Short-Term Returns of UK Share Buyback Activity

This paper examines the short-term signalling power of UK open market share repurchases between 1999 and 2004. The 5-day and 11-day abnormal returns centred on the announcement date are statistically significant at 1.13% and 1.21% respectively. However, there is no evidence to support any relationship between the 5-day announcement abnormal returns and characteristics of UK share repurchases, such as the percentage of shares to be repurchased, pre-announcement return, size and lag time. These results are largely in line with results reported by Rees (1996). It seems that UK share repurchases are not primarily motivated by share undervaluation. That is why the signalling hypothesis fails to explain the announcement abnormal returns of the UK open market share repurchases.UK share repurchases, signalling hypothesis, share undervaluation, announcement abnormal returns

Mid-degree work placements can boost chances of getting a 2.1 or first

With the university summer holidays now in full swing, many second-year students will be gearing up to start their first day at work in September instead of heading back to lectures. Sandwich years – a one-year work placement at a company that counts towards a degree course – have become a popular part of many university courses

Social mobility via elite placements::working class graduates in elite accounting and banking firms

Little research attention has been paid to the effect of yearlong placements in elite accounting firms and investment banks on the social mobility of working class graduates. Using the framework of Bourdieu, this paper examines the link between placements and employment destinations of eight cohorts of accounting and finance graduates from a non-elite British university. We find that elite professions are most likely to recruit graduates who have already gained the "right" professional habitus through the successful completion of yearlong placements in the same elite firms in that particular field and/or with better degree averages. Social mobility of working class graduates taking an elite placement is evident after controlling for gender, age, ethnicity and degree average. The findings indicate that working class graduates need to consciously and continuously modify their class specific dispositions so that they can fully engage with higher education and elite placement experiences to achieve social mobility

Higher achievers? Mobility programmes, generic skills and academic learning: a UK case study

The received wisdom is that mobility programmes considerably contribute to students in terms of the development of generic skills, language and multicultural competence and competitive advantage in global labour market. Surprisingly, the impacts of mobility programmes on academic learning have received very limited research interest in the literature. This study uses students enrolled on international management and modern languages degrees in a British university to investigate the benefits of a yearlong study abroad programme, on the development of linguistic and multicultural skills measured by their academic results pre- and post- international mobility. Using a control group of students who stay on campus, quantitative data drawn from a longitudinal study over eight years conclusively suggest that study abroad students academically outperform control group students after controlling for gender, domicile, ethnicity, socio-economic status, prior academic performance and age. The implications of these results on higher education and policy making are discussed

Revisiting progenitor-age dependence of type Ia supernova luminosity standardization process

Much of the research in supernova cosmology is based on an assumption that the peak luminosity of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), after a standardization process, is independent of the galactic environment. A series of recent studies suggested that there is a significant correlation between the standardized luminosity and the progenitor age of SNe Ia. The correlation found in the most recent work by Lee et al. is strong enough to explain the extra dimming of distant SNe Ia, and therefore casts doubts on the direct evidence of cosmic acceleration. The present work improves the previous work by incorporating the uncertainties of progenitor ages, which were ignored in Lee et al., into a fully Bayesian inference framework. We find a weaker dependence of supernova standardized luminosity on the progenitor age, but the detection of correlation remains significant (3.3$\sigma$). Assuming that such correlation can be extended to high redshift and applying it to the Pantheon SN Ia data set, we find that the correlation cannot be the primary cause of the observed extra dimming of distant SNe Ia. Further more, we use the PAge formalism, which is a good approximation to many dark energy and modified gravity models, to do a model comparison. The concordance Lambda cold dark matter model remains a good fit when the progenitor-age dependence of SN Ia luminosity is corrected. The best-fit parameters, however, are in $\sim 2\sigma$ tension with the standard values inferred from cosmic microwave background observations.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

Exploring the influence of individual and academic differences on the placement participation rate among international students: A UK case study

Purpose: The paper investigates the low placement participation rate among international students compared with UK students, by examining the impact of individual factors such as gender and domicile and academic achievement such as prior academic qualification, prior academic results and subsequent academic results on students’ choices of degree programmes as well as their graduation status. Methodology: This study adopts a quantitative approach by using 268 accounting and finance students in a UK university. Findings: The analyses show that UK students on entry are 35% more likely than international students to choose a degree programme with a placement module after controlling for individual and academic differences. Among females, international students who switch to a degree without placement following entry significantly and statistically underperformed their UK counterparts who complete a degree with placement from the first year onwards. This trend is not observable among male students. Instead, male students who select and graduate with a degree without placement are the worst performers, regardless of their nationalities. Research limitation: The quantitative data used here are collected in a UK institution so the results reported here may lack generalisability. Practical implications: International students need to know more about the benefits of undertaking placements on their academic performance and the development of generic skills before entry. Moreover, UK universities need to provide more assistance to international students, especially females about how to secure placements and how to widen their search for potential placements. Originality/value: To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to explain the low participation rate among international students in UK higher education. <br/

Flare-Aware Cross-modal Enhancement Network for Multi-spectral Vehicle Re-identification

Multi-spectral vehicle re-identification aims to address the challenge of identifying vehicles in complex lighting conditions by incorporating complementary visible and infrared information. However, in harsh environments, the discriminative cues in RGB and NIR modalities are often lost due to strong flares from vehicle lamps or sunlight, and existing multi-modal fusion methods are limited in their ability to recover these important cues. To address this problem, we propose a Flare-Aware Cross-modal Enhancement Network that adaptively restores flare-corrupted RGB and NIR features with guidance from the flare-immunized thermal infrared spectrum. First, to reduce the influence of locally degraded appearance due to intense flare, we propose a Mutual Flare Mask Prediction module to jointly obtain flare-corrupted masks in RGB and NIR modalities in a self-supervised manner. Second, to use the flare-immunized TI information to enhance the masked RGB and NIR, we propose a Flare-Aware Cross-modal Enhancement module that adaptively guides feature extraction of masked RGB and NIR spectra with prior flare-immunized knowledge from the TI spectrum. Third, to extract common informative semantic information from RGB and NIR, we propose an Inter-modality Consistency loss that enforces semantic consistency between the two modalities. Finally, to evaluate the proposed FACENet in handling intense flare, we introduce a new multi-spectral vehicle re-ID dataset, called WMVEID863, with additional challenges such as motion blur, significant background changes, and particularly intense flare degradation. Comprehensive experiments on both the newly collected dataset and public benchmark multi-spectral vehicle re-ID datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed FACENet compared to state-of-the-art methods, especially in handling strong flares. The code and dataset will be released soon