Acquiring foreign firms far away might be hazardous to your share price: evidence from Germany

This paper examines shareholder wealth effects of cross-border acquisitions. In a sample of 155 large acquisitions by German corporations from 1985–2006 international transactions in total do not lead to significant announcement returns. Geography, however, makes a difference: Shareholders of acquiring firms gain 6.5% in cross-border transactions into countries that have a common border with Germany but lose 4.4% in other international transactions. We find proximity to be one of the most important success factors in cross-border mergers and acquisitions, even when we control for firm, deal and country characteristics

Synthesis of cytochrome oxidase components in isolated mitochondria of Neurospora crassa

The formation of polypeptides within the mitochondrion has been documented by a large body of evidence. The ability of isolated mitochondria to incorporate amino acids int

Corruption and Remuneration in Singapore: The Dignity Argument

This chapter links the topic of high public officials’ remuneration to that of corruption. It does so by analyzing an argument set in the Singaporean context, which contends that a high salary is necessary for people to maintain their dignity, so that they in turn will not condescend to corruption. First, to best adhere to the intended meaning, the argument’s author’s conception of dignity is interpreted as being culturally Chinese dominated, making it a normative virtue that is closely related to the virtue of keeping face. With this understanding of dignity as a foundation, the link between remuneration and dignity is first analyzed, illuminating particularities in the Singaporean public sector and elaborating on the differentiated concept of dignity. Following that, the link between dignity and corruption is addressed, shedding light on corruption in Singapore. The analysis suggests inter alia the potentially high relevance of structural sociocultural conditions for potential anticorruption strategies

High-performance SiGe HBTs for next generation BiCMOS technology

This paper addresses fabrication aspects of SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors which record high-speed performance. We previously reported fT values of 505 GHz, fMAX values of 720 GHz, and ring oscillator gate delays of 1.34 ps for these transistors. The impact of critical process steps on radio frequency performance is discussed. This includes millisecond annealing for enhanced dopant activation and optimization of the epitaxial growth process of the base layer. It is demonstrated that the use of a disilane precursor instead of silane can result in reduced base resistance and favorable device scalability

The importance of the western Weddell Sea to Weddell Sea Deep Water formation

The dense water flowing out from the Weddell Sea (WS), the Weddell Sea Deep Water (WSDW), significantly contributes to Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) and plays an important role in the Meridional Overturning Circulation. However, the relative importance of the western Weddell Sea as a major source region remains unclear. Several studies hypothesized that the continental shelf off Larsen Ice Shelf (LIS) is important for deep and bottom water production, but the role of the Larsen Ice Shelf remains speculative. In this work the importance of the western WS including the LIS to the production of WSDW is investigated using in situ observations and results from numerical simulations. Measurements made during the Polarstern cruise ANT XXIX-3 (2013) in the northwestern WS add evidence to the importance of the western WS as a dense water source. An Optimum Multiparameter Analysis shows that the dense water found near the shelf break in front of the former Larsen A and B ice shelves, together with a very dense water observed off Larsen C Ice Shelf, increases the thickness and changes the _/S characteristics of WSDW that leaves the WS through gaps in the South Scotia Ridge to form AABW. A numerical experiment performed with the Finite Element Sea-ice Ocean Model (FESOM) was used to verify the hypothesis that the continental shelf of the western WS is important for dense water formation. The model results show the changes in the thermohaline properties of the WSDW flowing along the continental slope of the western WS, as well as an increase in the transport downstream. The variability along the continental slope can be explained by fluctuations of the large-scale circulation, namely theWeddell Gyre. In addition, there is no indication that dense waters are formed in the continental shelf of the western WS, and the exchanges between continental shelf and continental slope are small. These results suggest that the area is not important for WSDW formation as previously inferred from the sparse observations mainly along the continental slope. Instead, the western WS seems to be a region where the characteristics of WSDW are determined due to mixing of waters formed upstream. Two sensitivity experiments were designed to investigate whether LIS plays an indirect role in the dense water production: (1) Larsen B Ice Shelf was added to the grid, (2) Larsen C Ice Shelf was completely removed from the grid. The experiments show that LIS plays an important role for the waters on the continental shelf but has only minor importance for the WSDW. Given the disagreement between the hypothesis derived from the observations and the model results, more in situ data are needed to determine whether the western Weddell Sea is a region where dense water is formed or whether it only serves as a conduit for dense waters formed further upstream, which interact in the western WS before reaching the final WSDW characteristics

CleanCoNLL: A Nearly Noise-Free Named Entity Recognition Dataset

The CoNLL-03 corpus is arguably the most well-known and utilized benchmark dataset for named entity recognition (NER). However, prior works found significant numbers of annotation errors, incompleteness, and inconsistencies in the data. This poses challenges to objectively comparing NER approaches and analyzing their errors, as current state-of-the-art models achieve F1-scores that are comparable to or even exceed the estimated noise level in CoNLL-03. To address this issue, we present a comprehensive relabeling effort assisted by automatic consistency checking that corrects 7.0% of all labels in the English CoNLL-03. Our effort adds a layer of entity linking annotation both for better explainability of NER labels and as additional safeguard of annotation quality. Our experimental evaluation finds not only that state-of-the-art approaches reach significantly higher F1-scores (97.1%) on our data, but crucially that the share of correct predictions falsely counted as errors due to annotation noise drops from 47% to 6%. This indicates that our resource is well suited to analyze the remaining errors made by state-of-the-art models, and that the theoretical upper bound even on high resource, coarse-grained NER is not yet reached. To facilitate such analysis, we make CleanCoNLL publicly available to the research community.Comment: EMNLP 2023 camera-ready versio

The importance of the western Weddell Sea to Weddell Sea Deep Water formation

The dense water flowing out from the Weddell Sea (WS), the Weddell Sea Deep Water (WSDW), significantly contributes to Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) and plays an important role in the Meridional Overturning Circulation. However, the relative importance of the western Weddell Sea as a major source region remains unclear. Several studies hypothesized that the continental shelf off Larsen Ice Shelf (LIS) is important for deep and bottom water production, but the role of the Larsen Ice Shelf remains speculative. In this work the importance of the western WS including the LIS to the production of WSDW is investigated using in situ observations and results from numerical simulations. Measurements made during the Polarstern cruise ANT XXIX-3 (2013) in the northwestern WS add evidence to the importance of the western WS as a dense water source. An Optimum Multiparameter Analysis shows that the dense water found near the shelf break in front of the former Larsen A and B ice shelves, together with a very dense water observed off Larsen C Ice Shelf, increases the thickness and changes the _/S characteristics of WSDW that leaves the WS through gaps in the South Scotia Ridge to form AABW. A numerical experiment performed with the Finite Element Sea-ice Ocean Model (FESOM) was used to verify the hypothesis that the continental shelf of the western WS is important for dense water formation. The model results show the changes in the thermohaline properties of the WSDW flowing along the continental slope of the western WS, as well as an increase in the transport downstream. The variability along the continental slope can be explained by fluctuations of the large-scale circulation, namely theWeddell Gyre. In addition, there is no indication that dense waters are formed in the continental shelf of the western WS, and the exchanges between continental shelf and continental slope are small. These results suggest that the area is not important for WSDW formation as previously inferred from the sparse observations mainly along the continental slope. Instead, the western WS seems to be a region where the characteristics of WSDW are determined due to mixing of waters formed upstream. Two sensitivity experiments were designed to investigate whether LIS plays an indirect role in the dense water production: (1) Larsen B Ice Shelf was added to the grid, (2) Larsen C Ice Shelf was completely removed from the grid. The experiments show that LIS plays an important role for the waters on the continental shelf but has only minor importance for the WSDW. Given the disagreement between the hypothesis derived from the observations and the model results, more in situ data are needed to determine whether the western Weddell Sea is a region where dense water is formed or whether it only serves as a conduit for dense waters formed further upstream, which interact in the western WS before reaching the final WSDW characteristics