The impact of split share structure reform on corporate governance in China : an empirical analysis of ownership structure and firm performance of listed companies

Magister Economicae - MEconChina has embarked on a wide range of economic reforms in the past thirty years. One of the major reforms was to restructure state-owned enterprises (SOEs) into public listed companies (PLCs) to improve the performance and quality of corporate governance of SOEs. However, the unique phenomenon of China’s equity market is that the state continues to hold a controlling stake in PLCs with less than 40% of shares tradable in the stock market. This seriously affects the performance and quality of corporate governance of China’s PLCs. This mini-thesis investigates the effects of split-share structure reform on SOEs in China, with particular focus on an analysis of the relationship between ownership structure and firm performance of listed companies. By using a sample of the top 50 companies based on the ranking of the 2004 Fortune top 100 PLCs, a negative correlation was found between the state ownership structure and firm performance of China PLCs before the announcement of split-share structure reform. However, by using the same samples and techniques, the analysis shows that the improvement in the diversified ownership structure had a positive impact on firm performance in China PLCs after the reform

Research on Motor Vehicle Ownership of Jinan Based on the Traffic Environmental Bearing Capacity Motor

In this paper, the author quantified the city traffic environment carrying capacity on the basis of the relationships among traffic environment carrying capacity、the bearing capacity of the urban traffic and urban environmental capacity. And based on the actual vehicle maintain models of Jinan city, the author adjusted the formula of motor vehicle exhaust emission source ,then fixed the OPSM street valley diffusion model of China\u27s big cities in combination with the practical situation of Jinan, and established a new TECC calculation formula based on the traffic environmental bearing capacity of single factor contaminant, finally calculated Jinan\u27s threshold and predicted years of threshold, which would provide reference for the government and related departments to formulate the traffic development and management measures, and also would offer a thought for the research of urban motor vehicle development scale

Comparison of Two Newly Developed Multiple Imputation Methods for MNAR Cross-Sectional Data

The problem of missing not at random (MNAR) data is a highly complex problem to the difficulty of joint modeling the outcome values and missing pattern while taking the variability of the missing data into consideration. In recent years, two methods by Galimard et. al (2016) and Ogundimu & Collins (2017) each developed their own multiple imputation (MI) methods for handling MNAR data. However, they have yet to be tested for their effectiveness in research sufficiently. This dissertation investigates the effectiveness of Galimard et. al and Ogundimu & Collins’ MIs alongside complete case (CC) analysis and Rubin’s MI when applied to two real-life datasets of different size (n1 = 4451, n2 = 1607) with induced missing data of MCAR, MAR, and MNAR mechanisms of 15%, 30%, and 50% missing data percentage. In addition, the methods will also be applied to simulated datasets with imputation and response models more complicated than in Galimard et. al and Ogundimu & Collins’ studies to see how widely they can be applied in datasets with different missing mechanisms and data percentage. It was found in the application results that Galimard et. al’s MI delivered the same results as CC in all missing mechanism and percentage combinations. For both datasets, Ogundimu & Collins’ MI performed better than the other 3 methods for 50% MNAR, though overall, both Galimard et. al and Ogundimu & Collins’ MIs performed better on MCAR and MAR data than MNAR. In simulation, Galimard et. al’s MI also delivered results consistently identical to CC for all missing percentage and mechanism combinations. Ogundimu & Collins’ MI consistently delivered superior results than the other 3 methods for 15% and 30% MNAR. However, Ogundimu & Collins’ MI should be used with caution because it did not converge for 50% missing and only converged for approximately 100 – 400 datasets out of 1000 for 15% and 30%. It will be interesting if future studies can apply Galimard et. al and Ogundimu & Collins’ MI methods other real-life datasets and easily-converge simulated datasets to see how well they can work when applied broadly in research and industry

Power smoothing and oscillations suppression by controlling inertial energy of wind energy systems

In the first part, an economic scheme to smooth short periodic and heavily fluctuating wave power is proposed by controlling the inherent large amount of inertial energy of nearby offshore wind turbine systems (WTSs). The smoothing principle is that these WTSs are controlled to absorb the fluctuations of the wave power or release power opposite to them. The control challenge is that two objectives have to be achieved simultaneously: the rotor speed of a WTS has to be controlled against smoothing requirement whilst controlled to follow changes of wind speed to achieve wind power capture close to the maximum. To resolve this issue, Integrated Compensation Control is developed by adding two supplementary terms into the original maximum power point tracking (MPPT) control. In the second part, a method for short-term wind power smoothing is proposed by controlling wind turbines inertial energy. To achieve this, the designed power reference of a WTS includes two components: one component can approximately recover the original power trajectory of the MPPT control and the other can compensate the fluctuations of the former. In the third part, a new scheme to isolate and suppress forced oscillations is proposed. It controls the inertial energy of wind farms to timely release or absorb power opposite to the forced oscillating power from perturbation areas. Thus, the forced oscillations are prevented from propagating to the rest of power grid - isolated and the oscillating power in the disturbed areas is also reduced - suppressed

Enrichment of a microbial community performing anaerobic oxidation of methane in a continuous high-pressure bioreactor

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Anaerobic oxidation of methane coupled to sulphate reduction (SR-AOM) prevents more than 90% of the oceanic methane emission to the atmosphere. In a previous study, we demonstrated that the high methane pressure (1, 4.5, and 8 MPa) stimulated <it>in vitro </it>SR-AOM activity. However, the information on the effect of high-pressure on the microbial community structure and architecture was still lacking.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this study we analysed the long-term enrichment (286 days) of this microbial community, which was mediating SR-AOM in a continuous high-pressure bioreactor. 99.7% of the total biovolume represented cells in the form of small aggregates (diameter less then 15 μm). An increase of the total biovolume was observed (2.5 times). After 286 days, the ANME-2 (anaerobic methanotrophic archaea subgroup 2) and SRB (sulphate reducing bacteria) increased with a factor 12.5 and 8.4, respectively.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This paper reports a net biomass growth of communities involved in SR-AOM, incubated at high-pressure.</p

Transcriptional up-regulation of relaxin-3 by Nur77 attenuates β-adrenergic agonist-induced apoptosis in cardiomyocytes.

The relaxin family peptides have been shown to exert several beneficial effects on the heart, including anti-apoptosis, anti-fibrosis, and anti-hypertrophy activity. Understanding their regulation might provide new opportunities for therapeutic interventions, but the molecular mechanism(s) coordinating relaxin expression in the heart remain largely obscured. Previous work demonstrated a role for the orphan nuclear receptor Nur77 in regulating cardiomyocyte apoptosis. We therefore investigated Nur77 in the hopes of identifying novel relaxin regulators. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) data indicated that ectopic expression of orphan nuclear receptor Nur77 markedly increased the expression of latexin-3 (RLN3), but not relaxin-1 (RLN1), in neonatal rat ventricular cardiomyocytes (NRVMs). Furthermore, we found that the -adrenergic agonist isoproterenol (ISO) markedly stimulated RLN3 expression, and this stimulation was significantly attenuated in Nur77 knockdown cardiomyocytes and Nur77 knockout hearts. We showed that Nur77 significantly increased RLN3 promoter activity via specific binding to the RLN3 promoter, as demonstrated by electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) and chromatin immuno-precipitation (ChIP) assays. Furthermore, we found that Nur77 overexpression potently inhibited ISO-induced cardiomyocyte apoptosis, whereas this protective effect was significantly attenuated in RLN3 knockdown cardiomyocytes, suggesting that Nur77-induced RLN3 expression is an important mediator for the suppression of cardiomyocyte apoptosis. These findings show that Nur77 regulates RLN3 expression, therefore suppressing apoptosis in the heart, and suggest that activation of Nur77 may represent a useful therapeutic strategy for inhibition of cardiac fibrosis and heart failure. © 2018 You et al