Takeover defenses and IPO firm value in the Netherlands

The central question of this study involves the relation between the use of takeover defenses and IPO firm value. We report that management frequently uses takeover defenses before taking the firm public. The use of takeover defenses is primarily motivated by managerial entrenchment. IPO investors anticipate potential conflict of interests with management and reduce the price they pay for the IPO shares if takeover defenses are adopted. Although managers internalize this cost of takeover defenses to the degree they own pre-IPO stock, they are likely to gain through private control benefits. Non-management pre-IPO owners lose. Their shares are worth less, but different from managers, they do not get offsetting private control benefits. We infer that managers use takeover defenses to protect private control benefits at non-management pre-IPO owners' expense.firm valuation;initial public offering;takeover defense

Takeover defenses and IPO firm value in the Netherlands

The central question of this study involves the relation between the use of takeover defenses and IPO firm value. We report that management frequently uses takeover defenses before taking the firm public. The use of takeover defenses is primarily motivated by managerial entrenchment. IPO investors anticipate potential conflict of interests with management and reduce the price they pay for the IPO shares if takeover defenses are adopted. Although managers internalize this cost of takeover defenses to the degree they own pre-IPO stock, they are likely to gain through private control benefits. Non-management pre-IPO owners lose. Their shares are worth less, but different from managers, they do not get offsetting private control benefits. We infer that managers use takeover defenses to protect private control benefits at non-management pre-IPO owners' expense

Look who is talking now: analyst recommendations and internet IPOs

This paper investigates whether analyst recommendations are independent of their employer’s investment banking activities. Our sample consists of internet firms that went public during 1997-2000. The contribution of the paper to the literature is threefold. First, to account for missing recommendations in individual databases we have merged two databases with analyst recommendations. Second, we have exploited the short lives of internet IPOs by examining recommendations shortly before a firm’s delisting. Third, we have looked at stock returns after strong-buy recommendations. Based on regression analysis, significant differences are found between recommendations made by affiliated and unaffiliated analysts. Different results are obtained for initiations and reiterations. Furthermore, the recommendations from affiliated analysts appear to be more favorable than those from unaffiliated analysts before an IPO firm’s delisting. These findings support the conflicts of interest, but not the superior-information hypothesis for investment banks that have an underwriting mandate for the IPO firm. Keywords: analyst recommendations, internet firms, initial public offerings JEL codes: G14, M4

90-РІЧЧЮ КІРОВОГРАДСЬКОГО МЕДИЧНОГО КОЛЕДЖУ ІМ. Є.Й. МУХІНА ПРИСВЯЧУЄТЬСЯ

The article presents main issues concerning palliative and hospice care to incurable patients that were discussed at the regional scientific-practical conference within the preparation for the anniversary of the educational institution.У статті наведено основні питання, що розглядались на регіональній науково-практичній конференції в рамках підготовки до ювілею навчального закладу стосовно паліативної та хоспісної допомоги інкурабельним хворим

Building with Nature - an integrated approach for coastal zone solutions using natural, socio-economic and institutional processes

This paper presents Building with Nature as a viable alternative to the traditional engineering approach, making the services that nature provides an integral part of the design of hydraulic infrastructure, thereby creating benefits for nature and society. In it we describe the necessary steps with which to implement aBuilding with Nature approach. Our case study in Demak, Central Java, Indonesia is used for examples to illustrate this approach and the lessons learnt on benefits and challenges. The location in Demak concerns a tropical muddy mangrove coast. During the last decades, in several areas the coastline has retreated hundreds of meters up to several kilometres, while in other parts of the project area the threat of erosion and flooding by the sea and decline of aquaculture productivity continue to worsen. In 2015, a pilot project to restore the natural coastal mangrove forest was started. The first step was toestablish a good understanding of the complex natural and local socio-economic environments. Based on this system understanding, we then chose for non-traditional solutions using temporary permeable structures made from local material to create wave-sheltered areas that stimulate the settlement of sediment and create a habitat favourable to mangrove recolonisation. Once the mangrove forest is fully-grown it will provide protection against waves. It will also provide other ecosystem services like food provisioning, tourism, nursery habitat for fishery production and CO2-storage. A long-term sustainable solution requires the integration of these technical measures into the local socio-economic and governmental context. To support a smooth transition towards sustainable practices, local communities are simultaneously trained insustainable methods to improve the productivity of their aquaculture ponds. This is done using “coastal field schools” as modelled from the “farmer field school” methodology developed by the FAO in 1989 for rural development. The approach is embedded in the village regulations. Sustainability in this rural area is created by closely linking safety and livelihood. The key lessons learnt from this project are that a combination of a thorough understanding of the biophysical, socio-economic and governmental system and early stakeholder involvement results in higher vital benefits, reduces costs and provides the setting for sustainable design solutions. It requires a learning and adaptive planning cycle from all participants as this approach exemplifies a “learning by doing” approach

MultiLexNorm: A Shared Task on Multilingual Lexical Normalization

Lexical normalization is the task of transforming an utterance into its standardized form. This task is beneficial for downstream analysis, as it provides a way to harmonize (often spontaneous) linguistic variation. Such variation is typical for social media on which information is shared in a multitude of ways, including diverse languages and code-switching. Since the seminal work of Han and Baldwin (2011) a decade ago, lexical normalization has attracted attention in English and multiple other languages. However, there exists a lack of a common benchmark for comparison of systems across languages with a homogeneous data and evaluation setup. The MULTILEXNORM shared task sets out to fill this gap. We provide the largest publicly available multilingual lexical normalization benchmark including 12 language variants. We propose a homogenized evaluation setup with both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation. As extrinsic evaluation, we use dependency parsing and part-of-speech tagging with adapted evaluation metrics (a-LAS, a-UAS, and a-POS) to account for alignment discrepancies. The shared task hosted at W-NUT 2021 attracted 9 participants and 18 submissions. The results show that neural normalization systems outperform the previous state-of-the-art system by a large margin. Downstream parsing and part-of-speech tagging performance is positively affected but to varying degrees, with improvements of up to 1.72 a-LAS, 0.85 a-UAS, and 1.54 a-POS for the winning system

Estimation of Transmission Parameters of H5N1 Avian Influenza Virus in Chickens

Despite considerable research efforts, little is yet known about key epidemiological parameters of H5N1 highly pathogenic influenza viruses in their avian hosts. Here we show how these parameters can be estimated using a limited number of birds in experimental transmission studies. Our quantitative estimates, based on Bayesian methods of inference, reveal that (i) the period of latency of H5N1 influenza virus in unvaccinated chickens is short (mean: 0.24 days; 95% credible interval: 0.099–0.48 days); (ii) the infectious period of H5N1 virus in unvaccinated chickens is approximately 2 days (mean: 2.1 days; 95%CI: 1.8–2.3 days); (iii) the reproduction number of H5N1 virus in unvaccinated chickens need not be high (mean: 1.6; 95%CI: 0.90–2.5), although the virus is expected to spread rapidly because it has a short generation interval in unvaccinated chickens (mean: 1.3 days; 95%CI: 1.0–1.5 days); and (iv) vaccination with genetically and antigenically distant H5N2 vaccines can effectively halt transmission. Simulations based on the estimated parameters indicate that herd immunity may be obtained if at least 80% of chickens in a flock are vaccinated. We discuss the implications for the control of H5N1 avian influenza virus in areas where it is endemic

Risicofactoren voor introductie van laag-pathogeen aviare influenza virus op legpluimveebedrijven met vrije uitloop in Nederland

Door middel van een case-control studie is onderzoek gedaan naar veronderstelde risicofactoren voor introductie van laag-pathogene aviaire influenza (LPAI) virus op pluimveelegbedrijven met vrije uitloop. Onder een LPAI virus werd in dit onderzoek verstaan: een aviair influenza virus van elk subtype (H1 tm H16), met uitzondering van de hoog pathogene aviaire influenza (HPAI) virussen. Veertig bedrijven met een LPAI virus introductie in het verleden (cases) zijn vergeleken met 81 bedrijven waar geen introductie heeft plaats gevonden (controls) om te onderzoeken of potentiële risicofactoren voor een besmetting met een LPAI virus geïdentificeerd kunnen worden. Vragen over aanwezigheid van potentiële risicofactoren zijn door middel van enquêtes voorgelegd aan de pluimveehouders