An Empirical Study of the Relationship between Macroeconomic Variables and Stock Price: A Study on Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE)

Literature strongly supports vibration of the stock price as a consequence of various macroeconomic factors (Darrat, 1990; Fama & Schwert, 1977; Jaffe & Mandelker, 1976; Nelson, 1976; Pearce & Roley, 1985; Ripley, 1973). This study has investigated the explanatory power of various macro-factors such as inflation rate, exchange rate, interest rate, money supply and production index on the variability of the stock price in Bangladesh. Multiple regression analysis has been conducted to asses the relationship between the stated macro economic factors with stock price. All share price index of the Dhaka Stock Exchange has been used as a proxy for stock price, the dependent variable of the study. No significant relationship has been found between the stock price and any of the macroeconomic factors. The study bodes well for advanced empirical models with additional macroeconomic variables.

An empirical investigation of failing companies and their determinants using the hazard model in an emerging capital market

The purpose of this study is to highlight the predictors of financial distress during the period 1990 to 2000. Previous studies highlight the inadequacies of the MDA and the log it models and suggest that a hazard model gives a more accurate result due to its consideration of time varying co-variates. By applying the hazard model, we find that leverage, profit, cash flow, liquidity, size and growth play a significant role in explaining financial distress with 83% accuracy rate. This rate did not change much when the model is applied to the hold-out sample. We also find that multicollinearity problem is not a threat in our analysis

Application of particle swarm optimization for solving optimal generation plant location problem

The global demand for energy especially-in-developing-countries,-has-been witnessing a tremendous growth due to rapid population growth, economic growth and developing industrial sectors. Therefore, it is necessary to forecast the future energy needs and expand generation capacity to meet the increasing peak demand.-This-paper-presents-an-optimization approach to determine the optimal location for installing a new generator in which the technical, economic and environmental aspects are all taken into consideration. The location that yields the minimum fuel costs, total emission and system loss is considered as the optimal generation plant location. The- formulated- objective- function- and- its constraints compose an optimization problem is solved using particle swarm optimization (PSO). The proposed PSO based optimization approach is tested on IEEE 14-bus system and IEEE 30-bus system to illustrate the potential of the new approach. The simulation results have shown that the proposed approach is indeed capable of determining the optimal generation location that can save much overall fuel cost as well as reduce the total emissions of generators and losses in the network

Engineering the Hardware/Software Interface for Robotic Platforms - A Comparison of Applied Model Checking with Prolog and Alloy

Robotic platforms serve different use cases ranging from experiments for prototyping assistive applications up to embedded systems for realizing cyber-physical systems in various domains. We are using 1:10 scale miniature vehicles as a robotic platform to conduct research in the domain of self-driving cars and collaborative vehicle fleets. Thus, experiments with different sensors like e.g.~ultra-sonic, infrared, and rotary encoders need to be prepared and realized using our vehicle platform. For each setup, we need to configure the hardware/software interface board to handle all sensors and actors. Therefore, we need to find a specific configuration setting for each pin of the interface board that can handle our current hardware setup but which is also flexible enough to support further sensors or actors for future use cases. In this paper, we show how to model the domain of the configuration space for a hardware/software interface board to enable model checking for solving the tasks of finding any, all, and the best possible pin configuration. We present results from a formal experiment applying the declarative languages Alloy and Prolog to guide the process of engineering the hardware/software interface for robotic platforms on the example of a configuration complexity up to ten pins resulting in a configuration space greater than 14.5 million possibilities. Our results show that our domain model in Alloy performs better compared to Prolog to find feasible solutions for larger configurations with an average time of 0.58s. To find the best solution, our model for Prolog performs better taking only 1.38s for the largest desired configuration; however, this important use case is currently not covered by the existing tools for the hardware used as an example in this article.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2013 (arXiv:cs/1312.5952

Advertizing, concentration and profitability in Malaysian manufacturing revisited: A simultaneous equation approach

The original Structure-Conduct-Performance (SCP) paradigm that postulates a unidirectional relationship between concentration, advertizing and profitability had been used as the theoretical framework for many empirical works in industrial organizations before the mid seventies. Thereafter, doubts had begun to surface over the unidirectional postulate and there is new theory suggesting simultaneous interdependence. Unfortunately, not only are Malaysian studies in this area few and far between (exhaustive literature review yields only three published studies namely, Gan and Tham, 1977; Gan, 1978; and Rugayah, 1992), they also failed to incorporate the more recent theoretical development on the simultaneity of effects. This paper revisits the SCP paradigm as applied to the relationship among concentration, advertizing and profitability by conducting an empirical test that allows for simultaneous interdependence among variables. A set of three equations was estimated using three stage least squares (3SLS). The results provide considerable support to the feed forward and feedback effects between the three variables. Advertizing intensity exerts a significant influence on profit and concentration in the industry and there exists a feedback effect running from concentration to advertizing intensity. This finding suggests that advertizing does have an anti-competitive impact on the industry and therefore has a direct bearing on competition policy analysis

British Policy and Reform of Madrasah Education in Bengal (1780-1947)

British Academ