EFFICIENCY OF CORPORATE INTERNATIONAL DIVERISIFICATION: EVIDENCE FROM DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

During the last two decades corporate international diversification became a widely used growth strategy. However, the majority of scientific researches insist on its value-destroying pattern. Those of them which were based on accounting studies’ methodology and used current performance measures are likely to make an incomplete evaluation of corporate performance by accounting either for operating performance or financial (cost of capital) effects of internationalization. The current paper proposes a new approach for estimation of internalization-performance relationship which is based on economic profit concept. It allows to control simultaneously both operating and financial effects of internationalization on the firms’ current performance. The proposed model has been empirically tested on a sample of large companies from one of emerging economies - Russia. The results identify a nonlinear U-shape relationship between a degree of internationalization and companies’ residual income (economic profit). The relationship is mainly determined by operating performance effects on economic profit while cost of capital has a modest effect. Overall for the majority of companies international diversification refers to decrease in economic profit. The results are compared against the Q-Tobin measure which incorporates expectations about future performance. A joint analysis of current performance (economic profit) and long-term performance (Q-Tobin) allows to expect the internationalization benefits to be realized in future. As an implication of the present research for corporate decision makers it may be stated that at the initial level of international diversification the internationalization decisions should be made with a high degree of caution. There should be a clear internationalization strategy based on definite mechanisms of performance improvement. The prestige and other irrational motives which may lead to the value destruction should be pruned

The Problems of the Replacement of Alternative Penalties Taking into Account the Implementation of International Standards: Case of Some Post-Soviet Countries

International standards for the treatment of convicts without isolation from society contain the world experience of humanism in the execution of punishments and the development of the correctional system of all the countries in the world, concerning Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union, they are adopted and implemented relatively recently. Today not all international standards have found their consolidation in the sectoral legislation of Russia and the CIS and Baltic countries. The execution of punishments is one of the most detailed regulated processes from the point of view of international regulation, as for the classification of the state as democratic, largely affects the compliance of its sectoral legislation in the penitentiary sphere with international standards. The aim of the study is to determine the features of the procedure for the replacement of alternative penalties, taking into account the implementation of international standards in some post-Soviet countries.     Keywords: international standards; alternative punishments; court; Prosecutor’s office; replacement of punishments

Distribution of sizes of erased loops of loop-erased random walks in two and three dimensions

We show that in the loop-erased random walk problem, the exponent characterizing probability distribution of areas of erased loops is superuniversal. In d-dimensions, the probability that the erased loop has an area A varies as A^{-2} for large A, independent of d, for 2 <= d <= 4. We estimate the exponents characterizing the distribution of perimeters and areas of erased loops in d = 2 and 3 by large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. Our estimate of the fractal dimension z in two-dimensions is consistent with the known exact value 5/4. In three-dimensions, we get z = 1.6183 +- 0.0004. The exponent for the distribution of durations of avalanche in the three-dimensional abelian sandpile model is determined from this by using scaling relations.Comment: 25 pages, 1 table, 8 figure

BENCHOP - The BENCHmarking project in Option Pricing

The aim of the BENCHOP project is to provide the finance community with a common suite of benchmark problems for option pricing. We provide a detailed description of the six benchmark problems together with methods to compute reference solutions. We have implemented fifteen different numerical methods for these problems, and compare their relative performance. All implementations are available on line and can be used for future development and comparison

Probing photo-ionization: Experiments on positive streamers in pure gasses and mixtures

Positive streamers are thought to propagate by photo-ionization whose parameters depend on the nitrogen:oxygen ratio. Therefore we study streamers in nitrogen with 20%, 0.2% and 0.01% oxygen and in pure nitrogen, as well as in pure oxygen and argon. Our new experimental set-up guarantees contamination of the pure gases to be well below 1 ppm. Streamers in oxygen are difficult to measure as they emit considerably less light in the sensitivity range of our fast ICCD camera than the other gasses. Streamers in pure nitrogen and in all nitrogen/oxygen mixtures look generally similar, but become somewhat thinner and branch more with decreasing oxygen content. In pure nitrogen the streamers can branch so much that they resemble feathers. This feature is even more pronounced in pure argon, with approximately 10^2 hair tips/cm^3 in the feathers at 200 mbar; this density could be interpreted as the free electron density creating avalanches towards the streamer stem. It is remarkable that the streamer velocity is essentially the same for similar voltage and pressure in all nitrogen/oxygen mixtures as well as in pure nitrogen, while the oxygen concentration and therefore the photo-ionization lengths vary by more than five orders of magnitude. Streamers in argon have essentially the same velocity as well. The physical similarity of streamers at different pressures is confirmed in all gases; the minimal diameters are smaller than in earlier measurements.Comment: 28 pages, 14 figures. Major differences with v1: - appendix and spectra removed - subsection regarding effects of repetition frequency added - many more smaller change

Star Formation and Dynamics in the Galactic Centre

The centre of our Galaxy is one of the most studied and yet enigmatic places in the Universe. At a distance of about 8 kpc from our Sun, the Galactic centre (GC) is the ideal environment to study the extreme processes that take place in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole (SMBH). Despite the hostile environment, several tens of early-type stars populate the central parsec of our Galaxy. A fraction of them lie in a thin ring with mild eccentricity and inner radius ~0.04 pc, while the S-stars, i.e. the ~30 stars closest to the SMBH (<0.04 pc), have randomly oriented and highly eccentric orbits. The formation of such early-type stars has been a puzzle for a long time: molecular clouds should be tidally disrupted by the SMBH before they can fragment into stars. We review the main scenarios proposed to explain the formation and the dynamical evolution of the early-type stars in the GC. In particular, we discuss the most popular in situ scenarios (accretion disc fragmentation and molecular cloud disruption) and migration scenarios (star cluster inspiral and Hills mechanism). We focus on the most pressing challenges that must be faced to shed light on the process of star formation in the vicinity of a SMBH.Comment: 68 pages, 35 figures; invited review chapter, to be published in expanded form in Haardt, F., Gorini, V., Moschella, U. and Treves, A., 'Astrophysical Black Holes'. Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer 201

Fatou flowers and parabolic curves

In this survey we collect the main results known up to now (July 2015) regarding possible generalizations to several complex variables of the classical Leau-Fatou flower theorem about holomorphic parabolic dynamics