Subnational credit ratings : a comparative review

This paper surveys methodological issues in subnational credit ratings and highlights key challenges for developing countries. Subnational borrowing from capital markets has been on the rise owing to fiscal decentralization and demand for infrastructure investments. A prerequisite for accessing capital markets, subnational credit ratings have also emerged as a part of broader reform for fiscal sustainability. They facilitate a more transparent budgetary and financial management system. The global financial crisis makes subnational credit ratings more relevant, as they contribute to fiscal risk evaluations and fiscal adjustment. In addition to subnationals’ own credit strength, the creditworthiness of the sovereign and the intergovernmental fiscal system are among the most critical rating criteria. Implicit and contingent liabilities are integral to the rating process. Indirect debt instruments including off-balance-sheet financing create fiscal risks. The ongoing financial crisis has reinforced the rating focus on the management of liquidity, debt structure, and off-balance-sheet liabilities.Debt Markets,Banks&Banking Reform,,Bankruptcy and Resolution of Financial Distress,Access to Finance

The Roles of Information Technology in Customer Relationship Performance, Employee User Satisfaction, Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction

This paper presents a review of the relationships between information technology and customer relationship performance, employee user satisfaction, employee service quality and customer satisfaction. An extensive literature research is conducted to answer three research questions about the roles of information technology in the context of customer relationship management, the effect of information technology on front-line employees’ user satisfaction and service quality, and the impact of user satisfaction of information technology on employee service quality and thus customer satisfaction. A mechanism how information technology affects the two key parties in the front-line business process, customer service employees as well as customers, is discovered along with the answers to the research questions. CRM technology, representing customer-related information technology, is mainly discussed in the paper. The role of CRM in customer service is explored from the role of the relational information processes and technology use in customer relationship performance; the mediating effect of customer knowledge and the moderating effect of supply integration is reviewed. Sales force automation (SFA) as an operational CRM technology is also examined of its role on customer service in terms of five levels. Ineffective interaction of relationship information processes and CRM, insufficient supply chain integration, and organizational and contextual elements are the factors of CRM technology malfunction. Needs theory and equity theory are used to discuss the impact of information technology use on employees’ user satisfaction. Service profit chain (SPC) theory is used in understanding the impact of user satisfaction on employee service quality, moderated by employees’ embodied service knowledge. Finally, the impact of service quality on customer satisfaction is found mixed in many researches

3DCFS : Fast and robust joint 3D semantic-instance segmentation via coupled feature selection

We propose a novel fast and robust 3D point clouds segmentation framework via coupled feature selection, named 3DCFS, that jointly performs semantic and instance segmentation. Inspired by the human scene perception process, we design a novel coupled feature selection module, named CFSM, that adaptively selects and fuses the reciprocal semantic and instance features from two tasks in a coupled manner. To further boost the performance of the instance segmentation task in our 3DCFS, we investigate a loss function that helps the model learn to balance the magnitudes of the output embedding dimensions during training, which makes calculating the Euclidean distance more reliable and enhances the generalizability of the model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our 3DCFS outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets in terms of accuracy, speed and computational cost

A Descriptive Study of Variable Discretization and Cost-Sensitive Logistic Regression on Imbalanced Credit Data

Training classification models on imbalanced data tends to result in bias towards the majority class. In this paper, we demonstrate how variable discretization and cost-sensitive logistic regression help mitigate this bias on an imbalanced credit scoring dataset, and further show the application of the variable discretization technique on the data from other domains, demonstrating its potential as a generic technique for classifying imbalanced data beyond credit scoring. The performance measurements include ROC curves, Area under ROC Curve (AUC), Type I Error, Type II Error, accuracy, and F1 score. The results show that proper variable discretization and cost-sensitive logistic regression with the best class weights can reduce the model bias and/or variance. From the perspective of the algorithm, cost-sensitive logistic regression is beneficial for increasing the value of predictors even if they are not in their optimized forms while maintaining monotonicity. From the perspective of predictors, the variable discretization performs better than cost-sensitive logistic regression, provides more reasonable coefficient estimates for predictors which have nonlinear relationships against their empirical logit, and is robust to penalty weights on misclassifications of events and non-events determined by their apriori proportions

An Information Processing Perspective of Digital Social Innovation: Insights from China’s Taobao Villages

Digital social innovation describes new IT-enabled solutions that simultaneously meet a social need and enhance capacity to act. It is an emergent stream of social innovation research and a response to growing social, environmental and demographic challenges. Despite its importance, academic literature is still undeveloped, with ill-defined theoretical boundaries and no coherent knowledge. To address this gap, this study examines how information processing capabilities enable digital social innovation. We conduct an empirical case study on Qing Yan Liu, China’s leading Taobao e-commerce village, an emerging digital social innovation and economic phenomenon in China. From interview data collected from netrepreneurs, we construct a research model that posits information literacy, information immediacy and information liberty, as the required information processing capabilities to achieve digital social innovation. The model represents the first step to better understanding the interrelationships between digital social innovation, netrepreneurs, social enterprise and social entrepreneurship

IT-Enabled Social Innovation in China’s Taobao Villages: The Role of Netrepreneurs

We present a model of IT-enabled social innovation. Our model draws on the theoretical lens of social shaping of technology and the role of villagers-turned-netrepreneurs, as reference actors in the context of rural e-commerce development. The model is built on stage-wise observations of intermediary roles that villagers play and how these roles enhance or decrease in importance in the biography of rural to e-commerce villages’ transformations across China in recent years. In this research-in-progress paper, we present a case study of Daji, China’s first “Taobao performance costumes town”, located in rural Shandong province. Our preliminary model prescribes three mechanisms− advancing, authenticating and attaching−that are enacted by reference actors in the process of negotiating rural e-commerce development and resurrecting heritage in their communities. Our model builds on conjectural discussion in recent IS research on the expanding role of the users in influencing the development of IT-enabled social innovation

Root-n consistency of intercept estimators in a binary response model under tail restrictions

The intercept of the binary response model is not regularly identified (i.e., $\sqrt n$ consistently estimable) when the support of both the special regressor V and the error term ε are the whole real line. The estimator of the intercept potentially has a slower than $\sqrt n$ convergence rate, which can result in a large estimation error in practice. This paper imposes additional tail restrictions which guarantee the regular identification of the intercept and thus the $\sqrt n$-consistency of its estimator. We then propose an estimator that achieves the $\sqrt n$ rate. Last, we extend our tail restrictions to a full-blown model with endogenous regressors.</jats:p

Compatibility of NiO/CuO in Ca‐Cu chemical looping for high‐purity H2 production with CO2 capture

Ca‐Cu chemical looping is a novel and promising approach in converting methane into pure H2 following the principle of sorption‐enhanced reforming. Its operational efficiency is largely determined by an appropriate coexistence of Cu‐based oxygen carriers and Ni‐based catalysts. In this work, NiO/CuO composites were synthesized and their catalytic activity for H2 production was measured using a fixed‐bed reactor system equipped with an online gas analyzer. It is reported for the first time that the presence of CuO could hinder the activity of Ni‐based catalysts in H2 production, and experimental results show that the negative effect of CuO is strengthened with increasing CuO content and calcination temperature during sample preparation. With the help of a series of specific test and characterization techniques (SEM‐EDS, BET, XRD, TPR and XPS), interaction rules between NiO and CuO was further investigated and understood, and based on that an action mechanism model was proposed. Furthermore, an arrangement of mixed particles that avoiding the intimate contact of CuO/NiO was suggested and tested, and a superior performance was demonstrated while observing no restrictions of CuO on Ni‐based catalysts in sorption‐enhanced steam‐methane reforming under the conditions of Ca‐Cu chemical looping