Recent trends in corporate leverage

Corporations - Finance ; Flow of funds ; Debt

The increasing importance of retailers' inventories

Although inventory--sales (IS) ratios and inventory volatility have declined somewhat since the early 1980s, little evidence supports the view that declining IS ratios are associated with declines in inventory investment volatility. In the retail sector, IS ratios have risen and inventory investment volatility has, at best, not increased, pointing to a more significant role in future cyclical fluctuations.Inventories ; Investments ; Retail trade

Inventories and output volatility

Analyzing disaggregate data on inventories and sales from the U.S. manufacturing and trade sector between 1960 and 1997 yields four main findings. First, I find that IS ratios are somewhat lower after 1984: 1 among durable goods manufacturers and durable goods retailers outside the motor vehicle industry. Second, I find that industries which have lowered their IS ratios tend to be those in which the variance of output relative to sale has declined. Third, by decomposing the variance of output into its components, I find that the variance of sales is less important, and the variance of inventory investment is more important, after 1984:1 than in earlier years for the overall manufacturing and trade sector. Finally, the evidence suggests that industries where IS ratios fell are those where inventory investment volatility played a smaller role in output volatility in the later period.Inventories

Object recognition using shape-from-shading

This paper investigates whether surface topography information extracted from intensity images using a recently reported shape-from-shading (SFS) algorithm can be used for the purposes of 3D object recognition. We consider how curvature and shape-index information delivered by this algorithm can be used to recognize objects based on their surface topography. We explore two contrasting object recognition strategies. The first of these is based on a low-level attribute summary and uses histograms of curvature and orientation measurements. The second approach is based on the structural arrangement of constant shape-index maximal patches and their associated region attributes. We show that region curvedness and a string ordering of the regions according to size provides recognition accuracy of about 96 percent. By polling various recognition schemes. including a graph matching method. we show that a recognition rate of 98-99 percent is achievable

New constraints on data-closeness and needle map consistency for shape-from-shading

This paper makes two contributions to the problem of needle-map recovery using shape-from-shading. First, we provide a geometric update procedure which allows the image irradiance equation to be satisfied as a hard constraint. This not only improves the data closeness of the recovered needle-map, but also removes the necessity for extensive parameter tuning. Second, we exploit the improved ease of control of the new shape-from-shading process to investigate various types of needle-map consistency constraint. The first set of constraints are based on needle-map smoothness. The second avenue of investigation is to use curvature information to impose topographic constraints. Third, we explore ways in which the needle-map is recovered so as to be consistent with the image gradient field. In each case we explore a variety of robust error measures and consistency weighting schemes that can be used to impose the desired constraints on the recovered needle-map. We provide an experimental assessment of the new shape-from-shading framework on both real world images and synthetic images with known ground truth surface normals. The main conclusion drawn from our analysis is that the data-closeness constraint improves the efficiency of shape-from-shading and that both the topographic and gradient consistency constraints improve the fidelity of the recovered needle-map

WHEAT ACREAGE SUPPLY RESPONSE IN THE UNITED STATES

The dynamic structure of wheat acreage supply response is considerably more complex than previous studies have recognized. The distributed lag response is saw-toothed in its pattern, which is believed to eminate from the influence of summer fallow in crop rotations in the Great Plains. The acreage response elasticity estimate for the Great Plains at mean price was 1.3, and for the aggregate U.S. it was 1.5. For the Unites States, the proportion of long-run response experienced over the first five years from an increment to price was .24, .44, .70, .95, and. 99.Crop Production/Industries,

Statistical modelling to predict corporate default for Brazilian companies in the context of Basel II using a new set of financial ratios

This paper deals with statistical modelling to predict failure of Brazilian companies in the light of the Basel II definition of default using a new set of explanatory variables. A rearrangement in the official format of the Balance Sheet is put forward. From this rearrangement a framework of complementary non-conventional ratios is proposed. Initially, a model using 22 traditional ratios is constructed. Problems associated with multicollinearity were found in this model. Adding a group of 6 non-conventional ratios alongside traditional ratios improves the model substantially. The main findings in this study are: (a) logistic regression performs well in the context of Basel II, yielding a sound model applicable in the decision making process; (b) the complementary list of financial ratios plays a critical role in the model proposed; (c) the variables selected in the model show that when current assets and current liabilities are split into two sub-groups - financial and operational - they are more effective in explaining default than the traditional ratios associated with liquidity; and (d) those variables also indicate that high interest rates in Brazil adversely affect the performance of those companies which have a higher dependency on borrowing