One-skeleton galleries and cell combinatorics in type A

We describe the image of a cell in the Bialynicki-Birula decomposition of Gaussent and Littelmann's Bott-Samelson type variety, which is a desingularization of an affine Schubert variety, in type A for two particular cases. In the first case, we take a one-skeleton gallery, which is completely included in the dominant Weyl chamber. We can show, that the closure of the image of the cells associated to galleries, that belong to certain parts of the associated crystal, are in fact MV-cycles. In the second case we take a gallery of type N\omega_1, which is completely included in the dominant Weyl chamber. We generalize the notion of a Young tableau and use the 1:1 correspondance between tableaux and one-skeleton galleries to analyze, how the associated cells behave under the bumping algorithm. Finally, we can show that if and only if we take two words, equivalent under the Knuth relations, then the closure of the images of the cells associated to the galleries coming from these word, are the same. In addition, this closure is an MV-cycle. This allows a geometric interpretation of the combinatoric Knuth relations in the plactic monoid

Does the Type of Derivative Instrument Used by Companies Impact Firm Value?

We explore the relationship between the type of derivative instrument used and firm value, in a sample of Australian firms. Specifically, we examine the impact of the corporate use of swaps, futures, forwards and options, and the extent of such usage, on firm value. Our findings suggest that a ‘discount’ is most severely imposed on users of swaps.

Agricultural policies in Vietnam

Since 1986, Vietnam started to move from a centrally-planned towards a market-oriented system. It underwent several major economic and trade reforms – a process which is still not completed. At the same time, it also started to open its economy. Vietnam has become a member of the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (AFTA), signed several bilateral trade agreements and is currently negotiating accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). First positive results of the reform process became visible in the early 1990s when poverty declined to a large extent. Since then, the Vietnamese agricultural sector has also experienced high growth and impressive export achievements. The country changed from a food importer to one of the major exporters worldwide. The question arises to what extent support policies contributed to this growth, especially of the agricultural sector. In order to answer this question, domestic and trade policies in the agricultural sector are analysed and the market price support (MPS) and producer support estimates (PSEs) are calculated. To account for the special conditions in Vietnam, the MPS and PSEs are adjusted for country- and commodity-specific factors like transportation costs, marketing margins and the quality difference of exportables (or importables) at the border and domestically. The selected agricultural commodities for which the MPS and PSEs are estimated include rice, coffee, tea, rubber, pepper, sugar, groundnut, cashew nut and pig meat. These nine commodities are the main agricultural products and exportables of Vietnam. Their shares in total output exceed 70% allowing for a generalization of the calculated PSEs, thus roughly representing the whole agricultural sector. The finding is that most agricultural products were taxed in the mid 1980s until the mid 1990s. This was often due to large inefficiencies in the production and processing of agricultural commodities, the dominance and monopoly position of the state-owned sector, restrictive trade policies like import and export quotas and licenses, and distorted markets and prices in the country. The domestic reform process, the opening of the economy since the early 1990s, and the shift from an import-substitution strategy towards export-promotion, however, impacted on the gaps between the domestic and international prices. Thus, since the mid 1990s, the support of agriculture increased - but still reaching only rather low levels. At its peak, the %PSE for the agricultural sector was 24.2% which is moderate compared with other countries. The low level of protection implies that Vietnam may not face excessive difficulties in its further international integration. This study of Vietnam is the third comprehensive review conducted within an IFPRI project on understanding and assessing domestic and trade policies in the agricultural sector in developing countries. The data are meant to deliver a basis for further trade-related research to be conducted in the future.Agricultural policies ,Markets ,Free trade ,Trade agreements ,World Trade Organization ,Poverty ,

Are Financial Derivates Really Value Enhancing? Australian Evidence

This paper investigates the relationship between the use of financial derivatives and firm value in the Australian setting. Contrary to expectations, we find that the use of derivatives in general, and the use of interest rate derivatives in particular, are negatively related to firm value (as proxied by Tobin’s Q). The existence of this derivative user ‘discount’, combined with strong prior evidence that corporations are primarily motivated by value-enhancing goals, suggests a need for managers to focus serious efforts into explaining their value-driven strategies to the financial market and to do so in a timely manner.

Multilingual Schema Matching for Wikipedia Infoboxes

Recent research has taken advantage of Wikipedia's multilingualism as a resource for cross-language information retrieval and machine translation, as well as proposed techniques for enriching its cross-language structure. The availability of documents in multiple languages also opens up new opportunities for querying structured Wikipedia content, and in particular, to enable answers that straddle different languages. As a step towards supporting such queries, in this paper, we propose a method for identifying mappings between attributes from infoboxes that come from pages in different languages. Our approach finds mappings in a completely automated fashion. Because it does not require training data, it is scalable: not only can it be used to find mappings between many language pairs, but it is also effective for languages that are under-represented and lack sufficient training samples. Another important benefit of our approach is that it does not depend on syntactic similarity between attribute names, and thus, it can be applied to language pairs that have distinct morphologies. We have performed an extensive experimental evaluation using a corpus consisting of pages in Portuguese, Vietnamese, and English. The results show that not only does our approach obtain high precision and recall, but it also outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. We also present a case study which demonstrates that the multilingual mappings we derive lead to substantial improvements in answer quality and coverage for structured queries over Wikipedia content.Comment: VLDB201

Exchange rate exposure, foreign currency derivatives and the introduction of the euro : French evidence

We investigate the impact of the introduction of the Euro on exchange rate exposures for French corporations and examine the corporate use of foreign currency derivatives to hedge exchange rate exposure post-Euro. Our findings indicate that the introduction of the Euro is associated with both a reduction in the number of firms that have significant exchange rate exposure and the absolute size of exposure. Consistent with these reduced exposures, French firms use foreign currency derivatives less intensively. Furthermore, the use of foreign currency derivatives is found to be associated with lower exchange rate exposure but there is insufficient evidence that these instruments are more effective in the post-Euro environment