Why Do Countries Matter So Much for Corporate Governance?

This paper develops and tests a model of how country characteristics, such as legal protections for minority investors, and the level of economic and financial development, influence firms' costs and benefits in implementing measures to improve their own governance and transparency. The model focuses on an entrepreneur who needs to raise funds to finance the firm's investment opportunities and who decides whether or not to invest in better firm-level governance mechanisms to reduce agency costs. We show that, for a given level of country investor protection, the incentives to adopt better governance mechanisms at the firm level increase with a country's financial and economic development. When economic and financial development is poor, the incentives to improve firm-level governance are low because outside finance is expensive and the adoption of better governance mechanisms is expensive. Using firm-level data on international corporate governance and transparency ratings for a large sample of firms from around the world, we find evidence consistent with this prediction. Specifically, we show that (1) almost all of the variation in governance ratings across firms in less developed countries is attributable to country characteristics rather than firm characteristics typically used to explain governance choices, (2) firm characteristics explain more of the variation in governance ratings in more developed countries, and (3) access to global capital markets sharpens firm incentives for better governance, but decreases the importance of home-country legal protections of minority investors.

Analysing I/O bottlenecks in LHC data analysis on grid storage resources

We describe recent I/O testing frameworks that we have developed and applied within the UK GridPP Collaboration, the ATLAS experiment and the DPM team, for a variety of distinct purposes. These include benchmarking vendor supplied storage products, discovering scaling limits of SRM solutions, tuning of storage systems for experiment data analysis, evaluating file access protocols, and exploring I/O read patterns of experiment software and their underlying event data models. With multiple grid sites now dealing with petabytes of data, such studies are becoming essential. We describe how the tests build, and improve, on previous work and contrast how the use-cases differ. We also detail the results obtained and the implications for storage hardware, middleware and experiment software

Why are Foreign Firms Listed in the U.S. Worth More?

At the end of 1997, the foreign companies listed in the U.S. have a Tobin's q ratio that exceeds by 16.5% the q ratio of firms from the same country that are not listed in the U.S. The valuation difference is statistically significant and largest for exchange-listed firms, where it reaches 37%. The difference persists even after controlling for a number of firm and country characteristics. We propose a theory that explains this valuation difference. We hypothesize that controlling shareholders of firms listed in the U.S. cannot extract as many private benefits from control compared to controlling shareholders of firms not listed in the U.S., but that their firms are better able to take advantage of growth opportunities. Consequently, the cross-listed firms should be those firms where the interests of the controlling shareholder are better aligned with the interests of other shareholders. The growth opportunities of cross-listed firms will be more highly valued than those of firms not listed in the U.S. both because cross-listed firms are better able to take advantage of these opportunities and because a smaller fraction of the cash flow of these firms is expropriated by controlling shareholders. We find that our theory explains the greater valuation of cross-listed firms. In particular, we find expected sales growth is valued more highly for firms listed in the U.S. and that this effect is greater for firms from countries with poorer investor rights.

Has New York Become Less Competitive in Global Markets? Evaluating Foreign Listing Choices Over Time

We study the determinants and consequences of cross-listings on the New York and London stock exchanges from 1990 to 2005. This investigation enables us to evaluate the relative benefits of New York and London exchange listings and to assess whether these relative benefits have changed over time, perhaps as a result of the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of Congress (SOX) in 2002. We find that cross-listings have been falling on U.S. exchanges as well as on the Main Market in London. This decline in cross-listings is explained by changes in firm characteristics rather than by changes in the benefits of cross-listings. We show that, after controlling for firm characteristics, there is no deficit in cross-listing counts on U.S. exchanges related to SOX. Investigating the cross-listing premium from 1990 to 2005, we find that there is a significant premium for U.S. exchange listings every year, that the premium has not fallen significantly in recent years, that it persists even when allowing for unobservable firm characteristics, and that there is a permanent premium in event time. In contrast, there is no premium for London listings for any year. Cross-listing in the U.S. leads firms to increase their capital-raising activity at home and abroad while a London listing has no such impact. Our evidence is consistent with the theory that an exchange listing in New York has unique governance benefits for foreign firms. These benefits have not been seriously eroded by SOX and cannot be replicated through a London listing.

The EU and Asia within an evolving global order: what is Europe? Where is Asia?

The papers in this special edition are a very small selection from those presented at the EU-NESCA (Network of European Studies Centres in Asia) conference on "the EU and East Asia within an Evolving Global Order: Ideas, Actors and Processes" in November 2008 in Brussels. The conference was the culmination of three years of research activity involving workshops and conferences bringing together scholars from both regions primarily to discuss relations between Europe and Asia, perceptions of Europe in Asia, and the relationship between the European regional project and emerging regional forms in Asia. But although this was the last of the three major conferences organised by the consortium, it in many ways represented a starting point rather than the end; an opportunity to reflect on the conclusions of the first phase of collaboration and point towards new and continuing research agendas for the future

Subgenual Cingulum Microstructure Supports Control of Emotional Conflict

This is the final version of the article. Available from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this record.Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with specific difficulties in attentional disengagement from negatively valenced material. Diffusion MRI studies have demonstrated altered white matter microstructure in the subgenual cingulum bundle (CB) in individuals with MDD, though the functional significance of these alterations has not been examined formally. This study explored whether individual differences in selective attention to negatively valenced stimuli are related to interindividual differences in subgenual CB microstructure. Forty-six individuals (21 with remitted MDD, 25 never depressed) completed an emotional Stroop task, using happy and angry distractor faces overlaid by pleasant or unpleasant target words and a control gender-based Stroop task. CBs were reconstructed in 38 individuals using diffusion-weighted imaging and tractography, and mean fractional anisotropy (FA) computed for the subgenual, retrosplenial, and parahippocampal subdivisions. No significant correlations were found between FA and performance in the control gender-based Stroop task in any CB region. However, the degree of interference produced by angry face distractors on time to identify pleasant words (emotional conflict) correlated selectively with FA in the subgenual CB (r= -0.53;P= 0.01). Higher FA was associated with reduced interference, irrespective of a diagnosis of MDD, suggesting that subgenual CB microstructure is functionally relevant for regulating attentional bias toward negative interpersonal stimuli.P.A.K. was funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) and an Academy of Medical Sciences and Wellcome Trust Starter Grant (AJ17102004). M.M. received an EPSRC Doctoral Training Grant. This work was also supported by a Marie Curie fellowship to Marcel Meyer and received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 267171. D.K.J. was funded by HEFCW and received grants from the MS Society, a Wellcome Trust New Investigator Award, a Wellcome Trust Multi User Equipment Grant and Medical Research Council, and Wellcome Trust project grants. A.N.D. was supported by the Wellcome Trust PhD schemes. N.L. was funded by HEFCW. A.D.L. was funded by HEFCW. He also received grants from the ESRC, Wellcome Trust, and NISCHR. Funding to pay the Open Access publication charges for this article was provided by The Wellcome Trust

Control of an outbreak of carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii in Australia after introduction of environmental cleaning with a commercial oxidizing disinfectant

In the midst of an outbreak, carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii was grown from samples of multiple environmental sites in an intensive care unit. A commercial oxidizing disinfectant (potassium peroxomonosulphate 50%, sodium alkyl benzene sulphonate 15%, and sulphamic acid 5%) was introduced throughout the intensive care unit, and its use coincided with cessation of the outbreak

Measurement of the ttbar Production Cross Section in ppbar Collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV using Lepton + Jets Events with Lifetime b-tagging

We present a measurement of the top quark pair ($t\bar{t}$) production cross section ($\sigma_{t\bar{t}}$) in $p\bar{p}$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=1.96$ TeV using 230 pb$^{-1}$ of data collected by the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. We select events with one charged lepton (electron or muon), missing transverse energy, and jets in the final state. We employ lifetime-based b-jet identification techniques to further enhance the $t\bar{t}$ purity of the selected sample. For a top quark mass of 175 GeV, we measure $\sigma_{t\bar{t}}=8.6^{+1.6}_{-1.5}(stat.+syst.)\pm 0.6(lumi.)$ pb, in agreement with the standard model expectation.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables Submitted to Phys.Rev.Let

Formally Verifying the Safety of Pipelined Moonshot Consensus Protocol

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has emerged as a contemporary competitive as well as complementary to traditional centralized finance systems. As of 23rd January 2024, per Defillama approximately USD 55 billion is the total value locked on the DeFi applications on all blockchains put together. A Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) State Machine Replication (SMR) protocol, popularly known as the consensus protocol, is the central component of a blockchain. If forks are possible in a consensus protocol, they can be misused to carry out double spending attacks and can be catastrophic given high volumes of finance that are transacted on blockchains. Formal verification of the safety of consensus protocols is the golden standard for guaranteeing that forks are not possible. However, it is considered complex and challenging to do. This is reflected by the fact that not many complex consensus protocols are formally verified except for Tendermint and QBFT. We focus on Supra’s Pipelined Moonshot consensus protocol. Similar to Tendermint’s formal verification, we too model Pipelined Moonshot using IVy and formally prove that for all network sizes, as long as the number of Byzantine validators is less than 1/3, the protocol does not allow forks, thus proving that Pipelined Moonshot is safe and double spending cannot be done using forks. The IVy model and proof of safety is available on y. https://github.com/Entropy-Foundation/suprabft-fv/tree/master/suprabft

Measurement of Semileptonic Branching Fractions of B Mesons to Narrow D** States

Using the data accumulated in 2002-2004 with the DO detector in proton-antiproton collisions at the Fermilab Tevatron collider with centre-of-mass energy 1.96 TeV, the branching fractions of the decays B -> \bar{D}_1^0(2420) \mu^+ \nu_\mu X and B -> \bar{D}_2^{*0}(2460) \mu^+ \nu_\mu X and their ratio have been measured: BR(\bar{b}->B) \cdot BR(B-> \bar{D}_1^0 \mu^+ \nu_\mu X) \cdot BR(\bar{D}_1^0 -> D*- pi+) = (0.087+-0.007(stat)+-0.014(syst))%; BR(\bar{b}->B)\cdot BR(B->D_2^{*0} \mu^+ \nu_\mu X) \cdot BR(\bar{D}_2^{*0} -> D*- \pi^+) = (0.035+-0.007(stat)+-0.008(syst))%; and (BR(B -> \bar{D}_2^{*0} \mu^+ \nu_\mu X)BR(D2*0->D*- pi+)) / (BR(B -> \bar{D}_1^{0} \mu^+ \nu_\mu X)\cdot BR(\bar{D}_1^{0}->D*- \pi^+)) = 0.39+-0.09(stat)+-0.12(syst), where the charge conjugated states are always implied.Comment: submitted to Phys. Rev. Let