The fall of long-term capital management

The author examines the literature with respect to the pricing of initial public offerings and focus upon the effective factors of pricing. Using a data base of all share offerings undertaken in Hong Kong over a one year period (in 2007), the author finds that there is considerable evidence for the proposition that large and well-capitalized companies tend to price their share offerings at a higher absolute level in order to get a higher level of first-day closing price. Using classical statistical methods, the author finds that the pricing strategy of offering companies is connected to shareholders’ desire of the return. The motives for such pricing strategies, the author argues, lie with the affiliation of listing stocks with large size of trading shares and well expected return, suggesting that the pricing of new share offerings may be a means of excluding small-cap stocks from participating in the strong returns such issues exhibit. The author raises legal and regulatory implications of findings in the context of the general consolidation observed within the Hong Kong stock market in 2007

Enhancing Pseudocapacitive Process for Energy Storage Devices: Analyzing the Charge Transport Using Electro-kinetic Study and Numerical Modeling

Supercapacitors are a class of energy storage devices that store energy by either ionic adsorption via an electrochemical double layer capacitive process or fast surface redox reaction via a pseudocapacitive process. Supercapacitors display fast charging and discharging performance and excellent chemical stability, which fill the gap between high energy density batteries and high-power-density electrostatic capacitors. In this book chapter, the authors have presented the current studies on improving the capacitive storage capacity of various electrode materials for supercapacitors, mainly focusing on the metal oxide electrode materials. In particular, the approaches that mathematically simulate the behavior of interaction between electrode materials and charge carriers subject to potentiodynamic conditions (e.g., cyclic voltammetry) have been described. These include a general relationship between current and voltage to describe overall electrokinetics during the charge transfer process and a more comprehensive numerical modeling that studies ionic transport and electrokinetics within a spherical solid particle. The two aforementioned types of mathematical analyses can provide fundamental understanding of the parameters governing the electrode reaction and mass transfer in the electrode material, and thus shed light on how to improve the storage capacity of supercapacitors

Identifying Population Hollowing Out Regions and Their Dynamic Characteristics across Central China

Continuous urbanization and industrialization lead to plenty of rural residents migrating to cities for a living, which seriously accelerated the population hollowing issues. This generated series of social issues, including residential estate idle and numerous vigorous laborers migrating from undeveloped rural areas to wealthy cities and towns. Quantitatively determining the population hollowing characteristic is the priority task of realizing rural revitalization. However, the traditional field investigation methods have obvious deficiencies in describing socio-economic phenomena, especially population hollowing, due to weak efficiency and low accuracy. Here, this paper conceives a novel scheme for representing population hollowing levels and exploring the spatiotemporal dynamic of population hollowing. The nighttime light images were introduced to identify the potential hollowing areas by using the nightlight decreasing trend analysis. In addition, the entropy weight approach was adopted to construct an index for evaluating the population hollowing level based on statistical datasets at the political boundary scale. Moreover, we comprehensively incorporated physical and anthropic factors to simulate the population hollowing level via random forest (RF) at a grid-scale, and the validation was conducted to evaluate the simulation results. Some findings were achieved. The population hollowing phenomenon decreasing gradually was mainly distributed in rural areas, especially in the north of the study area. The RF model demonstrated the best accuracy with relatively higher R2 (Mean = 0.615) compared with the multiple linear regression (MLR) and the geographically weighted regression (GWR). The population hollowing degree of the grid-scale was consistent with the results of the township scale. The population hollowing degree represented an obvious trend that decreased in the north but increased in the south during 2016–2020 and exhibited a significant reduction trend across the entire study area during 2019–2020. The present study supplies a novel perspective for detecting population hollowing and provides scientific support and a first-hand dataset for rural revitalization