Earnings Management and Long-Run Stock Underperformance of Private Placements

The study investigates whether private placement issuers manipulate their earnings around the time of issuance and the effect of earnings management on the long-run stock performance. We find that managers of U.S. private placement issuers tend to engage in income-increasing earnings management in the year prior to the issuance of private placements. We further speculate that earnings management serves as a likely source of investor over-optimism at the time of private placements. To support this speculation, we find evidence suggesting that the income-increasing accounting accruals made at the time of private placements predict the post-issue long-term stock underperformance. The study contributes to the large body of literature on earnings manipulation around the time of securities issuance

Window Dressing in Reported Earnings

The article discusses the use of the term window dressing, a wide range of techniques for auditing, by audit clients to enhance the financial position of an entity through manipulated disclosures. The term refers to the reporting practices adopted by firms to distort earnings by changing the way stakeholders perceived the financial figures. A research suggests that firms must engage in the type of manipulative behavior for the purpose of economic incentives

Two problems related to prescribed curvature measures

Existence of convex body with prescribed generalized curvature measures is discussed, this result is obtained by making use of Guan-Li-Li's innovative techniques. In surprise, that methods has also brought us to promote Ivochkina's $C^2$ estimates for prescribed curvature equation in \cite{I1, I}.Comment: 12 pages, Corrected typo

Outsourcing CO2 within China

Recent studies have shown that the high standard of living enjoyed by people in the richest countries often comes at the expense of CO2 emissions produced with technologies of low efficiency in less affluent, developing countries. Less apparent is that this relationship between developed and developing can exist within a single country’s borders, with rich regions consuming and exporting high-value goods and services that depend upon production of low-cost and emission-intensive goods and services from poorer regions in the same country. As the world’s largest emitter of CO2, China is a prominent and important example, struggling to balance rapid economic growth and environmental sustainability across provinces that are in very different stages of development. In this study, we track CO2 emissions embodied in products traded among Chinese provinces and internationally. We find that 57% of China’s emissions are related to goods that are consumed outside of the province where they are produced. For instance, up to 80% of the emissions related to goods consumed in the highly developed coastal provinces are imported from less developed provinces in central and western China where many low–value-added but high–carbon-intensive goods are produced. Without policy attention to this sort of interprovincial carbon leakage, the less developed provinces will struggle to meet their emissions intensity targets, whereas the more developed provinces might achieve their own targets by further outsourcing. Consumption-based accounting of emissions can thus inform effective and equitable climate policy within China

The Nature of the Interlayer Interaction in Bulk and Few-Layer Phosphorus

An outstanding challenge of theoretical electronic structure is the description of van der Waals (vdW) interactions in molecules and solids. Renewed interest in resolving this is in part motivated by the technological promise of layered systems including graphite, transition metal dichalcogenides, and more recently, black phosphorus, in which the interlayer interaction is widely believed to be dominated by these types of forces. We report a series of quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations for bulk black phosphorus and related few-layer phosphorene, which elucidate the nature of the forces that bind these systems and provide benchmark data for the energetics of these systems. We find a significant charge redistribution due to the interaction between electrons on adjacent layers. Comparison to density functional theory (DFT) calculations indicate not only wide variability even among different vdW corrected functionals, but the failure of these functionals to capture the trend of reorganization predicted by QMC. The delicate interplay of steric and dispersive forces between layers indicate that few-layer phosphorene presents an unexpected challenge for the development of vdW corrected DFT.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Bayesian optimization for the inverse scattering problem in quantum reaction dynamics

We propose a machine-learning approach based on Bayesian optimization to build global potential energy surfaces (PES) for reactive molecular systems using feedback from quantum scattering calculations. The method is designed to correct for the uncertainties of quantum chemistry calculations and yield potentials that reproduce accurately the reaction probabilities in a wide range of energies. These surfaces are obtained automatically and do not require manual fitting of the {\it ab initio} energies with analytical functions. The PES are built from a small number of {\it ab initio} points by an iterative process that incrementally samples the most relevant parts of the configuration space. Using the dynamical results of previous authors as targets, we show that such feedback loops produce accurate global PES with 30 {\it ab initio} energies for the three-dimensional H + H$_2$ $\rightarrow$ H$_2$ + H reaction and 290 {\it ab initio} energies for the six-dimensional OH + H$_2$ $\rightarrow$ H$_2$O + H reaction. These surfaces are obtained from 360 scattering calculations for H$_3$ and 600 scattering calculations for OH$_3$. We also introduce a method that quickly converges to an accurate PES without the {\it a priori} knowledge of the dynamical results. By construction, our method illustrates the lowest number of potential energy points (i.e. the minimum information) required for the non-parametric construction of global PES for quantum reactive scattering calculations.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure