Share issuing privatizations in China: Determinants of public share allocation and underpricing.

Using data on 451 Chinese privatizations over the period 1994-2002, this paper empirically investigates the firm and stock market characteristics that determine the size of the portion of new shares sold to the general public and underpricing at SIP-time. We find that poor performance and financing constraints, reflected by a low profitability and high leverage, mainly drive public share allocation. Also, the government widens ownership to a larger extent in firms that receive substantial subsidies. By contrast, stock market returns pre-SIP and variables capturing the firmâ??s growth opportunities do not positively affect public share allocation. Yet, in firms with a low market-to-book ratio, the government is more likely to relinquish its majority stake at SIP-time. The determinants of underpricing further illustrate the uniqueness of SIPs compared to private-firm IPOs. Overall, there is little evidence that information asymmetries regarding firm value influence first-day returns whereas stock market conditions have an impact. After accounting for the endogeneity of the public share allocation decision, we find that the fraction of ownership divested is significantly positively related to underpricing.Accounting; Characteristics; Constraint; Data; Decision; Determinants; Firm value; Firms; Government divestment; Growth; Impact; Information; Market; Motives for going public; Opportunities; Ownership; Performance; Privatization; Profitability; Research; Size; Subsidies; Underpricing; Value; Variables;

Interdependencies between European, U.S. and Japanese stock markets: Did the Euro promote further integration?.

This paper investigates the co-movement of stock markets in some major economic regions. Specifically, we examine the long-run interdependencies and short-term dynamics between the European market on the one hand and the U.S. and Japanese stock markets on the other hand. The results show that strong interactions exist between these markets. A shock originating in one market induces a persistent effect of the same direction in the other market on the same day. This effect generally tapers off on the second day. We further demonstrate that the interrelationships of the European market are stronger with the U.S. than with Japan. Interestingly, these interdependencies became stronger after January 1, 1999, which suggests that the introduction of the Euro has reduced international diversification benefits.Diversification; Dynamics; Euro; Integration; International; Long-run; Market; Markets; Persistence; Regions; Research; Stock market integration; VAR modeling;

High-performance geometric vascular modelling

Image-based high-performance geometric vascular modelling and reconstruction is an essential component of computer-assisted surgery on the diagnosis, analysis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. However, it is an extremely challenging task to efficiently reconstruct the accurate geometric structures of blood vessels out of medical images. For one thing, the shape of an individual section of a blood vessel is highly irregular because of the squeeze of other tissues and the deformation caused by vascular diseases. For another, a vascular system is a very complicated network of blood vessels with different types of branching structures. Although some existing vascular modelling techniques can reconstruct the geometric structure of a vascular system, they are either time-consuming or lacking sufficient accuracy. What is more, these techniques rarely consider the interior tissue of the vascular wall, which consists of complicated layered structures. As a result, it is necessary to develop a better vascular geometric modelling technique, which is not only of high performance and high accuracy in the reconstruction of vascular surfaces, but can also be used to model the interior tissue structures of the vascular walls.This research aims to develop a state-of-the-art patient-specific medical image-based geometric vascular modelling technique to solve the above problems. The main contributions of this research are:- Developed and proposed the Skeleton Marching technique to reconstruct the geometric structures of blood vessels with high performance and high accuracy. With the proposed technique, the highly complicated vascular reconstruction task is reduced to a set of simple localised geometric reconstruction tasks, which can be carried out in a parallel manner. These locally reconstructed vascular geometric segments are then combined together using shape-preserving blending operations to faithfully represent the geometric shape of the whole vascular system.- Developed and proposed the Thin Implicit Patch method to realistically model the interior geometric structures of the vascular tissues. This method allows the multi-layer interior tissue structures to be embedded inside the vascular wall to illustrate the geometric details of the blood vessel in real world

Monotonicity Results for Arithmetic Means of Concave and Convex Functions

By majorization approaches, some known results on monotonicity of the arithmetic means of convex and concave functions are proved and generalized once again

Thermodynamics in the universe described by the emergence of the space and the energy balance relation

It has previously been shown that it is more general to describe the evolution of the universe based on the emergence of the space and the energy balance relation. Here we investigate the thermodynamic properties of the universe described by such a model. We show that the first law of thermodynamics and the generalized second law of thermodynamics (GSLT) are both satisfied and the weak energy condition are also fulfilled for two typical examples. Finally we examine the physical consistency for the present model.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figure

Smart Pacing for Effective Online Ad Campaign Optimization

In targeted online advertising, advertisers look for maximizing campaign performance under delivery constraint within budget schedule. Most of the advertisers typically prefer to impose the delivery constraint to spend budget smoothly over the time in order to reach a wider range of audiences and have a sustainable impact. Since lots of impressions are traded through public auctions for online advertising today, the liquidity makes price elasticity and bid landscape between demand and supply change quite dynamically. Therefore, it is challenging to perform smooth pacing control and maximize campaign performance simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a smart pacing approach in which the delivery pace of each campaign is learned from both offline and online data to achieve smooth delivery and optimal performance goals. The implementation of the proposed approach in a real DSP system is also presented. Experimental evaluations on both real online ad campaigns and offline simulations show that our approach can effectively improve campaign performance and achieve delivery goals.Comment: KDD'15, August 10-13, 2015, Sydney, NSW, Australi

Lift-Based Bidding in Ad Selection

Real-time bidding (RTB) has become one of the largest online advertising markets in the world. Today the bid price per ad impression is typically decided by the expected value of how it can lead to a desired action event (e.g., registering an account or placing a purchase order) to the advertiser. However, this industry standard approach to decide the bid price does not consider the actual effect of the ad shown to the user, which should be measured based on the performance lift among users who have been or have not been exposed to a certain treatment of ads. In this paper, we propose a new bidding strategy and prove that if the bid price is decided based on the performance lift rather than absolute performance value, advertisers can actually gain more action events. We describe the modeling methodology to predict the performance lift and demonstrate the actual performance gain through blind A/B test with real ad campaigns in an industry-leading Demand-Side Platform (DSP). We also discuss the relationship between attribution models and bidding strategies. We prove that, to move the DSPs to bid based on performance lift, they should be rewarded according to the relative performance lift they contribute.Comment: AAAI 201