The Economics of Leveraged Takeovers

Financing of hostile takeovers has emerged as a central issue in the ongoing debate concerning corporate takeovers. Concomitant with the increase in the dollar value of takeovers during the past few years has been a significant increase in the percentage of tender offer financing accounted for by bank borrowing and the issuance of high yield debt, (that is, debt securities which are rated below Standard and Poor\u27s BBB-or Moody\u27s Baa3), hereafter referred to as junk bonds, have accounted for an increasingly greater percentage of takeover financing. This Article examines these concerns about debt financing of corporate takeovers from an efficient markets perspective. The efficient-market hypothesis has important implications for public policy toward corporate takeovers. Because a takeover involves the payment of premiums to target shareholders, prospective bidders must perceive a way to raise the target firm\u27s value, that is, the discounted cash flow of the target firm. We argue that junk-bond financing facilitates takeovers which in turn promote economic efficiency. Critics of leveraged takeovers, in our view, exaggerate the risks associated with these transactions, and in some instances, misunderstand the nature of corporate debt. After illustrating the structure of a leveraged takeover with an analysis of Mesa Petroleum\u27s unsuccessful bid for Unocal, this Article seeks to correct the misperceptions about corporate debt with a discussion of the economics of corporate leverage. Finally, we use the Mesa-Unocal case to evaluate the claims made by critics of leveraged takeovers

Ground calibration of the Silicon Drift Detectors for NICER

The Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER) is set to be deployed on the International Space Station (ISS) in early 2017. It will use an array of 56 Silicon Drift Detectors (SDDs) to detect soft X-rays (0.2 - 12 keV) with 100 nanosecond timing resolution. Here we describe the effort to calibrate the detectors in the lab primarily using a Modulated X-ray Source (MXS). The MXS that was customized for NICER provides more than a dozen emission lines spread over the instrument bandwidth, providing calibration measurements for detector gain and spectral resolution. In addition, the fluorescence source in the MXS was pulsed at high frequency to enable measurement of the delay due to charge collection in the silicon and signal processing in the detector electronics. A second chamber, designed to illuminate detectors with either 55 Fe, an optical LED, or neither, provided additional calibration of detector response, optical blocking, and effectiveness of background rejection techniques. The overall ground calibration achieved total operating time that was generally in the range of 500-1500 hours for each of the 56 detectors. Keywords: Silicon Drift Detectors; X-rays; timing spectroscopy; calibrationUnited States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Contract NNG14PJ13C

NICER instrument detector subsystem: description and performance

An instrument called Neutron Star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER) will be placed on-board the International Space Station in 2017. It is designed to detect soft X-ray emission from compact sources and to provide both spectral and high resolution timing information about the incoming ux. The focal plane is populated with 56 customized Silicon Drift Detectors. The paper describes the detector system architecture, the electronics and presents the results of the laboratory testing of both ight and engineering units, as well as some of the calibration results obtained with synchrotron radiation in the laboratory of PTB at BESSY II.United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Contract NNG14PJ13C

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead