Market Valuation and Risk Assessment of Canadian Banks

The authors apply the asset-valuation model developed by Rabinovitch (1989) to six publicly traded Canadian banks over the period 1982–2002. The model is an extension of the Merton (1977a) option-pricing model with the incorporation of stochastic interest rates. The authors introduce the Z-score, a measure of distance-to-default, which can be a useful tool for regulators in assessing the risk of bank failures. The Z-scores, overall, suggest that Canadian banks are far from the point of default. The authors also find that both the market valuation of the bank assets and the Z-score of the Canadian banks demonstrate similar regime shifts in the late 1990s, which may be related to regulatory changes during the 1990s.Financial institutions

Overcoming the collective action problems facing Chinese workers: lessons from four protests against Walmart

In contrast to various structural accounts of collective inaction or short-lived contention of Chinese workers, the authors take an agency-centered approach to explain how the few sustained labor protests during closure bargaining develop against long odds. They suggest that workers’ capacity to resolve collective action problems is essential to understanding why a few contending workers are able to sustain protests whereas many others fail to do so. They argue that workplace representatives and external labor activists are crucial for helping Chinese workers resolve the collective action problems that prevent the formation of sustained labor protests. Their comparative analysis of four protests against Walmart store closures—including one unusually long, one relatively sustained, and two short-lived—shows how presence and strategic capacity of workplace representatives and external labor activists shape protest duration. The authors conclude by discussing lessons learned from these cases of closure bargaining for future development of labor contention in China

Toward Labor Flexibility with Chinese Characteristics? The Case of the Chinese Construction Machinery Industry

This paper takes an institutional perspective to study the roles of institutional change and continuity in shaping Chinese enterprises’ labor flexibility strategies. Based on intensive field research in seven construction machinery enterprises, I find that employment practices in these workplaces are converging toward extremely numerical flexibility including the use of temporary labor, short-term labor contracts, termination of labor relationships, internal retrenchment and flexible working time. I argue that both institutional change and continuity have played important roles in shaping these labor flexibility practices. On the one hand, the changing household registration system, the changing social protection system, the establishment of the labor contract system, the weakening workers’ representation in the workplace, and the ambiguous labor regulations and weak enforcement have directly provided pre-conditions for the spread of extreme numerical flexibility practices in the Chinese workplace. On the other hand, the continuity of other institutions including the macroeconomic control of the state, the underdeveloped business credit system, the cultural preference of extremely short lead time, and the vocational education and training system has indirectly imposed imperatives of extreme numerical flexibility on these enterprises by increasing uncertainties and fluctuations of product markets and worsening the labor market condition of excess low skilled and scarce high skilled labor

Evaluating Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models on Code Comprehension and Generation

In this work, we evaluate 10 open-source instructed LLMs on four representative code comprehension and generation tasks. We have the following main findings. First, for the zero-shot setting, instructed LLMs are very competitive on code comprehension and generation tasks and sometimes even better than small SOTA models specifically fine-tuned on each downstream task. We also find that larger instructed LLMs are not always better on code-related tasks. Second, for the few-shot setting, we find that adding demonstration examples substantially helps instructed LLMs perform better on most code comprehension and generation tasks; however, the examples would sometimes induce unstable or even worse performance. Furthermore, we find widely-used BM25-based shot selection strategy significantly outperforms the basic random selection or fixed selection only on generation problems. Third, for the fine-tuning setting, we find that fine-tuning could further improve the model performance on downstream code comprehension and generation tasks compared to the zero-shot/one-shot performance. In addition, after being fine-tuned on the same downstream task dataset, instructed LLMs outperform both the small SOTA models and similar-scaled LLMs without instruction tuning. Based on our findings, we further present practical implications on model and usage recommendation, performance and cost trade-offs, and future direction

Strength Degradation Characteristics of the Steel-Concrete Interface Under Cyclic Shear

The shear capacity of the steel-concrete interface (SCI) of concrete-filled steel tubular piles (CFSTs) degrades due to the cyclic shear action of external loading and unloading and can result in a reduction in the bearing capacity. To explore the shear strength degradation characteristics of the steel-concrete interface under cyclic shear, cyclic shear tests for three roughness types and under four different normal stresses were carried out by using a large-scale repeated direct shear test system. The characteristics of the shear load-displacement curve and failure mode of the SCI under external cyclic shear were analyzed, and the influence of the roughness and normal stress on the SCI shear strength degradation was explored. The results indicate that the CFSTs experienced shear failure in the first three shear cycles and then exhibited wear failure. The peak shear load of the SCI increases exponentially with increasing normal stress and decreases logarithmically with increasing cyclic shear time. A larger interfacial roughness and normal stress results in a faster interfacial shear strength ratio (τfn/τf1) weakening during the first three shear cycles, and with an increase of the cyclic shear times, the weakening rate is reduced