructing systems that generalize across languages and adapt to new speakers. The design features and evaluation metrics of the challenge are presented and the results of seventeen models are discussed.Comment: IEEE ASRU (Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding) 2017. Okinawa, Japa

Hydrophyte communities in the Tam Giang - Cau Hai lagoon

The Tam Giang - Cau Hai lagoon in Thua Thien-Hue province is the largest lagoon in South East Asia and also one of the places having the largest area of seagrass in Vietnam. The study results from 2009 to 2017 showed that 6 seagrasses species were identified (Halodule uninervis is a newly recorded species, however, Halophila minor is not recorded) and there were 8 freshwater grass species (with the exception of Potamogeton maackianus), with a total area of 2,840 ha. In particular, the area of seagrass has been recovering significantly from 1,000 hectares in 2009 to 2,037 hectares in 2017

New record of the genus Brulleia Szépligeti, 1904 ( Hymenoptera: Braconidae: Helconinae ), with description of three new species from VietNam

The genus Brulleia Szépligeti, 1904 was recorded for the first time in Vietnam, three new species, namely Brulleia flavosoma Long, sp. n.; B. mellicrus  Long, sp. n. and B. nigrisoma Long, sp. n., were descripbed and illustrated. A key to Brulleia species from Vietnam is provided. The checklist of the already known species of the genus Brulleia is also given

ECONOMIC RELATIONS BETWEEN VIETNAM AND THE SOVIET UNION (1986-1991)

On November 3, 1978, Vietnam and the Soviet Union signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, signaling a fresh and significant development in many domains, both in breadth and depth, which had a significant impact on the development of the two countries. This is seen as a "golden period" in particular for business connections between Vietnam and the Soviet Union. When both Vietnam and the Soviet Union began the process of "reforming" and "renovating" their respective nations in 1986, the two nations' economic connections continued to experience qualitative advancements. Vietnam was able to begin the process of rehabilitation and national construction with a strong economic foundation thanks to the Soviet Union's backing and aid during the years 1986 to 1991.  Article visualizations

Early phonetic learning without phonetic categories: Insights from large-scale simulations on realistic input

International audienceBefore they even speak, infants become attuned to the sounds of the language(s) they hear, processing native phonetic contrasts more easily than non-native ones. For example, between 6-8 months and 10-12 months, infants learning American English get better at distinguishing English [ɹ] and [l], as in ‘rock’ vs ‘lock’, relative to infants learning Japanese. Influential accounts of this early phonetic learning phenomenon initially proposed that infants group sounds into native vowel- and consonant-like phonetic categories—like [ɹ] and [l] in English—through a statistical clustering mechanism dubbed ‘distributional learning’. The feasibility of this mechanism for learning phonetic categories has been challenged, however. Here we demonstrate that a distributional learning algorithm operating on naturalistic speech can predict early phonetic learning as observed in Japanese and American English infants, suggesting that infants might learn through distributional learning after all. We further show, however, that contrary to the original distributional learning proposal, our model learns units too brief and too fine-grained acoustically to correspond to phonetic categories. This challenges the influential idea that what infants learn are phonetic categories. More broadly, our work introduces a novel mechanism-driven approach to the study of early phonetic learning, together with a quantitative modeling framework that can handle realistic input. This allows, for the first time, accounts of early phonetic learning to be linked to concrete, systematic predictions regarding infants’ attunement