Using a sample of non-U.S. borrowers from 40 countries during 1997ndash;2005, this paper investigates the effect of the voluntary adoption of International FinancialReporting Standards (IFRS) on price and non-price terms of loan contracts and loan ownership structure in the international loan...

Using a large sample of U.S. audit client firms over the period 2000-2005, this paper investigates whether and how the size of a local practice office within an audit firm (henceforth, office size) is a significant, engagement-specific factor determining audit quality and audit fees over and...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly used in the United Kingdom's public facilities and services provision through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Despite some casualties, PPP/PFI projects have been undertaken successfully, but the reasons for success are not entirely clear....

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly used in the United Kingdom's public facilities and services provision through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Despite some casualties, PPP/PFI projects have been undertaken successfully, but the reasons for success are not entirely clear....

In the last few years, vegetable industry developed rapidly in Hebei province, intensive raising seedling as its main component, also entered a period of rapid development. The background and characteristics, the current situation and existed questions of intensive seedling cultivation were...

In many applications the graph structure in a network arises from two sources: intrinsic connections and connections due to external effects. We introduce a sparse estimation procedure for graphical models that is capable of isolating the intrinsic connections by removing the external effects....

We introduce a nonparametric method for estimating non-Gaussian graphical models based on a new statistical relation called additive conditional independence, which is a three-way relation among random vectors that resembles the logical structure of conditional independence. Additive conditional...

type="main" xml:id="ecot12053-abs-0001" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>This paper examines the causal effect that trade openness has on government size in small developing countries (SDCs). We use the construction of the trade cost variables based on Baltic Dry Index in primary goods as instruments of...</p>

Liquid fuel such as bio-gasoline derived from biomass is widely recognized as a potential substitution for the diminishing fossil fuels due to its abundance of raw materials and lower greenhouse gas emissions. In this work, Ni/HZSM-5 catalysts were developed by incipient impregnation method and...

In this paper we demonstrate that a higher-ranking principal component of the predictor tends to have a stronger correlation with the response in single index models and sufficient dimension reduction. This tendency holds even though the orientation of the predictor is not designed in any way to...