Property Rights Protection and Investment: A Natural Experiment from China

This paper utilizes a natural experiment to examine the role of the protection of property rights in promoting investment. In order to explore a title-granting scheme in Shenzhen, China, I collect a sample of 83 listed SOE firms, with 32 of them holding about-to-be-entitled lands. Those landholders exhibit both a sharp short-term 7.8% additional increase in stock market price and a long-term 63% extra increase in investment, when compared with non-landholders, despite that there is no pre-event structural difference between the two. These increases in value are a result of having solved hold-up problems rather than a result of increased collateral values because those politically connected SOEs under analysis are financially unconstrained. Cross-sectionally, those firms with weaker pre-event protection against “hold-up” are associated with greater increases in share price and investment. Potentially, solving the hold-up problem of all unentitled land would bring about value of 2.2 Trillion RMB, almost triples Shenzhen's GDP in 2009

A Study of the Thematic Progression in Legal English Discourse

Being a special kind of language application, legal English enjoys its unique stylistic features, which are concise, logic, coherent and rigorous. It is quite meaningful and fruitful to study these features in discourse, which is the study of discourse analysis. System-functional linguistics provides distinguished perspective for discourse analysis, and once Halliday, the founder of System-functional linguistics, pointed out the system-functional grammar and its theories can be applied to legal English studies. This essay mainly discusses, analyzes and focuses on the discourse analysis of legal English and takes The Constitution of the United States of America as corpora to study from the perspective of Thematic Progression. It tries to explain how the Thematic Progression worked in developing the legal English discourse and how it helped legal English discourse to reach its features. Meanwhile it also hoped to inspire the application of linguistic theory into legal English studies

Distributed watermarking for secure control of microgrids under replay attacks

The problem of replay attacks in the communication network between Distributed Generation Units (DGUs) of a DC microgrid is examined. The DGUs are regulated through a hierarchical control architecture, and are networked to achieve secondary control objectives. Following analysis of the detectability of replay attacks by a distributed monitoring scheme previously proposed, the need for a watermarking signal is identified. Hence, conditions are given on the watermark in order to guarantee detection of replay attacks, and such a signal is designed. Simulations are then presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique