Cash Holdings and Labor Heterogeneity Ghaly, Mohamed; Dang, Viet Anh; Stathopoulos, Konstantinos
Review of financial studies/The Review of financial studies,
10/2017, Volume:
30, Issue:
10
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Firms differ in their dependence on skilled labor and face labor adjustment costs that increase with their workers’skill level. We show that firms with a higher share of skilled workers, and thus ...less flexibility to adjust their labor demand in response to cash flow shocks, hold more precautionary cash. The effect of labor skills on cash holdings is more pronounced for financially constrained firms and varies with exogenous differences in firing and hiring costs. We address endogeneity concerns by using subsamples of firms with reasonably similar characteristics, propensity score matching, and a quasi-experimental shock to labor markets.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, INZLJ, NMLJ, NUK, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
This paper examines the relation between chief executive officer (CEO) inside debt holdings and corporate debt maturity. We provide robust evidence that inside debt has a positive effect on ...short-maturity debt and that this effect is concentrated in financially unconstrained firms that face lower refinancing risk. Our analysis further shows that CEO inside debt helps reduce the cost of debt financing. Overall, our results indicate that managerial holdings of inside debt facilitate access to external debt financing and reduce refinancing risk, thus incentivizing managers to use less costly shorter term debt.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
Monitoring by long-term investors should reduce agency conflicts in firms' labor investment choices. Consistent with this argument, we find that abnormal net hiring, measured as the absolute ...deviation from optimal net hiring predicted by economic fundamentals, decreases in the presence of institutional investors with longer investment horizons. Firms dominated by long-term shareholders reduce both over-investment (over-hiring and under-firing) and under-investment (under-hiring) in employees. The monitoring role of long-term investors is stronger for firms facing higher labor adjustment costs both in absolute terms and relative to capital adjustment costs, and those for which human capital is regarded as more important. The effect is also more pronounced for firms that have stronger incentives and/or more opportunities to deviate from expected net hiring. We address endogeneity concerns by exploiting exogenous changes to long-term institutional ownership resulting from annual reconstitutions of the Russell indexes.
•We offer new evidence on the role of institutional investors in mitigating agency conflicts in firms’' employment decisions.•Firms dominated by long-term shareholders reduce both over-investment and under-investment in employees.•The effect is stronger for firms facing higher labor adjustment costs and attaching more importance to human capital.•It is also more pronounced for firms with more incentives and/or opportunities to deviate from expected net hiring.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
High species diversity may result from recent rapid speciation in a 'cradle' and/or the gradual accumulation and preservation of species over time in a 'museum'. China harbours nearly 10% of ...angiosperm species worldwide and has long been considered as both a museum, owing to the presence of many species with hypothesized ancient origins, and a cradle, as many lineages have originated as recent topographic changes and climatic shifts-such as the formation of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and the development of the monsoon-provided new habitats that promoted remarkable radiation. However, no detailed phylogenetic study has addressed when and how the major components of the Chinese angiosperm flora assembled to form the present-day vegetation. Here we investigate the spatio-temporal divergence patterns of the Chinese flora using a dated phylogeny of 92% of the angiosperm genera for the region, a nearly complete species-level tree comprising 26,978 species and detailed spatial distribution data. We found that 66% of the angiosperm genera in China did not originate until early in the Miocene epoch (23 million years ago (Mya)). The flora of eastern China bears a signature of older divergence (mean divergence times of 22.04-25.39 Mya), phylogenetic overdispersion (spatial co-occurrence of distant relatives) and higher phylogenetic diversity. In western China, the flora shows more recent divergence (mean divergence times of 15.29-18.86 Mya), pronounced phylogenetic clustering (co-occurrence of close relatives) and lower phylogenetic diversity. Analyses of species-level phylogenetic diversity using simulated branch lengths yielded results similar to genus-level patterns. Our analyses indicate that eastern China represents a floristic museum, and western China an evolutionary cradle, for herbaceous genera; eastern China has served as both a museum and a cradle for woody genera. These results identify areas of high species richness and phylogenetic diversity, and provide a foundation on which to build conservation efforts in China.
Full text
Available for:
KISLJ, NUK, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
This study examines the link between product market competition and labour investment efficiency. We find that competitive pressure distorts the efficiency of corporate employment decisions by ...creating an underinvestment problem. This finding withstands a battery of robustness checks and remains unchanged after accounting for endogeneity concerns. Additional analysis shows that the relationship between product market competition and labour investment efficiency is stronger for firms facing higher competitive threats, greater financial constraints, higher information asymmetry and higher labour adjustment costs. Our results suggest that as competition increases bankruptcy risk, it leads managers to underinvest in labour to avoid incurring labour‐related costs.
Full text
Available for:
FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
: In this paper, we examine the potential interactions of corporate financing and investment decisions in the presence of incentive problems. We develop a system‐based approach to investigate the ...effects of growth opportunities on leverage and debt maturity as well as the effects of these financing decisions on firm investment. Using a panel of UK firms between 1996 and 2003, we find that high‐growth firms control underinvestment incentives by reducing leverage but not by shortening debt maturity. There is a positive relation between leverage and debt maturity as predicted by the liquidity risk hypothesis. Leverage has a negative effect on firm investment levels, which is consistent with the overinvestment hypothesis regarding the disciplining role of leverage for firms with limited growth opportunities.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Display omitted
•Novel N,C,S-TiO2/WO3/rGO Z scheme photocatalyst generates both O2•- and HO• under visible light irradiation.•Electron-hole recombination rate is reduced due to Z-scheme system and ...graphene sheets.•Dye degradation is significantly enhanced by N,C,S-TiO2/WO3/rGO photocatalyst.•Dye degradation process is impacted by reaction conditions, and follows the pseudo-first-order kinetics model.•N,C,S-TiO2/WO3/rGO could be easily regenerated and reused with high photocatalytic performance.
Novel N,C,S-TiO2/WO3/rGO Z scheme photocatalyst was successfully synthesized from graphite, TIOT, and ammonium metatungstate precursors. Material characteristics such as crystal structure, surface morphology, functional groups, specific surface area, elemental composition, band gap energy, and electron-hole recombination were characterized by XRD, TEM, BET, SEM/EDX, FT-IR, UV–VIS, and PL methods. The as-synthesized novel N,C,S-TiO2/WO3/rGO Z-scheme heterojunction photocatalyst exhibited visible light-driven photocatalytic activity (the band gap energy = 2.24 eV), could generate both effective electrons and holes, and presented the lowest electron-hole recombination rate compared to all individual components. Different factors impacting the photocatalytic decomposition of Direct Blue 71 (DB 71) by the N,C,S-TiO2/WO3/rGO system were studied. The results showed that pH of the solution, catalyst load, DB 71 initial concentration, and reaction time affected the DB 71 photocatalytic degradation efficiency. The DB 71 degradation completed after 100 min with a typical efficiency of over 91%, which was much better than other photocatalytic systems. The DB 71 degradation process followed the pseudo-first-order kinetics model with coefficients of determination > 0.95 for all conditions. The photocatalyst was easily regenerated, and exhibited a very good stability, with a photocatalytic degradation efficiency of over 83.0% after 3 cycles.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Vibration-based structural damage detection is one of the most promising venues for building smart and automated structural health monitoring applications; however, its applicability is impeded by a ...large amount of collected vibration data, and the performance could be undermined by degraded data. Therefore, this study develops a robust framework, dubbed AutoBoost-SDD, that can effectively handle contaminated vibration data and provide reliable monitoring results within reasonable computational resources. The proposed method consists of three key components. Firstly, multi-domain feature extraction techniques are utilized to convert high-dimensional raw data into informative feature vectors. Secondly, the auto-encoder deep learning architecture is leveraged to refine feature vectors of contaminated data. Finally, a tree-based boosting machine learning algorithm, namely LightGBM, is employed to assess the structures’ operational states using learned output from the second step. The viability and performance of the proposed framework are illustrated via three case studies involving numerical data of a 5-degree of freedom system, a 2D frame structure, and experimental data of a large-scale 18-story frame structure from the literature. The results show that the AutoBoost-SDD framework is able to provide reasonable detection results despite the presence of various contaminations, including noisy, missing, and anomalous data.
•Diesel engine was powered with ternary blends of biodiesel-diesel-oxyhydrogen.•Third-generation biodiesel was synthesized from biomass of Azolla Pinnata.•A low-cost device-31 plates generator ...generated oxyhydrogen gas.•Oxyhydrogen addition improved engine performance and lowered emissions.•Box-Behnken design coupled with desirability approach used for optimization.
The current study explores and improves the effects of engine load, injection time, and oxyhydrogen fuel flow rate on the combustion and emissions characteristics of a diesel engine. Experiment with the combustion and exhaust characteristics of a medium-sized diesel engine working in tri-fuel mode using microalgae oil methyl ester-diesel blends as injected fuel and an oxyhydrogen gas combination as inducted fuel. The Box-Behnken design (BBD) was used to reduce the number of testing. The parameters and proposed attributes were calculated utilizing response surface techniques and BBD-generated quadratic models. The response surface analysis displayed the patterns of input interactions on the output using surface diagrams. The desirability-based optimization revealed the optimal engine operating parameters as 22.92° crank angles advance, 76% engine load, and 0.92 L per minute oxyhydrogen flow rate. At these optimized operating ranges, the performance and combustion output of the study was 30.8 % brake thermal efficiency (BTE), 0.3 kg/kWh brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC), and 65.6 bar peak cylinder pressure (PCP). On the emission front, the CO emission was 0.0107%, UHC was 26 ppm, and NOx was 853 ppm. The optimized values were validated through experimental testing, and all the results were within 7% of the model-predicted output. The addition of oxyhydrogen significantly improved the combustion of an algal biodiesel-diesel-oxyhydrogen-powered diesel engine in terms of fuel efficiency and fuel consumption and lower carbon-based emission levels except for nitrogen oxide emissions.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
•Machine learning techniques predict compressive strength of concrete made with RAC.•GB_PSO is the best Machine Learning model for prediction of compressive strength.•Mix design of concrete made with ...RAC can be estimated with aided of PDP 1D.
To reduce the environmental impact of construction and demolition waste of concrete, recycled concrete aggregate (RCA) has been widely utilized in concrete. The compressive strength of recycled concrete is one of the most important parameters governing the quality of concrete. The compressive strength is determined from the compression test, which requires a huge amount of materials as well as consumes cost and time. Thus, to solve those limitations, this study focused on evaluating the compressive strength of concrete made from RCA using different single and hybrid models of machine learning. Six machine learning models including Gradient Boosting (GB), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB), Support Vector Regression (SVR), and three hybrid models of those single models with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) namely GB_PSO, XGB_PSO, and SVR_PSO were used to estimate the compressive strength of recycled concrete. The input variables for modeling consisted of cement content, water content, aggregate content, natural aggregate content, recycle concrete aggregate content, sand content, water absorption rates of natural aggregate and RCA. The results of this study show that hybrid models performed better than single models in terms of prediction accuracy. The results indicated that the GB_PSO has the highest prediction accuracy with R = 0.9356, RMSE = 5.5604 MPa, and MAE = 4.2882 MPa. The results of feature importance analysis and partial dependence plots (PDP) analysis revealed that the most important variable effect on compressive strength of concrete made with RAC is cement content, whatever performance strategies of concrete made with RAC. From the results of PDP, the quantity of each material can be computed easily for the designed compressive strength. In the end, this study provides a systematic evaluation of the compressive strength prediction of recycled concrete and has a significant contribution to literature and practice.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
PDF
