Relationship between Real Earnings Management with Cost of Debt in Chinese Listed High-Tech Enterprises: The Perspective of Corporate Income Tax Incentives

To encourage corporate investment in innovation or R&D and foster innovative firms, the government of China established standards for the certification of high-tech enterprises in 2008. The business entities that fulfill these standards are entitled to tax deductions. One of the criteria is the ratio of R&D expenses to sales exceeding a specific percentage (which depends on the annual revenue) in the preceding 3 years. Moreover, this study examines data from the CSMAR database for the period 2008-2019 and includes data from 8,233 listed high-tech enterprises. The results show that if the proportion of pre-managed R&D expenses to pre-managed sales that are less than 6% (or 5%), 4%, or 3% in the past three years of firms with different sales range in the current year and managed earnings through sales or R&D expenses to fulfill the standards required for the certification positively influenced the costs of debt (non-significant)

Relationship between Fuel Price Volatility with Earnings Management in African Airlines: The Perspective of Real Activities Earnings Management

This study examines data from the COMPUSTAT database, and annual reports for the period from 2002Q1 to 2018O4 in African Airlines. The results show that fuel price volatility positively influenced real earnings management such as cash flow from operations and discretionary expenditures. In addition, fuel price volatility also positively to real earnings management such as product costs (but this variable is non-significant)

Seeking for sterile neutrinos with displaced leptons at the LHC

We study the signal of long-lived sterile neutrino at the LHC produced through the decay of the $W$ boson. It decays into charged lepton and jets. The characteristic signature is a hard prompt lepton and a lepton from the displaced decay of the sterile neutrino, which leads to a bundle of displaced tracks with large transverse impact parameter. Different from other studies, we neither reconstruct the displaced vertex nor place requirement on its invariant mass to maintain sensitivity for low sterile neutrino masses. Instead, we focus on the displaced track from the lepton. A difficulty for low mass sterile neutrino study is that the displaced lepton is usually \textit{non-isolated}. Therefore, leptons from heavy flavor quark is the major source of background. We closely follow a search for displaced electron plus muon search at CMS and study their control regions, which is related to our signal regions, in great detail to develop a robust estimation of the background for our signals. After further optimization on the signal limiting the number of jets, low $H_T$ and large lepton displacement $d_0$ to suppress SM background, we reach an exclusion sensitivity of about $10^{-8}$ ($10^{-5}$) for the mixing angle square at 10 (2) GeV sterile neutrino mass respectively. The strategy we propose can cover the light sterile masses complimentary to beam dump and forward detector experiments.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, 1 table; v2: matched to Journal version

Arbitrary point cloud upsampling via Dual Back-Projection Network

Point clouds acquired from 3D sensors are usually sparse and noisy. Point cloud upsampling is an approach to increase the density of the point cloud so that detailed geometric information can be restored. In this paper, we propose a Dual Back-Projection network for point cloud upsampling (DBPnet). A Dual Back-Projection is formulated in an up-down-up manner for point cloud upsampling. It not only back projects feature residues but also coordinates residues so that the network better captures the point correlations in the feature and space domains, achieving lower reconstruction errors on both uniform and non-uniform sparse point clouds. Our proposed method is also generalizable for arbitrary upsampling tasks (e.g. 4x, 5.5x). Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the lowest point set matching losses with respect to the benchmark. In addition, the success of our approach demonstrates that generative networks are not necessarily needed for non-uniform point clouds.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Soft-IntroVAE for Continuous Latent space Image Super-Resolution

Continuous image super-resolution (SR) recently receives a lot of attention from researchers, for its practical and flexible image scaling for various displays. Local implicit image representation is one of the methods that can map the coordinates and 2D features for latent space interpolation. Inspired by Variational AutoEncoder, we propose a Soft-introVAE for continuous latent space image super-resolution (SVAE-SR). A novel latent space adversarial training is achieved for photo-realistic image restoration. To further improve the quality, a positional encoding scheme is used to extend the original pixel coordinates by aggregating frequency information over the pixel areas. We show the effectiveness of the proposed SVAE-SR through quantitative and qualitative comparisons, and further, illustrate its generalization in denoising and real-image super-resolution.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Effect of earnings management on economic value added: A cross-country study

This paper addresses the association between earnings management and economic value added (EVA) among nations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), European Union (EU), and those classified as a newly industrialized country (NIC). Furthermore, an analysis of the earnings management behaviour is presented based on data from 2009 to 2013. The results indicated that a significantly inverse relationship exists between earnings management through either discretionary accruals (DAs) or real earnings management (REM) activities and EVA in NAFTA and EU nations. Moreover, a significantly positive relationship exists between earnings management through either DAs or REM and EVA in ASEAN and NIC nations. In addition, REM activities exhibit greater explanatory power among these nations

Rapid determination of volatile constituents in safflower from Xinjiang and Henan by ultrasonic-assisted solvent extraction and GC–MS

AbstractThe total volatile components were extracted from safflower by ultrasonic-assisted solvent extraction (USE) and their chemical constituents were analyzed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) to provide scientific basis for the quality control of safflower. Five different solvents (diethyl ether, ethanol, ethyl acetate, dichloromethane and acetone) were used and compared in terms of number of volatile components extracted and the peak areas of these components in TIC. The results showed that USE could be used as an efficient and rapid method for extracting the volatile components from safflower. It also could be found that the number of components in the TIC of ethyl acetate extract was more than that in the TIC of other solvent ones. Meanwhile, the volatile components of safflower from Xinjiang Autonomous Region and Henan Province of China were different in chemical components and relative contents. It could be concluded that both the extraction solvents and geographical origin of safflower are responsible for these differences. The experimental results also indicated that USE/GC–MS is a simple, rapid and effective method to analyze the volatile oil components of safflower