Legal protection of investors, corporate governance, and investable premia in emerging markets

We examine the interaction between the legal protection of investors, corporate governance within firms, institutional development between countries, and investable premia in emerging markets. In a multi country setting and using a novel dataset we find that better-governed firms experience significantly greater stock price increases upon equity market liberalization. We look to see whether well-governed firms in poorly governed countries enjoy an investability premium as measured by Tobin’s q. We find they do. Investors look beyond the seemingly weak country-level governance structures, and focus on corporate governance.Investability, Corporate Governance, Tobin's q, Emerging Markets

The Volunteers 1778-1793: Iconography and Identity

The Volunteers of 1778 to 1793 represent one of the most widely studied political and military movements of eighteenth century Ireland. The Volunteers were undoubtedly of central importance to the political life of this period, but were also of great significance to the tradition of amateur military service in Ireland, social customs and networking, political empowerment and the consumption of material goods. The focus of this work is centred on certain facets of volunteering, many of which have previously been overshadowed by political aspects of the movement, which have traditionally received most attention. This study approaches the subject primarily through the medium of artefacts relating to Irish Volunteer companies. This work, therefore, hopes to utilise previously untapped sources in an attempt to gain fresh insights into a well explored area of Irish history

The Volunteers 1778-1793: Iconography and Identity

The Volunteers of 1778 to 1793 represent one of the most widely studied political and military movements of eighteenth century Ireland. The Volunteers were undoubtedly of central importance to the political life of this period, but were also of great significance to the tradition of amateur military service in Ireland, social customs and networking, political empowerment and the consumption of material goods. The focus of this work is centred on certain facets of volunteering, many of which have previously been overshadowed by political aspects of the movement, which have traditionally received most attention. This study approaches the subject primarily through the medium of artefacts relating to Irish Volunteer companies. This work, therefore, hopes to utilise previously untapped sources in an attempt to gain fresh insights into a well explored area of Irish history

Tip–sample interactions: Extraction of single molecular pair potentials from force curves

This article describes a method for extracting the true tip–sample potential from an experimental force curve in atomic force microscopy. This potential is not the negative integral of the force curve. Rather, the potential is a more complicated function of the force curve and cantilever spring constant. If information about the shape of the tip is known, a decorrelation may be performed to extract molecular pair potentials from the total tip–sample potential. Applications and limitations of this method are discussed

Low power techniques for video compression

This paper gives an overview of low-power techniques proposed in the literature for mobile multimedia and Internet applications. Exploitable aspects are discussed in the behavior of different video compression tools. These power-efficient solutions are then classified by synthesis domain and level of abstraction. As this paper is meant to be a starting point for further research in the area, a lowpower hardware & software co-design methodology is outlined in the end as a possible scenario for video-codec-on-a-chip implementations on future mobile multimedia platforms

Countdown to 2010: Can we assess Ireland’s insect species diversity and loss?

peer-reviewedThe insects are the most diverse organisms on this planet and play an essential role in ecosystem functioning, yet we know very little about them. In light of the Convention on Biological Diversity, this paper summarises the known insect species numbers for Ireland and questions whether this is a true refl ection of our insect diversity. The total number of known species for Ireland is 11,422. Using species accumulation curves and a comparison with the British fauna, this study shows that the Irish list is incomplete and that the actual species number is much higher. However, even with a reasonable knowledge of the species in Ireland, insects are such speciose, small, and inconspicuous animals that it is diffi cult to assess species loss. It is impossible to know at one point in time the number of insect species in Ireland and, although it is useful to summarise the known number of species, it is essential that biodiversity indicators, such as the Red List Index, are developed