Cross cultural perspectives of decision-making and control in multinational corporations operating in ASEAN

Kajian ini membincangkan isu-isu persekitaran budaya negara ASEAN dan cabaran-cabarannya terhadap pengurus-pengurus korporat multi-nasional. Kajian ini melaporkan penemuan terhadap corak membuat keputusan, kawalan dan pengurusan budaya serta aspek gelagat. Walaupun penemuan ini mempunyai persamaan dengan kajian lain, namun terdapat perbezaan dalam corak membuat keputusan, kawalan dan pengurusan budaya serta aspek gelagat

Carter-like constants of motion in the Newtonian and relativistic two-center problems

In Newtonian gravity, a stationary axisymmetric system admits a third, Carter-like constant of motion if its mass multipole moments are related to each other in exactly the same manner as for the Kerr black-hole spacetime. The Newtonian source with this property consists of two point masses at rest a fixed distance apart. The integrability of motion about this source was first studied in the 1760s by Euler. We show that the general relativistic analogue of the Euler problem, the Bach-Weyl solution, does not admit a Carter-like constant of motion, first, by showing that it does not possess a non-trivial Killing tensor, and secondly, by showing that the existence of a Carter-like constant for the two-center problem fails at the first post-Newtonian order.Comment: 11 pages; version to be published by Classical and Quantum Gravit

Do political connections matter? Empirical evidence from listed firms in Pakistan

The purpose of this thesis is to enhance understanding of the way in which political connections benefit or impair connected firms. For this purpose, the current study employs the data of Pakistani listed non-financial firms from 2002–2010, and examines the impact of political connections on the economic life of individual firms. More specifically, this thesis comprises three empirical studies: the first enquires into the way in which political connectedness influences firms’ access to finance; the second empirical chapter examines the impact of political connections on the performance of the connected firms; and lastly, the third empirical chapter explores the channels through which connected politicians intervene in business operations. The findings in the first empirical chapter provide strong and robust evidence of preferential lending in the credit market. Political connectedness appears to be a determining factor of the total and long-term leverage of the firms; nevertheless, short-term financing is indifferent to political connections. The study also finds that having connections with a winning politician or politician affiliated to the winning parties (coalition) have a larger impact on the firm’s total and long-term leverage, thus implying that the benefits associated with political connections ultimately depend on electoral outcomes. In addition, firm size and business group affiliation have increasing effect on the borrowing capabilities of the connected firms, whilst connections underplay the significance of collateral. Through the use of an instrumental variable framework focused on the long-term panel and cross-sectional data of Pakistani listed firms, the second empirical chapter finds that political connections distort the performance of the connected firms. Consistent results are found for various accounting and marketing measures of performance. So as to investigate the impact of connectedness on performance in different political environments, the sample period is stratified into two contrasting government periods: autocratic; and democratic government periods. The result is more pronounced in the autocratic regime, providing evidence of excessive managerial inefficiencies and rent-extraction of affiliated politicians in dictatorship regime. It was also found that the performance of connected firms increased further if they belonged to business groups, whilst the large firms were subject to severe performance distortions more so than small firms. Finally, those firms with low growth opportunities were more prone to the negative effects of political connectedness in terms of their performances. The findings in the second empirical chapter (connections insert negative effect on the firm performance) inspired us to progress one step further and investigate the intriguing question: what are the channels through which politicians interfere and distort the performance of the connected firms? In quest to answer this question, the last empirical chapter provides strong and robust evidence of political intervention in the investment and employment decisions. More specifically, results find the existence of investment inefficiencies and excessive employment in the connected firms. Importantly, the effect of political interference is more pronounced for employment decisions, indicating the presence of clientelism in the Pakistani market, where politicians distribute job favours in exchange of electoral support. The study also reveals that connected firms with high growth opportunities experience political interference less often than their peers with low growth opportunities. Lastly, the economic cost of such political intervention in employment decisions is estimated to be 0.15% GDP annually

Entropy of continuous maps on quasi-metric spaces

The category of metric spaces is a subcategory of quasi-metric spaces. In this paper the notion of entropy for the continuous maps of a quasi-metric space is extended via spanning and separated sets. Moreover, two metric spaces that are associated to a given quasi-metric space are introduced and the entropy of a map of a given quasi-metric space and the maps of its associated metric spaces are compared. It is shown that the entropy of a map when symmetric properties is included is grater or equal to the entropy in the case that the symmetric property of the space is not considered

Utilising semantic technologies for decision support in dementia care

The main objective of this work is to discuss our experience in utilising semantic technologies for building decision support in Dementia care systems that are based on the non-intrusive on the non-intrusive monitoring of the patient’s behaviour. Our approach adopts context-aware modelling of the patient’s condition to facilitate the analysis of the patient’s behaviour within the inhabited environment (movement and room occupancy patterns, use of equipment, etc.) with reference to the semantic knowledge about the patient’s condition (history of present of illness, dependable behaviour patterns, etc.). The reported work especially focuses on the critical role of the semantic reasoning engine in inferring medical advice, and by means of practical experimentation and critical analysis suggests important findings related to the methodology of deploying the appropriate semantic rules systems, and the dynamics of the efficient utilisation of complex event processing technology in order to the meet the requirements of decision support for remote healthcare systems