► We examine the effect institutional investors’ investment horizon on firm investment. ► Longer investment horizons lead to more effective monitoring. ► Improved monitoring reduces agency costs and ...informational asymmetries. ► As a result, firms’ investment outlays are less sensitive to internal cash flows.
This paper examines the relevance of institutional investors’ investment horizon, as reflected in the response of firm investment to internal cash flows. We argue that institutional investors with longer investment horizons have greater incentives and efficiencies to engage in effective monitoring. This improved monitoring mitigates asymmetric information and agency problems, and in turn reduces the wedge between the costs of internal and external funds. As a result, the sensitivity of firms’ investment outlays to internal cash flows decreases in the presence of institutional investors with long-term investment horizons. Using a sample of 8402 US firms over the period 1981–2008, we provide empirical evidence consistent with these arguments.
Recent developments in European supercomputing are reviewed covering both the latest hardware trends and the increasing difficulties faced by scientists in utilising these machines to perform ...large-scale numerical simulations. These challenges are reflected in the large number of international initiatives which have come into being over the last few years, founded in anticipation of exascale hardware which is foreseen within the next decade. The role of a key institution in supercomputing within these programmes is described using the example of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), and progress in setting up its own community-oriented support units for scientific computing – Simulation Laboratories – is reported on. Finally, an assessment is made of some common grand challenges and their suitability for scaling to exaflop-scale computation.
Prior studies, such as Claessens et al.’s Claessens, S., Djankov, S., Fan, J., Lang, L., 2002. Disentangling the incentive and entrenchment effects of large shareholding. Journal of Finance 57, ...2741–2771, suggest that deviation between ultimate control and ownership decreases firm value (due to the entrenchment effects of large shareholding). Using a sample of Canadian firms, we study the relation of ultimate control and ownership with an important dimension of stock liquidity – bid–ask spread. We find that stocks with greater deviations between ultimate control and ownership have a larger information asymmetry component of their bid–ask spread and wider bid–ask spread. Our results are consistent with the notion that the ultimate owners of these stocks may have selfish agendas. To increase the probability of the agendas being implemented, the firms may have poor information disclosure, resulting in poor stock liquidity.
We present results of our ongoing determination of “string breaking” in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) including two dynamical light quarks. Our investigation of the fission of the string between a ...heavy (static) quark and a corresponding antiquark into a meson–antimeson system is based on dynamical configurations of size
24
3
×
40
. The all-to-all light quark propagators occurring in the transition element are computed from a set of 200 low-lying eigenmodes of the Hermitian Wilson–Dirac matrix which encodes the effect of the dynamical quarks. These eigenmodes are calculated on the 1312-node IBM p690 system at the John von Neumann Institute in Jülich. Combining the eigenvalue computations with a variety of ground state enhancing optimization methods we determine the matrix elements of the two-by-two system with so far unprecedented accuracy. We observe—for the first time ever in a simulation of 4-dimensional lattice-QCD—
level-splitting as the perfect signature for dynamical string breaking between ground state and excited potential.
The determination of physical properties of flavor singlet objects like the
η′ meson by computer simulation requires the computation of functionals of the inverse fermionic matrix
M
−1. So far, only ...stochastic methods could cope with the enormous size of
M. In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach which is based on the computation of a subset of low-lying eigenmodes of the fermionic matrix. The high quality of this ‘truncated eigenmode approximation’ (TEA) is demonstrated by comparison with the pion correlator, a flavor octet quantity, which is readily computable through a linear system of equations. We show that TEA can successfully approximate the flavor singlet
η′ correlator. We find that the systematic error of the method is tolerable. As the determination of the chosen subset of 300 eigenmodes requires about 3.5 Tflops-hours CPU-time per canonical ensemble and at least 15 GBytes of memory, the power of high-end supercomputers like the CRAY T3E is indispensable.
The John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC) at the Research Centre Jülich, Germany, is one of the leading supercomputing centres in Europe. Founded as a national centre in the mid-eighties it ...now provides more and more resources to European scientists. This happens within EU-funded projects (I3HP, DEISA) or Europe-wide scientific collaborations. Beyond these activities NIC started an initiative towards the new EU member states in summer 2004. Outstanding research groups are offered to exploit the supercomputers at NIC to accelerate their investigations on leading-edge technology.
The article gives an overview of the organisational structure of NIC, its current supercomputer systems, and its user support. Transnational Access (TA) within I3HP is described as well as access by the initiative for new EU member states. The volume of these offers and the procedure of how to apply for supercomputer resources is introduced in detail.
We describe the steps which lead to a speed efficiency of about 48% for a code for the simulation of pure SU(2) Lattice Gauge Theory on the Intel Paragon XP/S Supercomputer. Here the efficiency is ...defined by the ratio of sustained MFLOPS performance over the peak performance. The maximal size of the lattice is 80 × 48
3, and up to 135 compute nodes have been used. We analyze several kernels, written partly in assembler language, and we describe the communication strategy both for the updating process and for the measurement. Exclusive use of FORTRAN language leads to a performance reduction of a factor 2.4 as compared to the assembler case.
Nucl.Phys.Proc.Suppl. 153 (2006) 3-8 The John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC) at the Research Centre
Juelich, Germany, is one of the leading supercomputing centres in Europe.
Founded as a ...national centre in the mid-eighties it now provides more and more
resources to European scientists. This happens within EU-funded projects (I3HP,
DEISA) or Europe-wide scientific collaborations. Beyond these activities NIC
started an initiative towards the new EU member states in summer 2004.
Outstanding research groups are offered to exploit the supercomputers at NIC to
accelerate their investigations on leading-edge technology.
The article gives an overview of the organisational structure of NIC, its
current supercomputer systems, and its user support. Transnational Access (TA)
within I3HP is described as well as access by the initiative for new EU member
states. The volume of these offers and the procedure of how to apply for
supercomputer resources is introduced in detail.
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