The Emergence of Corporate Pyramids in China

We examine the pyramidal ownership structure of a large sample of newly listed Chinese companies controlled by local governments or private entrepreneurs. Both types of the owners use layers of intermediate companies to control their firms. However, their pyramiding behaviors are likely affected by different property rights constraints. Local governments are constrained by the Chinese laws prohibiting free transfer of state ownership. Pyramiding allows them to credibly decentralize their firm decision rights to firm management without selling off their ownership. Private entrepreneurs are constrained by their lack of access to external funds. Pyramiding creates internal capital markets that help relieving their external financing constraints. Our empirical results support these conjectures. Local governments build more extensive corporate pyramids when they are less burdened with fiscal or unemployment problems, when they have more long-term goals, and when their firm decisions are more subject to market and legal disciplines. The more extensive pyramids are also associated with smaller "underpricing" when the firms go public. Entrepreneur owners construct more complex corporate pyramids when they do not have a very deep pocket - as indicated by their personal wealth.

Founder Succession and Accounting Properties

Using a sample of 231 entrepreneurial firm successions in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, we find that firms' unsigned discretionary accruals decrease while timely loss recognition increases subsequent to successions, suggesting a shift in accounting toward a less insider-based system. We argue that the change in accounting properties is due to the loss of specialized assets in the succession process, such as the entrepreneur's reputation and political/social networks, inducing the firm to adapt to market-based rather than relationship-based contracting. Moreover, we find that the extent of the shift in accounting is larger in founder successions than in subsequent (non-founder) successions, as the dissipation of specialized assets is greatest in founder successions.Succession, founder, corporate governance, accounting properties

The Emergence of Corporate Pyramids in China

We examine the pyramidal ownership structure of a large sample of newly listed Chinese companies controlled by local governments or private entrepreneurs. Both types of the owners use layers of intermediate companies to control their firms. However, their pyramiding behaviors are likely affected by different property rights constraints. Local governments are constrained by the Chinese laws prohibiting free transfer of state ownership. Pyramiding allows them to credibly decentralize their firm decision rights to firm management without selling off their ownership. Private entrepreneurs are constrained by their lack of access to external funds. Pyramiding creates internal capital markets that help relieving their external financing constraints. Our empirical results support these conjectures. Local governments build more extensive corporate pyramids when they are less burdened with fiscal or unemployment problems, when they have more long-term goals, and when their firm decisions are more subject to market and legal disciplines. The more extensive pyramids are also associated with smaller "underpricing" when the firms go public. Entrepreneur owners construct more complex corporate pyramids when they do not have a very deep pocket - as indicated by whether they are among the top-100 richest people in China.Pyramidal Ownership, Decentralization, China

Formalisation and Implementation of the XACML Access Control Mechanism

We propose a formal account of XACML, an OASIS standard adhering to the Policy Based Access Control model for the specifica- tion and enforcement of access control policies. To clarify all ambiguous and intricate aspects of XACML, we provide it with a more manageable alternative syntax and with a solid semantic ground. This lays the basis for developing tools and methodologies which allow software engineers to easily and precisely regulate access to resources using policies. To demonstrate feasibility and effectiveness of our approach, we provide a software tool, supporting the specification and evaluation of policies and access requests, whose implementation fully relies on our formal development

Data Management with Flexible and Extensible Data Schema in CLANS

AbstractData Management plays an essential role in both research and industrial areas, especially for the fields need text processing, like business domain. Corporate Leaders Analytics and Network System (CLANS) is a system designed to identify and analyze social networks among corporations and business elites. It targets to tackle some of difficult problems such as natural language processing, network construction, relationship mining, and it requires high-quality management of data. For data management, we propose a novel approach by integrating the essential XML files and auxiliary databases, with a flexible and extensible data schema. This data schema is the kernel of our data management. It achieves plenty of superiorities, namely, separability, scalability, traceability, distinguishability, version control and maintainability. In this paper, we specifically illustrate the data schema as well as the management approach in CLANS

Physics of Psychophysics: Stevens and Weber-Fechner laws are transfer functions of excitable media

Sensory arrays made of coupled excitable elements can improve both their input sensitivity and dynamic range due to collective non-linear wave properties. This mechanism is studied in a neural network of electrically coupled (e.g. via gap junctions) elements subject to a Poisson signal process. The network response interpolates between a Weber-Fechner logarithmic law and a Stevens power law depending on the relative refractory period of the cell. Therefore, these non-linear transformations of the input level could be performed in the sensory periphery simply due to a basic property: the transfer function of excitable media.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

PO and ID BCG vaccination in humans induce distinct mucosal and systemic immune responses and CD4(+) T cell transcriptomal molecular signatures.

Protective efficacy of Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) may be affected by the methods and routes of vaccine administration. We have studied the safety and immunogenicity of oral (PO) and/or intradermal (ID) administration of BCG in healthy human subjects. No major safety concerns were detected in the 68 healthy adults vaccinated with PO and/or ID BCG. Although both PO and ID BCG could induce systemic Th1 responses capable of IFN-γ production, ID BCG more strongly induced systemic Th1 responses. In contrast, stronger mucosal responses (TB-specific secretory IgA and bronchoalveolar lavage T cells) were induced by PO BCG vaccination. To generate preliminary data comparing the early gene signatures induced by mucosal and systemic BCG vaccination, CD4(+) memory T cells were isolated from subsets of BCG vaccinated subjects pre- (Day 0) and post-vaccination (Days 7 and 56), rested or stimulated with BCG infected dendritic cells, and then studied by Illumina BeadArray transcriptomal analysis. Notably, distinct gene expression profiles were identified both on Day 7 and Day 56 comparing the PO and ID BCG vaccinated groups by GSEA analysis. Future correlation analyses between specific gene expression patterns and distinct mucosal and systemic immune responses induced will be highly informative for TB vaccine development.Mucosal Immunology advance online publication 30 August 2017; doi:10.1038/mi.2017.67