Access to finance, technology investments and exporting decisions of Indian services firms

This study provides fresh empirical evidence on the influence of various financing sources on firms’ technology investments and exporting decisions using a panel of firms from the service sector in India during the period 1999–2010. Allowing both activities to be jointly determined, our results show that the source of finance matters for exporting and investing in technology. Moreover, the importance of different types of finance varies across industries in the service sector. Overall, we find that internal funds and non-conventional sources of finance play an important role for exporting and investing in technology in both modern and traditional services. However, funding from conventional financial markets exerts divergent effects across service industries: while traditional service firms use resources from the banking sector to fund their technological investments, firms in the modern service sector rely more on funds raised through equity markets to support their exporting and technological efforts. These results contribute to the academic literature and policy debate on the importance of financial mechanisms to promote firms’ strategic investment decisions

Essays on technology and exporting by Indian firms in a globalised World

This thesis consists of three self-contained studies on technology and exporting of Indian firms in the post-liberalization era. In Chapter 1, we describe the background of Indian economic reforms, provide a general introduction and motivation, and give a brief outline of the thesis. Chapter 2 introduces the data, the variables used in the empirical estimations of the followed chapters, the sample selection steps, and presents some descriptive statistics. Chapter 3 studies regional and national productivity convergence among manufacturing firms in India, using a panel data over the period 1999 to 2010. We find that firms are converging to both their national and regional frontier, and they converge faster to their national frontier than to the regional frontier. We pay attention to the effects of globalisation on the speed of convergence, and find that both export and outward FDI facilitates firms’ productivity growth but slows down the convergence speed. Chapter 4 investigates the role of financing sources on the joint decision to invest in technology and to export, for both manufacturing and service firms in India. We find that firms with higher internal financing are more likely to engage in technology investment and exporting, and this pattern is consistent between manufacturing and service firms. The effects of external financing sources are not statistically significant for manufacturing firms, but show a significant and positive effect on service firms’ decision to undertake technology investments. We further investigate the impact of financial reforms in India for the manufacturing firms, and find a weak effect of the financial reforms in reducing the effects of internal sources on exporting. Chapter 5 summarises the main findings and implications of the thesis, and provides a short discussion of future research directions

A Review of Sequential Decision Making via Simulation

Optimization via simulation has been well established to find optimal solutions and designs in complex systems. However, it still faces modeling and computational challenges when extended to the multi-stage setting. This survey reviews the models and methodologies of single-stage optimization via simulation and multi-stage stochastic programming. These are necessary theoretical components to push forward the development of sequential decision making via simulation. We identify the key challenge of sequential decision making via simulation as the appropriate modeling of the stage-wise value function, for which we survey the state-of-the-art meta-models and their potential solution algorithms

Resource utilization of microalgae from biological soil crusts::biodiesel production associated with desertification control

With the continuing consumption of resources and increasingly prominent environmental issues, microalgal resource utilization has received extensive attention. In this study, based on the microalgal investigation in desert biological soil crusts (BSCs) using pyrosequencing technology, the cultivated crust microalgae were further isolated in order to obtain high quality microalgae for resource utilization. The results showed that with crust development and succession, microalgal diversity gradually decreased, including the number of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and genus, although Microcokus always was the dominant genera. Pyrosequencing obtained 630 OTUs of cyanobacteria, 25 OTUs of green algae and 9 OTUs of diatom; however, part of cultivated microalgae still could not yet be detected due to the DNA extraction preferences and errors caused by PCR amplification. After isolation, four strains were purified and cultivated, including two filamentous cyanobacteria Microcoleus vaginatus BSC-06 and Scytonema javanicum BSC-39, and two unicellular green algae Chlorella sp. BSC-24 and Monoraphidium dybowskii BSC-81. The two green algae grew fast (> 250 mg L-1 d(-1)), and achieved high lipid productivity up to 75-85 mg L-1 d(-1), with lipid content of 28.7-39.0%, thus was considered as promising feedstock for biodiesel production. In addition, the two crust cyanobacteria could be used to construct artificial cyanobacterial soil crusts in desertification control, although their biomass accumulation was not as high as that in the green algae. Ultimately, combining biodiesel production with desertification control would not only improve desert environments, but also provide ideal places for the local microalgal resource exploitation, further promoting desert socioeconomic development