Voluntary Disclosure and Earnings Management

Discretion pervades the accounting rules. Proponents argue that allowing discretion enables managers to incorporate more information in their disclosures, while opponents believe that managers can abuse discretion and engage in earnings management at the expense of shareholders. We explicitly model accounting discretion and earnings management in a disclosure setting motivated by Shin (1994). We use this setting to study the interaction between management’s voluntary disclosure and the subsequent mandatory disclosure of value-relevant information. We show that, in equilibrium, allowing the manager to have some discretion over the mandatory financial reports may enhance the informativeness of the more-timely voluntary disclosure. However, allowing too much discretion for earnings management may result in less informative voluntary disclosure. Thus there may be a hidden benefit of granting some (but not too much) discretion in firms’ mandatory financial statements

Design and Evaluation of Digital Baseband Converter Sub-channel Delay Compensation Method on Bandwidth Synthesis

The effect of sub-channel delay on bandwidth synthesis is investigated to eliminate the “phase step” phenomenon in bandwidth synthesis during the test of CDBE (Chinese Digital Backend). Through formula derivation, we realize that sub-channel delay may cause phase discontinuity between different sub-channels. Theoretical analysis shows that sub-channel delay can induce bandwidth synthesis error in group delay measurement of the linear system. Furthermore, in the differential delay measurement between two stations, bandwidth synthesis error may occur when the LO (Local Oscillator) frequency differences of corresponding sub-channels are not identical. Error-free conditions are discussed under different applications. The phase errors among different sub-channels can be removed manually. However, the most effective way is the compensation of sub-channel delay. A sub-channel delay calculation method based on Modelsim is proposed. The compensation method is detailed. Simulation and field experiments are presented to verify our approach

Semiquantum private comparison via cavity QED

In this paper, we design the first semiquantum private comparison (SQPC) protocol which is realized via cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) by making use of the evolution laws of atom. With the help of a semi-honest third party (TP), the proposed protocol can compare the equality of private inputs from two semiquantum parties who only have limited quantum capabilities. The proposed protocol uses product states as initial quantum resource and employs none of unitary operations, quantum entanglement swapping operation or delay lines. Security proof turns out that it can defeat both the external attack and the internal attack.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, 2 table

ComCLIP: Training-Free Compositional Image and Text Matching

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has demonstrated great zero-shot performance for image-text matching because of its holistic use of natural language supervision that covers large-scale, open-world visual concepts. However, it is still challenging to adapt CLIP to compositional image and text matching -- a more challenging image and matching mask requiring the model understanding of compositional word concepts and visual components. Towards better compositional generalization in zero-shot image and text matching, in this paper, we study the problem from a causal perspective: the erroneous semantics of individual entities are essentially confounders that cause the matching failure. Therefore, we propose a novel training-free compositional CLIP model (ComCLIP). ComCLIP disentangles input images into subjects, objects, and action sub-images and composes CLIP's vision encoder and text encoder to perform evolving matching over compositional text embedding and sub-image embeddings. In this way, ComCLIP can mitigate spurious correlations introduced by the pretrained CLIP models and dynamically assess the contribution of each entity when performing image and text matching. Experiments on compositional image-text matching on SVO and ComVG and general image-text retrieval on Flickr8K demonstrate the effectiveness of our plug-and-play method, which boosts the zero-shot inference ability of CLIP even without further training or fine-tuning of CLIP