Investigate The Wealth Effect Of Investment Banks And Fairness Opinions They Provide In Corporate Mergers And Acquisitions

The dissertation studies the value of both investment banks\u27 services on the whole and fairness opinions specifically, which the banks provide to the acquiring firms. In the first chapter, I examine how investment banks and acquiring firms\u27 governance quality interact to affect shareholders\u27 wealth in corporate mergers and acquisitions. Although the wealth impact of investment banks in mergers and acquisitions is widely studied in the literature, existing studies do not consider the interaction between governance quality and investment banks. I examine how investment banks and governance quality of acquiring firms interact to affect the wealth of acquiring firms\u27 shareholders. I find that acquiring firms with poor governance are more likely to use investment banks in the deal. This association holds even after controlling for deal feature and other characteristics. I find that the use of investment banks per se does not result in a wealth reduction for the acquiring firms\u27 shareholders. However, when the acquiring firm has poor governance, the use of investment bank is associated with extra value loss for the shareholders. The finding suggests that investment banks may help managerial empire building at the expense of shareholders under some circumstances. The study indicates that when studying investment bank\u27s impact it is important to consider the quality of the hiring firms\u27 governance. In the second chapter, I investigate the wealth implications of fairness opinions that the board of an acquiring firm purchases in corporate mergers from investment banks. Using the propensity score matching method to address the self-selection issue, I find that firms undertaking opinioned mergers under-perform firms with non-opinioned matching mergers in short windows around the announcement date. In the long run, the firms with opinioned merger do not perform better than firms with non-opinioned mergers. The acquiring firms perform poorly relative to their performance before the mergers, irrespective of whether their mergers are opinioned. Over a 12-month window after the mergers, the acquiring firms involved in both opinioned and non-opinioned mergers under-perform matching firms that do not make mergers. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the board buys a fairness opinion for its self-protection instead of maximization of shareholder wealth. The implication of this finding is that when investors evaluate mergers, they should focus primarily on deal characteristics, not fairness opinion

The Stability of Underground Power Chambers in the Brittle Rock

The statistical analysis has been executed for the phenomenon of disk cores in the dam site, which has been compared with the condition of high geostresses. The mechanism to form disk cores and the stress state and energy distribution around underground power houses have been analysed with FEM. In addition, the modelling test to investigate the stability of underground house with block material is introduced. Finally some practical conclusions are proposed

Rewards to Meet Market Expectations: Evidence of Stock Market Sophistication

Very often, firms report earnings that meet or beat market expectation (MBE). In this study, we empirically document that managers are rewarded more cash bonus when their firm MBE more often, and this relation holds same regardless of the extent of managerial entrenchment. We find that stock market reacts positively overall when firms MBE, but it reacts less positively for firms with entrenched managers. The study shows that stock market is more sophisticated in rewarding firms for meeting or beating market expectation than a firm\u27s cash bonus system does

Local Discovery by Partitioning: Polynomial-Time Causal Discovery Around Exposure-Outcome Pairs

This work addresses the problem of automated covariate selection under limited prior knowledge. Given an exposure-outcome pair {X,Y} and a variable set Z of unknown causal structure, the Local Discovery by Partitioning (LDP) algorithm partitions Z into subsets defined by their relation to {X,Y}. We enumerate eight exhaustive and mutually exclusive partitions of any arbitrary Z and leverage this taxonomy to differentiate confounders from other variable types. LDP is motivated by valid adjustment set identification, but avoids the pretreatment assumption commonly made by automated covariate selection methods. We provide theoretical guarantees that LDP returns a valid adjustment set for any Z that meets sufficient graphical conditions. Under stronger conditions, we prove that partition labels are asymptotically correct. Total independence tests is worst-case quadratic in |Z|, with sub-quadratic runtimes observed empirically. We numerically validate our theoretical guarantees on synthetic and semi-synthetic graphs. Adjustment sets from LDP yield less biased and more precise average treatment effect estimates than baselines, with LDP outperforming on confounder recall, test count, and runtime for valid adjustment set discovery

The impact of different sentiment in investment decisions: evidence from China’s stock markets IPOs

In this study, we used data on China’s initial public offerings (IPOs), market volatility and macro environment before and after two stock crashes during 2006–2016 to investigate how different investor sentiment affects IPO first-day flipping. The empirical results show that the expected returns of allocated investors are affected by sentiment, with allocated investors having higher psychological expectations of future returns during an optimistic bull market and their optimism discouraging first-day flipping, while higher risk-free interest rate levels and rising broad market indices also discourage first-day flipping and tend to sell in the future. The pessimistic bear market during which allocated investors have lower psychological expectations of future returns, their pessimism will promote first-day flipping, and the increase in the risk-free rate level will also promote first-day flipping, which is the opposite of the optimistic bull market, indicating that their risk aversion has increased and they tend to sell on the same day. We also found an anomaly that the greater the decline in the broad market index during a pessimistic bear market, the more inclined the allocated investors are to sell in the future when the broad market index rises in an attempt to gain higher returns. These findings help explain and understand the impact of market and macro index fluctuations on investor behavior under different investor sentiments

Oxygen diffusion in oxide crystals - tracing new routes to identify the rate limiting step of oxygen permeation through perovskite membranes: Oxygen diffusion in oxide crystals - tracing new routes to identifythe rate limiting step of oxygen permeation through perovskitemembranes

Perovskites are known as mixed electric conductors because they show both electronic (via electron holes) and ionic (via oxygen vacancies) conductivity. Since the electron conductivity is orders of magnitude higher than the ionic one, oxygen vacancy bulk diffusion is regarded as the rate limiting step in oxygen permeation through perovskites. However, for thin perovskite layer the rate of this bulk diffusion process starts to compete with the so called surface reaction which represents the dissociative adand desorption of the oxygen molecule and the incorporation/release of the oxygen ions from the perovskite framework. The oxygen permeation flux through the perovskite membrane made of Ba 0.5 Sr 0.5 Co 0.8 Fe 0.2 O 3-δ (BSCF) has been measured as a function of both the temperature, membrane thickness and the oxygen pressure gradient across the membrane. A combined bulk diffusion/surface reaction model can be used to understand the mechanism of the oxygen transport. The limiting step of the oxygen transport was found to be the bulk oxygen ion diffusion coefficient (D i ) for the BSCF perovskite at temperatures above 700 ℃. Furthermore, the oxygen vacancy diffusion coefficient (D v) can be deduced from the dependence of the oxygen permeation flux on the oxygen pressure gradient provided that the oxygen vacancy δ are known. From permeation measurement on the BSCF membrane tube under study, is found to be between 2.82×10 -5 cm2/s at 900 ℃ and 0.82×10 -5 cm2/s at 700 ℃

Roadmap for Sustainable Mixed Ionic‐Electronic Conducting Membranes

Mixed ionic‐electronic conducting (MIEC) membranes have gained growing interest recently for various promising environmental and energy applications, such as H₂ and O₂ production, CO₂ reduction, O₂ and H₂ separation, CO₂ separation, membrane reactors for production of chemicals, cathode development for solid oxide fuel cells, solar‐driven evaporation and energy‐saving regeneration as well as electrolyzer cells for power‐to‐X technologies. The purpose of this roadmap, written by international specialists in their fields, is to present a snapshot of the state‐of‐the‐art, and provide opinions on the future challenges and opportunities in this complex multidisciplinary research field. As the fundamentals of using MIEC membranes for various applications become increasingly challenging tasks, particularly in view of the growing interdisciplinary nature of this field, a better understanding of the underlying physical and chemical processes is also crucial to enable the career advancement of the next generation of researchers. As an integrated and combined article, it is hoped that this roadmap, covering all these aspects, will be informative to support further progress in academics as well as in the industry‐oriented research toward commercialization of MIEC membranes for different applications

Boards, Uncertainty, And The Use Of Fairness Opinions

Manuscript Type: Empirical Research Question/Issue: We propose and test a new perspective on why the boards of some acquiring firms purchase a fairness opinion (FO). Specifically, we examine whether the board\u27s knowledge explains the use of an FO and the market reaction to the FO. Research Findings/Insights: We find that FOs are more likely to be purchased when the acquiring firm\u27s board feels uncertain about the deal. Specifically, we find that boards with more outside directors are more likely to use an FO, while boards whose directors hold more outside appointments (busy boards) are less likely to seek an FO. Moreover, we find that although the market reacts negatively to the FO, board characteristics both moderate and exacerbate the reaction. When an FO is used by a busy board, the market reacts more negatively to the merger announcement. In contrast, board independence and the average service years for directors seem to moderate the market\u27s reaction to the FO. Theoretical/Academic Implications: The results of this study are consistent with the idea that a lack of knowledge and underlying transaction uncertainty motivates the board to purchase an FO. In addition, our empirical evidence supports a sophisticated market reaction, where the market recognizes the board\u27s knowledge when assessing the necessity of the FO. Practitioner/Policy Implications: This study provides a new perspective on why boards use FOs. A board with more outside directors may be strong on monitoring, but may lack knowledge on the deal. This essentially provides an example of a cost associated with an independent board. Further, we show that the market can differentiate the types of boards that use an FO. © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd