The East Midlands: economy a joint response to changing economic circumstances

This document provides an assessment of the regional economy as the UK entered recession in 2008 and sets out how emda, local agencies and Government would work together to tackle the challenges posed by the recession

The influence of internal corporate governance mechanisms on capital structure decisions of Chinese listed firms

Purpose: This paper examines the effects of internal corporate governance mechanisms on the capital structure decisions of Chinese listed firms. Design/Methodology: Using a large and more recent dataset consisting of 2386 Chinese listed firms over the period from 1998 to 2012, we employ panel data and use different statistical methods (OLS, fixed effects, and system GMM) to analyse the effects of firm-specific and corporate governance influences on capital structure. Findings: We find that the proportion of independent directors and ownership concentration exert significant influence on the level of Chinese long-term debt ratios after controlling for firm-specific determinants and split share reforms. Further analysis separating our sample into state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and privately- owned enterprises (POEs) suggests that ownership concentration in the hands of the state leads to decrease in debt ratios. Implications: The finding implies that concentrated ownership in the hands of the state appears more efficient compared to their private counterparts in their monitoring role. Original Value: This study extends prior literature, which has concentrated disproportionately on firm-specific influences on capital structure, to the effects of within-firm governance mechanisms on capital structure decisions. The paper contributes to the agency theory-capital structure discourse in an emerging country context where corporate governance system appears weak

Overeducation across British regions

This paper analyses levels of over-education and wage returns to education for males across eleven regions of the UK using Labour Force Survey data. Significant differences are found in the probability of being over-educated across regions; also, differences are found in the return to the ‘correct’ level of education in each region, in each case associated with flexibility of movement between and into particular regions, which determines the ease of job matching. Furthermore, evidence is found that, after controlling for the level of education acquired, there exists a premium to the ‘correct’ level of education, which varies across UK regions

ON THE PERFORMANCE OF NONPARAMETRIC SPECIFICATION TESTS IN REGRESSION MODELS

Some recently developed nonparametric specification tests for regression models are described in a unified way. The common characteristic of these tests is that they are consistent against any alternative hypothesis. The performance of the test statistics is compared by means of Monte Carlo simulations, analysing how heteroskedasticity, number of regressors and bandwidth selection influence the results. The statistics which do not use a bandwidth perform slightly better if the regression model has only one regressor; otherwise, some of the statistics which use a bandwidth behave better if the bandwidth is chosen adequately. These statistics are applied to test the specification of three commonly used Mincer-type wage equations with Uruguayan and Spanish data; all of them are rejected.

Scanning electron microscopy image representativeness: morphological data on nanoparticles.

A sample of a nanomaterial contains a distribution of nanoparticles of various shapes and/or sizes. A scanning electron microscopy image of such a sample often captures only a fragment of the morphological variety present in the sample. In order to quantitatively analyse the sample using scanning electron microscope digital images, and, in particular, to derive numerical representations of the sample morphology, image content has to be assessed. In this work, we present a framework for extracting morphological information contained in scanning electron microscopy images using computer vision algorithms, and for converting them into numerical particle descriptors. We explore the concept of image representativeness and provide a set of protocols for selecting optimal scanning electron microscopy images as well as determining the smallest representative image set for each of the morphological features. We demonstrate the practical aspects of our methodology by investigating tricalcium phosphate, Ca3 (PO4 )2 , and calcium hydroxyphosphate, Ca5 (PO4 )3 (OH), both naturally occurring minerals with a wide range of biomedical applications

Public Service Markets: Their Economics, Oversight and Regulation

This paper has three aims. Firstly, it aims to show that the language of markets can help to frame arguments about how effectively public services are achieving their intended outcomes. Using ‘market’ language and concepts may not always be comfortable for those from a traditional policy-making background. This paper suggests that thinking in these terms can nevertheless be very useful when designing investigations of the effectiveness of public services, whenever those services entail a degree of personalisation or user choice – as is currently the case, for example, in large parts of health, social care and education in England. Secondly, the paper aims to show that public service markets (public services that involve choice on the part of service users) differ quite fundamentally from private markets. Hence the conditions for the success, or failure, of public service markets to achieve public policy intentions may be different from the conditions that are necessary to foster successful (well functioning) markets in the private sector. Although there are analogies between private and public markets, some of which are discussed, the introduction of ‘market mechanisms’ into public service provision does not necessarily mean that the public service markets thus created will behave like private markets, or that policy intentions will be achieved simply by ‘leaving it to the market’. This, of course, has implications for how public service markets are overseen, managed, and regulated. In particular, the nature of the ‘goods’ that are ‘traded’ in public service markets is often very different from those in many private markets. This paper argues that not only are public services typically merit goods (characterised by positive externalities in their consumption), but that there is an important distinction between ‘choice’ merit goods, such as education or social care, and ‘compulsory’ merit goods, such as probation services or welfare-to-work programmes. Choice merit goods could in principle be provided through vouchers or direct payments to users, although doing so would not necessarily achieve other policy objectives such as universality or equity, even if all conditions were in place for the public market to operate efficiently (in practice, this latter requirement is also unlikely to be met). There may also be conflicts between how service users actually make choices, and how the state would ‘like’ them to (for example, hospital patients may value proximity of the hospital to their home more highly than its results on clinical performance measures). The ‘users’ of compulsory merit goods, on the other hand, may not wish to consume them, but it may be welfare-enhancing for society to coerce them to do so. The commissioning or direct provision by the state of such goods may meet public policy objectives more effectively than the market mechanism alone, as users are not able to internalise the full social benefits of their actions. Finally, building on these foundations, the paper discusses when public service markets are likely to be an effective method of achieving public policy objectives, and when they may not be. Issues that arise frequently in public service markets are discussed, such as principal-agent relationships; determining the quality of complex experience goods; the existence of local or regional monopolies of provision, and monopsonies of funding; the operation of competition law in the public sector; and how to deal with provider failure. The paper concludes with some suggestions for what this all means for those charged with overseeing public service markets in practice, based both on the preceding considerations, and on empirical evidence and experience to date

Development of simulation-based testing environment for safety-critical software

Recently, a software program has been used in nuclear power plants (NPPs) to digitalize many instrumentation and control systems. To guarantee NPP safety, the reliability of the software used in safety-critical instrumentation and control systems must be quantified and verified with proper test cases and test environment. In this study, a software testing method using a simulation-based software test bed is proposed. The test bed is developed by emulating the microprocessor architecture of the programmable logic controller used in NPP safety-critical applications and capturing its behavior at each machine instruction. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated via a case study. To represent the possible states of software input and the internal variables that contribute to generating a dedicated safety signal, the software test cases are developed in consideration of the digital characteristics of the target system and the plant dynamics. The method provides a practical way to conduct exhaustive software testing, which can prove the software to be error free and minimize the uncertainty in software reliability quantification. Compared with existing testing methods, it can effectively reduce the software testing effort by emulating the programmable logic controller behavior at the machine level

ORegAnno 3.0: A community-driven resource for curated regulatory annotation

The Open Regulatory Annotation database (ORegAnno) is a resource for curated regulatory annotation. It contains information about regulatory regions, transcription factor binding sites, RNA binding sites, regulatory variants, haplotypes, and other regulatory elements. ORegAnno differentiates itself from other regulatory resources by facilitating crowd-sourced interpretation and annotation of regulatory observations from the literature and highly curated resources. It contains a comprehensive annotation scheme that aims to describe both the elements and outcomes of regulatory events. Moreover, ORegAnno assembles these disparate data sources and annotations into a single, high quality catalogue of curated regulatory information. The current release is an update of the database previously featured in the NAR Database Issue, and now contains 1 948 307 records, across 18 species, with a combined coverage of 334 215 080 bp. Complete records, annotation, and other associated data are available for browsing and download at http://www.oreganno.org/