Ownership structure and initial public offerings

The authors study the relationship between ownership structure, corporate governance, and the initial public offering (IPO) process. They examine equity ownership by different institutions, such as foreign and domestic financial institutions, banks with and without lending relationships, venture capitalists, and corporations prior to an IPO. The authors also analyze the relationship between ownership structure and corporate governance. They use a unique dataset of 152 Indian IPOs during the period 1999-2001 to analyze ownership of shares by main groups of shareholders. The authors find a relationship between ownership structure and firm-specific factors such as sales, leverage, and profitability, and IPO characteristics such as percentage of equity locked up, gross proceeds, and exchange of listing. There is also a strong relationship between ownership by different types of institutions. Ownership is also tied to bank lending relationships. Finally, the authors find strong relationships between ownership types and corporate governance. For example, firms with foreign investors are more likely to have an outside chief executive officer and offer an employee stock option plan.Economic Theory&Research,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Small Scale Enterprise,Financial Intermediation,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Economic Theory&Research,Financial Intermediation,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Microfinance

American Depositary Receipts (ADR) holdings of U.S. based emerging market funds

For a foreign"issuer,"the benefits of cross-listing in the United States are extensively documented in the literature. However it is not clear what motivates"investors"to hold American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) rather than the underlying stock of these issuers. The authors address the investors'choice to purchase local shares versus investing in ADRs. Specifically, they analyze the investment allocation decision of mutual fund managers to invest in emerging market firms that are listed in their domestic markets and have also issued ADRs in the United States. Although legal provisions (governance/investor protection) are typically assumed to affect ADRs and their underlying domestic shares equally, investors holding ADRs may have a higher level of legal protection as these securities are issued and traded in the United States. The authors'results are consistent with this"better legal protection"hypothesis as they find that funds prefer to hold ADRs rather than the underlying shares if the issuer is from a country with weak investor protection laws. Also,theoretical models of multiple trading exchanges predict that trading should tend to aggregate in the market with the lowest transaction costs. Similarly, the relative liquidity of an ADR compared to that of its underlying stock should also affect the funds'relative holding of the ADR versus the underlying stock. Consistent with this"ease of transaction"hypothesis the authors find that if an issuer is based in a country with a relatively small stock market, low level of trading volume, and high transaction costs, funds tend to hold a larger proportion of their investments in the ADR. Furthermore, funds hold a larger fraction of their investment in the ADR if the ADR trading volume is high relative to its domestic security trading volume. The results also suggest that ADR listings of local firms might not negatively affect local markets if the investment climate is good.Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Investment and Investment Climate,Drylands&Desertification,Legal Products

Portfolio preferences of foreign institutional investors

The authors examine the relationship between foreign investment and the attributes of emerging market countries and firms in which investment is made. Their findings indicate that countries with higher levels of economic development and floating exchange rate regimes tend to have greater ability to obtain foreign capital. After controlling for the country's level of economic development, they find that firms in countries with stronger shareholder rights and legal framework attract more foreign capital. The authors also find that foreign institutions allocate more of their assets to firms with better corporate governance after controlling for other country and firm attributes. The main firm-level measures of corporate governance are derived from accounting quality variables. Their results imply that steps can be taken both at the country and the firm level to create an environment conducive to foreign portfolio investment. The analysis is based on a unique dataset consisting of equity positions of U.S. mutual funds in emerging markets.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Financial Intermediation,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Economic Theory&Research,Financial Intermediation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform

Institutional Allocation In Initial Public Offerings: Empirical Evidence

We analyze institutional allocation in initial public offerings (IPOs) using a new dataset of US offerings between 1997 and 1998. We document a positive relationship between institutional allocation and day one IPO returns. This is partly explained by the practice of giving institutions more shares in IPOs with strong pre-market demand, consistent with book-building theories. However, institutional allocation also contains private information about first-day IPO returns not reflected in pre-market demand and other public information. Our evidence supports book-building theories of IPO underpricing, but suggests that institutional allocation in underpriced issues is in excess of that explained by book-building alone.

Enhancement in DSR Protocol for Load Balancing and Congestion Control

The routing protocols are classified as reactive and proactive routing protocol. The reactive protocols are the protocols which establish route from source to destination when required on the other hand proactive routing protocols are protocols in which nodes store routing tables and on the basis of these routing tables route is established between source and destination. The simulation results show that reactive routing protocols are efficient than proactive routing protocols. DSR is the reactive type of routing protocols. DSR protocol establish route from source to destination on the basis of hop counts and sequence number. There is possibility that the route which is established between source and destination will be in congestion. In this paper, we are proposing new technique for congestion control in DSR protocol. The new technique is implemented in NS2 and results show that proposed technique is better than the previous techniques

Differences in Governance Practices between U.S. and Foreign Firms: Measurement, Causes, and Consequences

Using an index which increases as a firm adopts more governance attributes, we find that 12.7% of foreign firms have a higher index than matching U.S. firms. The best predictor for whether a foreign firm adopts more governance attributes than a comparable U.S. firm is whether the firm comes from a common law country. We show that the value of foreign firms is negatively related to the difference between their governance index and the index of matching U.S. firms. This relation is robust to various approaches to control for the endogeneity of corporate governance and is consistent with the hypothesis that foreign firms are valued less because country characteristics make it suboptimal for them to invest as much in governance as comparable U.S. firms. Overall, our evidence suggests that firm-level governance attributes are complementary to rather than substitutes for country-level investor protection, so that better country-level investor protection makes it optimal for firms to invest more in internal governance. Our evidence supports the view that minority shareholders of a typical foreign firm would benefit from an increase in investment in governance, but that the firm's controlling shareholder and possibly other stakeholders would not.

Do U.S. Firms Have the Best Corporate Governance? A Cross-Country Examination of the Relation between Corporate Governance and Shareholder Wealth

We compare the governance of foreign firms to the governance of similar U.S. firms. Using an index of firm governance attributes, we find that, on average, foreign firms have worse governance than matching U.S. firms. Roughly 8% of foreign firms have better governance than comparable U.S. firms. The majority of these firms are either in the U.K. or in Canada. When we define a firm's governance gap as the difference between the quality of its governance and the governance of a comparable U.S. firm, we find that the value of foreign firms increases with the governance gap. This result suggests that firms are rewarded by the markets for having better governance than their U.S. peers. It is therefore not the case that foreign firms are better off simply mimicking the governance of comparable U.S. firms. Among the individual governance attributes considered, we find that firms with board and audit committee independence are valued more. In contrast, other attributes, such as the separation of the chairman of the board and of the CEO functions, do not appear to be associated with higher shareholder wealth.

Phrenic Nerve Impingement and Effect of Superficial Neck Flexors Stretching in Improving Diaphragmatic Function among Patient with Chronic Neck Pain

Background: The phrenic nerve is formed on the lateral border of scalenus anterior. It runs vertically downward on the anterior surface of the scalenus anterior. The muscle is oblique and nerve cross it obliquely from its lateral to medial border. In this part the nerve is related anteriorly sternocleidomastoid. The decline in the diaphragm function can occur due to phrenic nerve block but to the best of our search, there is dearth of literature pertaining to involvement of phrenic nerve in patient with chronic neck pain secondary to superficial neck flexors tightness. So, evaluation of these muscle for tightness may be considered which may affect the maximum inspiratory pressure (MIP). Objective: To find the change in diaphragmatic function secondary to phrenic nerve impingement measured through maximum inspiratory pressure (MIP) following stretching of superficial neck flexors in patient with chronic neck pain Methods: An experimental (pre-post design) study involving 40 subjects with mean (±SD) age 22.4 ± 2.8 years was performed. Using purposive sampling 40 subjects (77.5% female and 22.5% male) were used to check phrenic nerve impingement by looking at the effect of superficial neck flexors stretching (sternocleidomastoid and anterior scalene) in improving diaphragmatic function in patient with chronic neck pain. The included subject’s diaphragmatic function was measured through maximum inspiratory pressure using a device capsule sensing pressure gauge followed by stretching of superficial neck flexors on both sides. After two minutes of stretching diaphragmatic function was again measured. Results: There was increase in diaphragmatic function following stretching of superficial neck flexors by 13.2cm H2O which was found to be highly significant statistically with p value < 0.01 Conclusion: The result of present study concluded that superficial neck flexors stretching was effective in treating the impingement of phrenic nerve as measured through maximum inspiratory pressure in patients with chronic neck pain

Visible Light Communication

In this paper, a visible light communications system is proposed that employs wavelength division multiplexing, to transmit multiple data streams from different data sources simultaneously and transmission of audio song and also an image was demonstrated by using LED light. Not limit to this, multiple source signals simultaneously in different frequency bands were transmitted through the LED circuitry, and the signals were recovered successfully. This demonstrates the feasibility studies of our design in signals broadcasting