United we stand: Corporate Monitoring by Shareholder Coalitions in the UK

This paper investigates whether voting coalitions are formed by shareholders in order to discipline incumbent management. Shapley values capturing the relative power of shareholder coalitions by category of owner, outperform models with percentage ownership stakes and models measuring the relative voting power of individual owners. There is evidence of successful executive director resistance to board restructuring if these executive directors can combine their ownership stakes to a substantial block of voting power. Non-executive directors seem to support incumbent management, but poor performance is penalised by industrial and commercial companies with large relative voting power. The voting power of insurance companies is positively related to executive director turnover, but this voting power is used for remove management for reasons of other than performance, which may be of strategic nature. Investment/pension funds and funds managed by banks do not play a role in the management substitution process. A large number of share blocks change hands, and new shareholders-industrial companies, individuals and families-are related to increased executive director turnover. Still, these changes in share stakes do not constitute a market in (partial) control since there is no systematic evidence that these changes are triggered by poor performance with the notable exception of industrial companies. There is little evidence that adjusting the board composition to allow for more independence for non-executive directors leads to higher managerial removal. In contrast, high gearing facilitates substitution of executive directors, especially if the company needs to be refinanced.Corporate Finance;Corporate Control;Ownership structures;Government Regulation

Observation of surface states with algebraic localization

We introduce and experimentally demonstrate a class of surface bound states with algebraic decay in a one-dimensional tight-binding lattice. Such states have an energy embedded in the spectrum of scattered states and are structurally stable against perturbations of lattice parameters. Experimental demonstration of surface states with algebraic localization is presented in an array of evanescently-coupled optical waveguides with tailored coupling rates.Comment: revised version with Supplemental Material, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

Polarization entangled state measurement on a chip

The emerging strategy to overcome the limitations of bulk quantum optics consists of taking advantage of the robustness and compactness achievable by the integrated waveguide technology. Here we report the realization of a directional coupler, fabricated by femtosecond laser waveguide writing, acting as an integrated beam splitter able to support polarization encoded qubits. This maskless and single step technique allows to realize circular transverse waveguide profiles able to support the propagation of Gaussian modes with any polarization state. Using this device, we demonstrate the quantum interference with polarization entangled states and singlet state projection.Comment: Revtex, 5+2 pages (with supplementary information), 4+1 figure

United we stand:Corporate Monitoring by Shareholder Coalitions in the UK

This paper investigates whether voting coalitions are formed by shareholders in order to discipline incumbent management. Shapley values capturing the relative power of shareholder coalitions by category of owner, outperform models with percentage ownership stakes and models measuring the relative voting power of individual owners. There is evidence of successful executive director resistance to board restructuring if these executive directors can combine their ownership stakes to a substantial block of voting power. Non-executive directors seem to support incumbent management, but poor performance is penalised by industrial and commercial companies with large relative voting power. The voting power of insurance companies is positively related to executive director turnover, but this voting power is used for remove management for reasons of other than performance, which may be of strategic nature. Investment/pension funds and funds managed by banks do not play a role in the management substitution process. A large number of share blocks change hands, and new shareholders-industrial companies, individuals and families-are related to increased executive director turnover. Still, these changes in share stakes do not constitute a market in (partial) control since there is no systematic evidence that these changes are triggered by poor performance with the notable exception of industrial companies. There is little evidence that adjusting the board composition to allow for more independence for non-executive directors leads to higher managerial removal. In contrast, high gearing facilitates substitution of executive directors, especially if the company needs to be refinanced

Monitoring urban heat island through google earth engine. Potentialities and difficulties in different cities of the United States

The aim of this work is to exploit the large-scale analysis capabilities of the innovative Google Earth Engine platform in order to investigate the temporal variations of the Urban Heat Island phenomenon as a whole. A intuitive methodology implementing a large-scale correlation analysis between the Land Surface Temperature and Land Cover alterations was thus developed. The results obtained for the Phoenix MA are promising and show how the urbanization heavily affects the magnitude of the UHI effects with significant increases in LST. The proposed methodology is therefore able to efficiently monitor the UHI phenomenon

Polling bias and undecided voter allocations: US Presidential elections, 2004 - 2016

Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to each candidate in a simple, deterministic manner. Historically this may have been adequate because the undecided were comparatively small enough to assume that they do not affect the relative proportions of the decided voters. However, in the presence of high numbers of undecided voters, these static rules may in fact bias election predictions from election poll authors and meta-poll analysts. In this paper, we examine the effect of undecided voters in the 2016 US presidential election to the previous three presidential elections. We show there were a relatively high number of undecided voters over the campaign and on election day, and that the allocation of undecided voters in this election was not consistent with two-party proportional (or even) allocations. We find evidence that static allocation regimes are inadequate for election prediction models and that probabilistic allocations may be superior. We also estimate the bias attributable to polling agencies, often referred to as "house effects".Comment: 32 pages, 9 figures, 6 table