Venture Capital Finance in China

The globalization of capital flow has resulted in an increasing number of firms choosing to cross-list their stocks in foreign stock exchanges to raise public equity capital abroad, and more recently, the booming of venture capital (VC) inflow to developing nations to finance the start-ups and growth companies in those emerging economies. The dramatic rise in venture-funded activity in developing nations has been largely fueled by institutional investors in the United States and other developed nations. Among the developing nations, China, in the transition from a central planning regulated economy to a free market economy, has progressed quickly in grasping these unique funding opportunities to encourage the emergence of innovative enterprises and ensure its relevance in the global economy

Venture-backed IPOs and the Exiting of Venture Capital in China

This paper documents the dramatic improvement in institutional, legal and regulatory environment for the exiting of foreign venture capital in China. It also discusses the recent developments, advantages and disadvantages of various China venture-backed IPO listing channels, including overseas listing through the main board and high-tech trading board in the United States (via New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ), Hong Kong (via Hong Kong Stock Exchange and Hong Kong Growth Enterprise Market) and Singapore (via Singapore Exchange and SESDAQ), and domestic listing (via Shenzhen Small and Medium Enterprise Board). Finally, this paper examines the venture capital funding and IPO offering details, and the short-run and long-run performance of the U.S.-listed China Venture-backed IPOs between 2000 and 2005

A Comparative Study of Venture Capital Performance in the US and Europe

For the past fifty years in the United States, venture capital (VC) has provided initial funding to innovative entrepreneurial enterprises, while the European venture capital industry has only really emerged over the past decade. Using quarterly data from 1993 to 2003, this paper examines and compares the return and risk performance of venture capital funds in US and Europe. Several results are noteworthy. First, pooled venture capital returns in US and Europe are 3.273% and 0.765% (on a quarterly basis) above the CAPM market risk-adjusted returns, respectively. Second, US venture capital fund performance dominates that of Europe in all measures: mean return, total-risk adjusted return, and market-risk adjusted return. Third, the linkage between US VC fund performance and the US stock market is much stronger than the co-movement between the European VC and European stock market. Finally, the introduction of Euro.NM in 1997 has substantially enhanced the relationship between the venture capital and stock market performance in Europe

Methodology for standard cell compliance and detailed placement for triple patterning lithography

As the feature size of semiconductor process further scales to sub-16nm technology node, triple patterning lithography (TPL) has been regarded one of the most promising lithography candidates. M1 and contact layers, which are usually deployed within standard cells, are most critical and complex parts for modern digital designs. Traditional design flow that ignores TPL in early stages may limit the potential to resolve all the TPL conflicts. In this paper, we propose a coherent framework, including standard cell compliance and detailed placement to enable TPL friendly design. Considering TPL constraints during early design stages, such as standard cell compliance, improves the layout decomposability. With the pre-coloring solutions of standard cells, we present a TPL aware detailed placement, where the layout decomposition and placement can be resolved simultaneously. Our experimental results show that, with negligible impact on critical path delay, our framework can resolve the conflicts much more easily, compared with the traditional physical design flow and followed layout decomposition

Contracting for IT Outsourcing with Asymmetric Information

IT outsourcing allows a business to reduce the cost of IT service delivery and improve the quality of IT service by taking advantage of the service provider’s economics of scale and technical expertise. However, the successful outsourcing of IT service is hampered by lack of guidance on how to design incentive contracts to encourage performance of the service provider, especially in the presence of information asymmetry and incentive divergence. In this article, we identify and characterize two asymmetric information factors: asymmetric effort information and asymmetric capability information. Depending on whether the service provider’s effort information and capability information is symmetric or not, we consider three information scenarios and characterize optimal incentive contracts for each scenario. We also introduce the concept of information value to quantify the adverse effects of the two asymmetric information factors. The results provide theoretical support for designing incentive contracts that mitigate the adverse effects of asymmetric information, and recommend effective guidance for activities so as to reduce the degree of information asymmetry

How to hide your voice: Noise-cancelling bird photography blind

Getting close to birds is a great challenge in wildlife photography. Bird photography blinds may be the most effective and least intrusive way if properly designed. However, the acoustic design of the blinds has been overlooked so far. Herein, we present noise-cancelling blinds which allow photographing birds at close range. Firstly, we conduct a questionnaire in the eco-tourism centre located in Yunnan, China. Thus, we determine the birders' expectations of the indoor sound environment. We then identify diverse variables to examine the impact of architectural and acoustic decisions on noise propagation. Finally, we examine the acoustic performance of the blinds by considering the birds' hearing threshold. The numerical simulations are performed in the acoustics module of Comsol MultiPhysics. Our study demonstrated that photography blinds require a strong and thorough acoustic design for both human and bird well-being.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figures. Revised argument in sections 2 and 4, results unchanged, references adde