The role of institutional shareholder activism in corporate governance: a comparative study of the UK and US and China

Although institutional shareholders are still in their infancy in China, Chinese institutional shareholder activism in corporate governance is drawing public attention in state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform. Since the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) are at the forefront in this regard, a comparative study was conducted to explore whether Chinese institutional investors activism could influence corporate governance as their UK and US counterparts and whether the possibility of more institutional shareholder activism in China exists as the country rides on the current wave of economic reform. A contractual perspective of the firm and principal–agent relationship between members provide a useful tool to get a better understanding of the internal structure of organizations. Therefore, the thesis begins with the agency theory and the analysis of agency problems existed in each jurisdiction serve as a foundation for further research. Apart from the legal research, historical and political perspective of research were adopted. On the one hand, the factors that promote the development of institutional shareholders are analysed with the evolution of the ownership structure. This retrospective assists with an understanding of the wider context in which institutional shareholder activism emerged. On the other hand, the socialist ideology and political legitimacy management by the Chinese Communist Party deeply influence every aspect of Chinese economy. The political influence is discussed and Chinese institutional shareholder activism analysed under the influence of political factors. Given the fact that institutional shareholder activism operates within a complex framework, a breakdown of shareholder activism by typologies of institutional investors and forms of activism is presented. The extent of institutional shareholder activism in the UK, US and China was explored from an empirical perspective. Academic research, reports from institutional investors and industry associations, related news, and cases were collected to assist with the study. Although it appears that there is institutional shareholder activism with similar features in the UK, US and China, the role that institutional shareholder activism plays in corporate governance is different. Nine factors that contribute to the difference in institutional shareholder activism are presented. Based on these findings, the research suggests that although institutional shareholder activism is rational and beneficial to corporate performance under certain circumstances, and more institutional shareholder activism can be expected as it fits within a broad tapestry of economic reform, it is not easy for Chinese institutional shareholders to overcome their passivity and engage in corporate governance actively. The possible way forward was analysed at the end of the thesis

Generative Adversarial Mapping Networks

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown impressive performance in generating photo-realistic images. They fit generative models by minimizing certain distance measure between the real image distribution and the generated data distribution. Several distance measures have been used, such as Jensen-Shannon divergence, $f$-divergence, and Wasserstein distance, and choosing an appropriate distance measure is very important for training the generative network. In this paper, we choose to use the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as the distance metric, which has several nice theoretical guarantees. In fact, generative moment matching network (GMMN) (Li, Swersky, and Zemel 2015) is such a generative model which contains only one generator network $G$ trained by directly minimizing MMD between the real and generated distributions. However, it fails to generate meaningful samples on challenging benchmark datasets, such as CIFAR-10 and LSUN. To improve on GMMN, we propose to add an extra network $F$, called mapper. $F$ maps both real data distribution and generated data distribution from the original data space to a feature representation space $\mathcal{R}$, and it is trained to maximize MMD between the two mapped distributions in $\mathcal{R}$, while the generator $G$ tries to minimize the MMD. We call the new model generative adversarial mapping networks (GAMNs). We demonstrate that the adversarial mapper $F$ can help $G$ to better capture the underlying data distribution. We also show that GAMN significantly outperforms GMMN, and is also superior to or comparable with other state-of-the-art GAN based methods on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and LSUN-Bedrooms datasets.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Large-scale Point Cloud Registration Based on Graph Matching Optimization

Point Clouds Registration is a fundamental and challenging problem in 3D computer vision. It has been shown that the isometric transformation is an essential property in rigid point cloud registration, but the existing methods only utilize it in the outlier rejection stage. In this paper, we emphasize that the isometric transformation is also important in the feature learning stage for improving registration quality. We propose a \underline{G}raph \underline{M}atching \underline{O}ptimization based \underline{Net}work (denoted as GMONet for short), which utilizes the graph matching method to explicitly exert the isometry preserving constraints in the point feature learning stage to improve %refine the point representation. Specifically, we %use exploit the partial graph matching constraint to enhance the overlap region detection abilities of super points ($i.e.,$ down-sampled key points) and full graph matching to refine the registration accuracy at the fine-level overlap region. Meanwhile, we leverage the mini-batch sampling to improve the efficiency of the full graph matching optimization. Given high discriminative point features in the evaluation stage, we utilize the RANSAC approach to estimate the transformation between the scanned pairs. The proposed method has been evaluated on the 3DMatch/3DLoMatch benchmarks and the KITTI benchmark. The experimental results show that our method achieves competitive performance compared with the existing state-of-the-art baselines

Application of family-centered empowerment model in primary caregivers of premature infants: A quasi-experimental study

ObjectiveTo explore the effect of the family-centered empowerment model (FECM) on reducing anxiety, improving care ability, and readiness for hospital discharge of main caregivers of preterm infants.MethodsThe primary caregivers of preterm infants who were admitted to the Neonatal intensive care Unit (NICU) of our center from September 2021 to April 2022 were selected as the research objects. According to the wishes of the primary caregivers of preterm infants, they were divided into group A (FECM group) and group B (non-FECM group). The intervention effects were evaluated with the Anxiety Screening Scale (GAD-7), the Readiness for Hospital Discharge Scale-Parent Version (RHDS-Parent Form), and the Primary Caregivers of Premature Infants Assessment of Care Ability Questionnaire.ResultsBefore the intervention, there was no statistically significant difference in the general information, anxiety screening, the scores of each dimension, and total score of the comprehensive ability of the main caregivers, and the score of caregiver preparedness between the two groups (P > 0.05). After the intervention, there were statistically significant differences in the anxiety screening, the total score and total score of each dimension of the care ability, and the score of caregiver preparedness between the two groups (P < 0.05).ConclusionsFECM can effectively reduce the anxiety of primary caregivers of premature infants and improve their readiness for hospital discharge and care ability. To improve the quality of life of premature infants by implementing personalized training, care guidance, and peer support

When Does CSR Fail to Incentive Employees’ Affective Organizational Commitment? Exploring the Moderating Effects Based on the C-S-R Concerns Model

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a strategy employed to engage stakeholders. Prior studies explored the different mechanisms by which employees, as one of an organization’s biggest stakeholder groups, positively respond to organizational CSR behavior. However, limited attention has been paid to the conditional boundaries when employees’ positive responses are stronger or weaker, overlooking the possibility that sometimes CSR fails to obtain employees’ support. The study employed the “C-S-R concerns” model to systematically investigate how caring-based (i.e., moral identity), self-based (i.e., corporate ability), and relational-based (i.e., importance of CSR) factors moderate the relationship between perceived CSR (PCSR) and affective organizational commitment (AOC). Using data collected from 326 employees in the Chinese high-tech industry, we found that the positive effects of employees’ PCSR on their AOC becomes negative when employees have higher levels of moral identity, when their organizations are perceived as having greater ability, and when CSR is perceived as more important to the success of their organization. The findings advance our understanding of the inconclusive impacts of CSR on firm performance by providing micro-level evidence from employees. This also provides practical implications for managers about how to select employees, set CSR strategies and cultivate organizational cultures

A Novel Heterogalactan from Antrodia camphorata and Anti-Angiogenic Activity of Its Sulfated Derivative

A heterogalactan, named ACW0, was extracted from Antrodia camphorata and purified by anion exchange and gel permeation chromatography. It was composed of galactose (94.98%), traces of mannose (2.41%), and fucose (2.61%), with its molecular weight estimated to be 13.5 k Da. The polysaccharide ACW0 was shown to be a mannofucogalactan with a backbone chain of α-d-1,6-linked Gal, attached by a non-reducing terminal α-d-Man and α-l-Fuc on C-2 of nearly every six α-d-1,6-linked Gal residues. A sulfated polysaccharide, ACW0-Sul was achieved by the chlorosulfonic acid-pyridine method. Compared with the native polysaccharide, ACW0-Sul could disrupt tube formation and migration as well as cell growth of human microvascular endothelial cells (HMEC-1) dose-dependently. Further studies revealed that phosphorylation of Extracellular Regulated Protein Kinases (Erk) and Focal Adhesion Kinase (FAK) were significantly inhibited by ACW0-Sul. These results suggested that ACW0-Sul could be a potent candidate for anti-angiogenic agent development

Investigation of Mechanochemically Treated Municipal Solid Waste Incineration Fly Ash as Replacement for Cement

Municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) fly ash has been classified as hazardous waste in China because of the leachable toxic heavy metals and high concentrations of chlorides and polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDD/Fs). Currently, the main treatment method is still landfilling after chemical treatment or cement solidification, and an effective approach to realize fly ash utilization is still lacking. In the present work, the fly ash was firstly water-washed to remove the soluble chlorine salts, which can improve the performance of the produced cement mortar in later work. Mechanochemical pre-treatment was adopted to destroy the PCDD/Fs and improve the heavy metals’ stabilization. The results show that 75% of PCDD/Fs can be degraded and that most of the heavy metals are stabilized. After the mechanochemical pre-treatment, the average particle size of the fly ash decreases to 2–5 μm, which is beneficial for promoting the activation energy and accelerating the hydration process in cement mortar production. The compressive and flexural strengths of the fly ash cement mortar improve to 6.2 MPa and 32.4 MPa, respectively, when 35% of the OPC is replaced by treated fly ash. The similarity in the 3-day and 28-day strength with or without the addition of the treated ash shows the light influence of the fly ash addition. Thus, the mechanochemical process can stabilize the heavy metals and activate the fly ash, allowing it to partly substitute ordinary Portland cement in building materials, such as cement raw materials and concrete