Cross-border mergers and acquisitions of Chinese firms: an investigation of value creation

The surge of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBM&As) from China, the largest of the emerging economies, has attracted considerable scholarly attention recently. The unique institutional context in China, i.e., heavy government involvement in business activities and imbalanced development of subnational institutions among Chinese regions, raises two interesting questions: whether, or not, CBM&As of Chinese firms create value for acquirers in the short and the long term; and what special sources of value creation exist in Chinese firms’ CBM&A? The main focus of this thesis is to investigate the impact of multi-level institutional variables on short- and long-term value creation in Chinese firms’ CBM&A in the unique Chinese context. Using a sample of 279/192 CBM&A events collected from the CSMAR database over the period 1999-2013, we find that the market reacts positively to CBM&A announcements, but the accounting performance of acquirers fails to improve after CBM&A in the long term. Based on the selected sample, we employ Ordinary Least Squares to analyse the data and find the following results. First, the study reveals government is an important source of value creation, but its effects on the short- and long-term value creation in Chinese firms’ CBM&A are reflected by government ownership and political connections. We find Chinese market investors reward acquirers with political connections at the time of CBM&A announcements, but explicit government ownership contributes more to long-term performance improvement of acquirers after CBM&A. Second, in the long term, we find there is U-shaped relationship between R&D intensity and the long-term post-CBM&A performance of acquirers, which suggests acquirers with moderate-level R&D intensity suffer from more integration problems resulting from the dilemma of compatibility. Third, at the macro level, we find that higher-quality institutions among the Chinese regions and higher-quality host country institutions provoke more positive market reactions, while less cultural distance and greater formal institutional distance contribute to performance improvement of acquirers after CBM&A in the long term. Furthermore, the effects of micro-level institutional factors, i.e., government ownership and political connections, on the value creation in Chinese firms’ CBM&A are dependent on the macro-level institutional environments. In the short term, the market responds more positively to acquirers with higher government ownership, but less positively to acquirers with political connections with an increase in subnational institutional quality. With the increase in host country institutional quality, the market responds less positively to both the larger government ownership and the presence of political connections. In the long term, we find that the influence of government ownership on value creation is enhanced with the increase of cultural distance, but declines with the increase of formal institutional distance

Do Chinese firms benefit from government ownership following cross-border acquisitions?

Chinese firms’ increasing cross-border acquisitions (CBAs) in recent years seem to challenge the explanatory power of received theories of multinational enterprise (MNE) due to their relatively unique characteristics and the active role of the Chinese government. In this study, we seek to revisit and contextualize the OLI paradigm in conjunction with the institution-based view and examine how Chinese firms’ post-CBA long term performance is associated with government ownership. Our study shows that Chinese firms with more government ownership demonstrate better post-CBA long term performance. However, the above relationship is differentially moderated by such firm-level boundary conditions as political connections and financial slack, and the country-level institutional boundary conditions (i.e., the host country formal institutions and the home-host country cultural distance). We discuss our findings in detail and explore theoretical and practical implications for both Chinese firms and other emerging economy (EE) firms

Action Recognition with Actons

With the improved accessibility to an exploding amoun-t of video data and growing demands in a wide range of video analysis applications, video-based action recogni-tion/classification becomes an increasingly important task in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a two-layer structure for action recognition to automatically exploit a mid-level “acton ” representation. The weakly-supervised actons are learned via a new max-margin multi-channel multiple instance learning framework, which can capture multiple mid-level action concepts simultaneously. The learned actons (with no requirement for detailed manual annotations) observe the properties of being compact, infor-mative, discriminative, and easy to scale. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of applying the learned actons in our two-layer structure, and show the state-of-the-art recognition performance on two challenging action datasets, i.e., Youtube and HMDB51. 1

Extracts of Cistanche deserticola

The senescence accelerated mouse prone 8 substrain (SAM-P8), widely accepted as an animal model for studying aging and antiaging drugs, was used to examine the effects of dietary supplementation with extracts of Cistanche deserticola (ECD) which has been used extensively in traditional Chinese medicine because of its perceived ability to promote immune function in the elderly. Eight-month-old male SAM-P8 mice were treated with ECD by daily oral administrations for 4 weeks. The results showed that dietary supplementation of 150 mg/kg and 450 mg/kg of ECD could extend the life span measured by Kaplan-Meier survival analysis in dose-dependent manner. Dietary supplementation of SAM-P8 mice for 4 weeks with 100, 500, and 2500 mg/kg of ECD was shown to result in significant increases in both naive T and natural killer cells in blood and spleen cell populations. In contrast, peripheral memory T cells and proinflammatory cytokine, IL-6 in serum, were substantially decreased in the mice that ingested 100 and 500 mg/kg of ECD daily. Additionally, Sca-1 positive cells, the recognized progenitors of peripheral naive T cells, were restored in parallel. Our results provide clear experimental support for long standing clinical observational studies showing that Cistanche deserticola possesses significant effects in extending life span and suggest this is achieved by antagonizing immunosenescence

Baseline whole-lung CT features deriving from deep learning and radiomics: prediction of benign and malignant pulmonary ground-glass nodules

ObjectiveTo develop and validate the model for predicting benign and malignant ground-glass nodules (GGNs) based on the whole-lung baseline CT features deriving from deep learning and radiomics.MethodsThis retrospective study included 385 GGNs from 3 hospitals, confirmed by pathology. We used 239 GGNs from Hospital 1 as the training and internal validation set; 115 and 31 GGNs from Hospital 2 and Hospital 3 as the external test sets 1 and 2, respectively. An additional 32 stable GGNs from Hospital 3 with more than five years of follow-up were used as the external test set 3. We evaluated clinical and morphological features of GGNs at baseline chest CT and extracted the whole-lung radiomics features simultaneously. Besides, baseline whole-lung CT image features are further assisted and extracted using the convolutional neural network. We used the back-propagation neural network to construct five prediction models based on different collocations of the features used for training. The area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUC) was used to compare the prediction performance among the five models. The Delong test was used to compare the differences in AUC between models pairwise.ResultsThe model integrated clinical-morphological features, whole-lung radiomic features, and whole-lung image features (CMRI) performed best among the five models, and achieved the highest AUC in the internal validation set, external test set 1, and external test set 2, which were 0.886 (95% CI: 0.841-0.921), 0.830 (95%CI: 0.749-0.893) and 0.879 (95%CI: 0.712-0.968), respectively. In the above three sets, the differences in AUC between the CMRI model and other models were significant (all P < 0.05). Moreover, the accuracy of the CMRI model in the external test set 3 was 96.88%.ConclusionThe baseline whole-lung CT features were feasible to predict the benign and malignant of GGNs, which is helpful for more refined management of GGNs

Health-related quality of life as measured with EQ-5D among populations with and without specific chronic conditions: A population-based survey in Shaanxi province, China

© 2013 Tan et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Introduction: The aim of this study was to examine health-related quality of life (HRQoL) as measured by EQ-5D and to investigate the influence of chronic conditions and other risk factors on HRQoL based on a distributed sample located in Shaanxi Province, China. Methods: A multi-stage stratified cluster sampling method was performed to select subjects. EQ-5D was employed to measure the HRQoL. The likelihood that individuals with selected chronic diseases would report any problem in the EQ-5D dimensions was calculated and tested relative to that of each of the two reference groups. Multivariable linear regression models were used to investigate factors associated with EQ VAS. Results: The most frequently reported problems involved pain/discomfort (8.8%) and anxiety/depression (7.6%). Nearly half of the respondents who reported problems in any of the five dimensions were chronic patients. Higher EQ VAS scores were associated with the male gender, higher level of education, employment, younger age, an urban area of residence, access to free medical service and higher levels of physical activity. Except for anemia, all the selected chronic diseases were indicative of a negative EQ VAS score. The three leading risk factors were cerebrovascular disease, cancer and mental disease. Increases in age, number of chronic conditions and frequency of physical activity were found to have a gradient effect. Conclusion: The results of the present work add to the volume of knowledge regarding population health status in this area, apart from the known health status using mortality and morbidity data. Medical, policy, social and individual attention should be given to the management of chronic diseases and improvement of HRQoL. Longitudinal studies must be performed to monitor changes in HRQoL and to permit evaluation of the outcomes of chronic disease intervention programs. © 2013 Tan et al.National Nature Science Foundation (No. 8107239

Contextualizing the Revised Patient Perception of Patient-Centeredness (Pppc-R) Scale in Primary Healthcare Settings: a Validity and Reliability Evaluation Study

BACKGROUND: An English version of the Patient Perception of Patient-Centeredness (PPPC) scale was recently revised, and it is necessary to test this instrument in different primary care populations. AIM: This study aimed to assess the validity and reliability of a Chinese version of the PPPC scale. DESIGN: A mixed method was used in this study. The Delphi method was used to collect qualitative and quantitative data to address the content validity of the PPPC scale by calculating the Content Validity Index, Content Validity Ratio, the adjusted Kappa, and the Item Impact Score. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) were used to assess the construct validity of the PPPC scale through a cross-sectional survey. The internal consistency was also assessed. SETTING/PARTICIPANTS: In the Delphi consultation, seven experts were consulted through a questionnaire sent by email. The cross-sectional survey interviewed 188 outpatients in Guangzhou city and 108 outpatients in Hohhot City from community health service centers or stations face-to-face. RESULTS: The 21 items in the scale were relevant to their component. The Item-level Content Validity Index for each item was higher than 0.79, and the average Scale-level content validity index was 0.97 in each evaluation round. The initial proposed 4-factor CFA model did not fit adequately. Still, we found a 3-factor solution based on our EFA model and the validation via the CFA model (model fit: [Formula: see text], P \u3c 0.001, RMSEA = 0.044, CFI = 0.981; factor loadings: 0.553 to 0.888). Cronbach\u27s α also indicated good internal consistency reliability: The overall Cronbach\u27s α was 0.922, and the Cronbach\u27s α for each factor was 0.851, 0.872, and 0.717, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The Chinese version of the PPPC scale provides a valuable tool for evaluating patient-centered medical service quality