The pricing of spatial linkages in companies’ underlying assets

Spatial linkages in returns have not yet received much attention in an asset pricing context, however, they can capture important information about idiosyncratic externalities associated with firms’ holdings. We explain returns of real estate companies by modelling the spatial comovement across their underlying assets. We connect stocks of real estate firms using the location of their property portfolios and show that spatial linkages across real estate assets explain some of the variation in abnormal returns, controlling for exposure to systematic factors and firm characteristics. We propose a trading strategy that exploits the information contained in the spatial linkages of the underlying assets. We show that a long-short hedge that sells the stocks that experience a drop in the price if their connected stocks have also gone down in price and buys the stocks that experience an increase in the price if their connected stocks have also gone up delivers a non-market return of 9.7% per year

Retracted: Effect of Paris polyphylla extract on seconddegree burns in rats

This article previously published in Volume 15 Issue 10 of this journal in October 2016 has beenretracted in line with the guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE,http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines)Retracted: Ma Z, Yin W, Hu G, Zhu Z, Huang Z. Effect of Paris polyphylla extract on second-degree burns in rats. Trop J Pharm Res 2016; 15(10):2131-2135 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/tjpr.v15i10.11From the EditorOur attention was drawn to the falsification of the data published in this article which was confirmed.The corresponding author, Zhi-jian Huang, failed to respond to communication in this respect.26 January 201

Identifying patterns of weight-related health behaviors among US adolescents, and associated risk of obesity

Little is known about the current complex pattern of weight-related health behaviors among adolescents in the US. The goal of this report was to develop and examine a comprehensive latent class analysis (LCA) model examining the prevalence of combined associations of physical activities sedentary behaviors, and eating behaviors with obesity among female and male US adolescents (n= 12,031). Four classes and five classes were identified for female and male adolescents, respectively. Among which, three were similar and were characterized as ‘Inactive/ Low screen time/ Poor eating habit’, ‘Inactive/ Moderately high screen time/ Poor eating habit’, and ‘Active/ Low screen time/ Poor eating habit'. Additionally, ‘Inactive/ Low screen time/Good eating habit’ was unique to female adolescents, while ‘Moderately active/ High screen time/ Good eating habit' and ‘Moderately active/ Low screen time/ Good eating habit' were unique to males. Furthermore, the proportion of normal weight, overweight, and obese in each class was examined across females and males. The results showed that male adolescents had a higher proportion of people being obese than female adolescents in each class. The findings from this report provided insights on the current health needs of US adolescents and implied that gender-specific intervention strategies were required to reduce the risk of obesity among adolescents.Statistic

Forest Species Identification with High Spectral Resolution Data

Data collected over the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes Test Site and the Saginaw Forest Test Site (Michigan) with the JPL Airborne Imaging Spectrometer and the Collins' Airborne Spectroradiometer are being used for forest species identification. The linear discriminant function has provided higher identification accuracies than have principal components analyses. Highest identification accuracies are obtained in the 450 to 520 nm spectral region. Spectral bands near 1,300, 1,685 and 2,220 nm appear to be important, also

Alumnus Jordan Zhu to Deliver Winthrop\u27s Fall M.B.A. Lecture

Winthrop’s fall 2015 M.B.A. lecture will feature Jordan Zhu ’04, the global product line director, director of sales Asia, for CommScope Inc. The lecture will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 29, at 7 p.m. in Whitton Auditorium. Zhu earned his Bachelor of Arts in management information systems from Winthrop in 2004

From iron rice bowl to the world's biggest sweatshop: globalization, institutional constraints, and the rights of Chinese workers

This article discusses how China's institutional constraints combine with its integration into the global economy to suppress its workers' rights. The rapid expansion of China's market economy is the consequence of the government's active embrace of global capitalism and global capitalists' ongoing search for new markets and lower production costs. China's traditional socialist labor relationships collapsed as a result of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform and the emergence of private enterprises. In the wake of these events, China's leaders promulgated new labor legislation and social insurance schemes, but these initiatives fail to safeguard workers' rights effectively. This is because the SOEs fail to compensate their workers properly, local authorities do not actively monitor labor abuses, the judicial system cannot effectively defend workers' rights, and the Chinese government suppresses efforts to organize independent labor unions. In short, global capitalism together with China's authoritarian polity have limited workers' rights and undermined their well-being

The New “Selective Diplomacy” of the People’s Republic of China: towards a “partial” interference in global affairs?

Rozdział z: The Quandaries and Foreign Development, ed. D. Mierzejewski, “Contemporary Asian Studies Series

A strategic framework for e-government adoption in public sector organisations

E-government has been recognized as a change agent for public sector reform. Through this change, the public sector organisation plans to increase operating efficiencies, build information-sharing partnerships and improve communication with other organisations, as well as with the public. Several studies have discussed how e-government will transform public sector organisations from traditional paper-based systems to electronic delivery that leads self-service operations that develop efficiently managed internal business process. However, a number of voids exist in the immature e-government literature, regarding its adoption strategy and process. This paper looks at the implementation aspect of e-government in public sector organisations. The paper critically reviews the issues of e-government adoption and identifies factors that affect the implementation process, such as, technical, organisational, and environmental. In addition, the authors discuss the benefits and barriers that might influence the decision making process toward the adoption of e-government in public sector. Since, e-government is an emerging research area, there is limited literature explaining the framework of e-government adoption. Therefore, this study suggests a strategic framework for e-government adoption that will assist decision makers in public sector organisations to support their egovernment adoption strategy and guide the IT developers for implementation process of e-government project

Modeling of cross-coupling magnetic saturation in signal-injection-based sensorless control of permanent-magnet brushless AC motors

An improved brushless AC motor model is proposed for use in signal-injection-based sensorless control schemes by accounting for cross-coupling magnetic saturation between the - and -axes. The incremental self- and mutual-inductance characteristics are obtained by both finite-element analysis and measurements, and have been successfully used to significantly reduce the error in the rotor position estimation of sensorless control