The Case for Mandatory Ownership Disclosure

The use of equity derivatives to conceal economic ownership of shares (“hidden ownership”) is increasingly drawing attention from the financial community, as is the exercise of voting power without corresponding economic interest (“empty voting”). Market participants and commentators have called for expansion of ownership disclosure rules, and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic are now contemplating how to respond. Yet, in order to design appropriate responses it is key to understand why we have ownership disclosure rules in the first place. This understanding currently appears to be lacking, which may explain why we observe divergent approaches between countries. The case for mandatory ownership disclosure has also received remarkably little attention in the literature, which has focused almost exclusively on mandatory issuer disclosure. Perhaps this is because most people assume that ownership disclosure is a good thing. But why is such information important, and to whom? This paper aims to answer these fundamental questions, using the European disclosure regime as an example. First, the paper identifies two main objectives of ownership disclosure: improving market efficiency and corporate governance. Next, the paper explores the various mechanisms through which ownership disclosure performs these tasks. This sets the stage for an analysis of hidden ownership and empty voting that demonstrates why these phenomena are so problematic.ownership disclosure; market efficiency; corporate governance; monitoring; hidden ownership; empty voting; hedge fund activism

Motives of Socially Responsible Business Conduct

The social and ecological challenges that governments face have raised their interest in socially responsible business conduct (SRBC). In this article we analyze the motives of executives to perform SRBC. We distinguish three types of motives: financial, ethical and altruistic motives. We test the hypotheses on a sample of 473 executives. The estimation results show that SRBC is driven by a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motives, but that the intrinsic motives are stronger than the extrinsic motive.intrinsic motivation;extrinsic motivation;corporate social responsibility;socially responsible business conduct

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Using a Two-Step Neural Network Architecture

The World Wide Web holds a wealth of information in the form of unstructured texts such as customer reviews for products, events and more. By extracting and analyzing the expressed opinions in customer reviews in a fine-grained way, valuable opportunities and insights for customers and businesses can be gained. We propose a neural network based system to address the task of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis to compete in Task 2 of the ESWC-2016 Challenge on Semantic Sentiment Analysis. Our proposed architecture divides the task in two subtasks: aspect term extraction and aspect-specific sentiment extraction. This approach is flexible in that it allows to address each subtask independently. As a first step, a recurrent neural network is used to extract aspects from a text by framing the problem as a sequence labeling task. In a second step, a recurrent network processes each extracted aspect with respect to its context and predicts a sentiment label. The system uses pretrained semantic word embedding features which we experimentally enhance with semantic knowledge extracted from WordNet. Further features extracted from SenticNet prove to be beneficial for the extraction of sentiment labels. As the best performing system in its category, our proposed system proves to be an effective approach for the Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Nondestructive readout for a superconducting flux qubit

We present a new readout method for a superconducting flux qubit, based on the measurement of the Josephson inductance of a superconducting quantum interference device that is inductively coupled to the qubit. The intrinsic flux detection efficiency and back-action are suitable for a fast and nondestructive determination of the quantum state of the qubit, as needed for readout of multiple qubits in a quantum computer. We performed spectroscopy of a flux qubit and we measured relaxation times of the order of 80 $\mu s$.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures; modified content, figures and references; accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

QND measurement of a superconducting qubit in the weakly projective regime

Quantum state detectors based on switching of hysteretic Josephson junctions biased close to their critical current are simple to use but have strong back-action. We show that the back-action of a DC-switching detector can be considerably reduced by limiting the switching voltage and using a fast cryogenic amplifier, such that a single readout can be completed within 25 ns at a repetition rate of 1 MHz without loss of contrast. Based on a sequence of two successive readouts we show that the measurement has a clear quantum non-demolition character, with a QND fidelity of 75 %.Comment: submitted to PR

Dissimilar response of plant and soil biota communities to long-term nutrient adition in grasslands

The long-term effect of fertilizers on plant diversity and productivity is well known, but long-term effects on soil biota communities have received relatively little attention. Here, we used an exceptional long-lasting (>40 years) grassland fertilization experiment to investigate the long-term effect of Ca, N, PK, and NPK addition on the productivity and diversity of both vegetation and soil biota. Whereas plant diversity increased by liming and decreased by N and NPK, the diversity of nematodes, collembolans, mites, and enchytraeids increased by N, PK, or NPK. Fertilization with NPK and PK increased plant biomass and biomass of enchytraeids and collembolans. Biomass of nematodes and earthworms increased by liming. Our results suggest that soil diversity might be driven by plant productivity rather than by plant diversity. This may imply that the selection of measures for restoring or conserving plant diversity may decrease soil biota diversity. This needs to be tested in future experiment

Low-crosstalk bifurcation detectors for coupled flux qubits

We present experimental results on the crosstalk between two AC-operated dispersive bifurcation detectors, implemented in a circuit for high-fidelity readout of two strongly coupled flux qubits. Both phase-dependent and phase-independent contributions to the crosstalk are analyzed. For proper tuning of the phase the measured crosstalk is 0.1 % and the correlation between the measurement outcomes is less than 0.05 %. These results show that bifurcative readout provides a reliable and generic approach for multi-partite correlation experiments.Comment: Copyright 2010 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Applied Physics Letters and may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?apl/96/12350