This study investigates small businesses’ financing decisions. Drawing upon asymmetric information theory, institutional theory and relevant literature on cognitive financial constraints, human ...capital and social capital, we propose a theoretical framework in which financing determinants come from three dimensions: entrepreneurs’ individual factors, organisational (firm-level) factors and contextual (institutional) factors. We employ this model to distinguish four types of firms: (1) firms that use no external finance, (2) firms that use informal finance only, (3) firms that use formal finance only and (4) firms that use both formal and informal finance. An empirical test on Vietnamese small businesses shows that factors from all three dimensions are important in understanding small businesses’ financing decisions.
This study examines whether energy security contributes to economic growth for a global sample of 74 countries covering the period from 2002 to 2013. The benchmark model is built based on an extended ...version of the Cobb-Douglas production function. Ten measures of energy security are employed to capture five aspects of energy security including availability, accessibility, acceptability, affordability, and develop-ability. Besides the whole sample, we also conduct the panel data analysis on subsamples of countries based on different income levels, using Panel-Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE) and Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) techniques that correct for heterogeneity and autocorrelation and produce robust standard errors. The empirical results appear to be relatively robust to these two estimation techniques. Overall, we find that energy security enhances economic growth for both the whole sample and subsamples of countries. Meanwhile, energy insecurity measured by energy intensity and carbon intensity variables has a negative impact on economic growth. The results vary across subsamples for several cases. The findings imply that at the global level, energy for economic development, energy security, and climate change mitigation should be pursued as integrated themes since there are linkages among these three agendas.
•This study examines if energy security affects economic growth for a global sample.•The benchmark model is an extended version of the Cobb-Douglas production function.•Ten measures of energy security are employed to capture five aspects of the term.•Energy security measures appear to enhance economic growth for the global sample.•Energy insecurity measures seem to have a negative impact on economic growth.
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In this paper, we study the physical significance of the thermodynamic volumes of AdS black holes using the Noether charge formalism of Iyer and Wald. After applying this formalism to study ...the extended thermodynamics of a few examples, we discuss how the extended thermodynamics interacts with the recent complexity = action proposal of Brown et al. (CA-duality). We, in particular, discover that their proposal for the late time rate of change of complexity has a nice decomposition in terms of thermodynamic quantities reminiscent of the Smarr relation. This decomposition strongly suggests a geometric, and via CA-duality holographic, interpretation for the thermodynamic volume of an AdS black hole. We go on to discuss the role of thermodynamics in complexity = action for a number of black hole solutions, and then point out the possibility of an alternate proposal, which we dub “complexity = volume 2.0”. In this alternate proposal the complexity would be thought of as the spacetime volume of the Wheeler-DeWitt patch. Finally, we provide evidence that, in certain cases, our proposal for complexity is consistent with the Lloyd bound whereas CA-duality is not.
We argue that the resolution to the black hole information paradox lies in a proper accounting of the implications of diffeomorphism invariance for the Hilbert space and observables of quantum ...gravity. The setting of asymptotically anti–de Sitter spacetime is adopted for most of the paper, but in the framework of canonical quantum gravity, without invoking AdS/CFT duality. We present Marolf's argument that boundary unitarity is a consequence of diffeomorphism invariance and show that its failure to apply in the classical limit results from a lack of analyticity that has no quantum counterpart. We argue that boundary unitarity leads to a boundary information paradox, which generalizes the black hole information paradox and arises in virtually any scattering process. We propose a resolution that involves operators of the boundary algebra that redundantly encode information about physics in the bulk and explain why such redundancy need not violate the algebraic no cloning theorem. We also argue that the infaller paradox, which has motivated the firewall hypothesis for black hole horizons, is ill-posed in quantum gravity, because it ignores essential aspects of the nature of the Hilbert space and observables in quantum gravity.
We propose a weakly supervised temporal action localization algorithm on untrimmed videos using convolutional neural networks. Our algorithm learns from video-level class labels and predicts temporal ...intervals of human actions with no requirement of temporal localization annotations. We design our network to identify a sparse subset of key segments associated with target actions in a video using an attention module and fuse the key segments through adaptive temporal pooling. Our loss function is comprised of two terms that minimize the video-level action classification error and enforce the sparsity of the segment selection. At inference time, we extract and score temporal proposals using temporal class activations and class-agnostic attentions to estimate the time intervals that correspond to target actions. The proposed algorithm attains state-of-the-art results on the THUMOS14 dataset and outstanding performance on ActivityNet1.3 even with its weak supervision.
Chiral-induced spin selectivity is a phenomenon in which electron spins are polarized as they are transported through chiral molecules, and the spin polarization depends on the handedness of the ...chiral molecule. In this study, we show that spin selectivity can be realized in achiral materials by strongly coupling electrons to a circularly polarized mode of an optical cavity or waveguide. Through the investigation of spin-dependent electron transport in a two-terminal setup using the nonequilibrium Green’s function approach, it is found that a large spin polarization can be obtained if the rate of dephasing is sufficiently small and the average chemical potential of the two leads is within an appropriate range of values, which is narrow because of the high frequency of the optical mode. To obtain a wider range of energies for a large spin polarization, chiral molecules can be combined with light–matter interactions. To demonstrate this, the spin polarization of electrons transported through a helical molecule strongly coupled to a circularly polarized optical mode is evaluated.
It has been experimentally demonstrated that molecular-vibration polaritons formed by strong coupling of a molecular vibration to an infrared cavity mode can significantly modify the physical ...properties and chemical reactivities of various molecular systems. However, a complete theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the modifications remains elusive due to the complexity of the hybrid system, especially the collective nature of polaritonic states in systems containing many molecules. We develop here the semiclassical theory of molecular vibration-polariton dynamics based on the truncated Wigner approximation (TWA) that is tractable in large molecular systems and simultaneously captures the quantum character of photons in the optical cavity. The theory is then applied to investigate the nuclear quantum dynamics of a system of identical diatomic molecules having the ground-state Morse potential and being strongly coupled to an infrared cavity mode in the ultrastrong coupling regime. The validity of TWA is examined by comparing it with the full quantum dynamics of a single-molecule system for two different initial states in the dipole and Coulomb gauges. For the initial tensor-product ground state in the dipole gauge, which corresponds to a light–matter entangled state in the Coulomb gauge, the collective and resonance effects of molecular vibration-polariton formation on the nuclear dynamics are observed in a system of many molecules.
This paper is a pioneering endeavour to investigate the determinants of environmental degradation in Australia through a comprehensive framework of EKC and STIRPAT. Specifically, the impacts of ...multiple factors of socio-economic development including economic growth, trade openness, industrialization, energy consumption on CO2 emissions are analysed. Furthermore, the influences of financial development through different dimensions (financial efficiency, access and depth) in two subsectors (financial markets and institutions) and other proxies of financial development are focused over the period 1980–2014. Empirical results show short as well as long-run differences in the association among the variables. Short-term bidirectional causality prevails between economic growth, energy consumption, industrialization, and stock market development with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. However, there is no significant evidence found on EKC. This is due to the long-run positive impact of financial development, energy consumption, and trade openness on CO2 emissions. Interestingly, the industrialization process is found to does not affect CO2 emissions. Empirical findings provide insight into why the quality of the Australian environment is truncated with frequent and widespread bushfires and suggest policymakers to have selective and strict environmental-friendly strategies to fulfil a sustainable development goal.
•Study analysis determinants of environmental degradation in Australia.•Economic growth, trade openness and energy consumption contribute to CO2 emissions.•Industrialization process has no statistically significant impact on CO2 emissions.•Financial efficiency, financial access and financial depth affect the CO2 emissions.•Financial markets and institutions play a vital role in increasing CO2 emissions.
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