Twenty percent of the world population, or 1.2 billion live on less than $1 per day; 70% of these are rural and 90% in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Research led technological change in agriculture generates sufficient productivity growth to give high rates of return in African and Asia and has a...

A growing number of merger studies concern the causality of firm performance and merger activity in the last decade, but with mixed results. Assuming semi-strong efficiency, this article argues that firms with good stock performance are more likely to acquire other firms. With 412 US-listed...

In Taiwan the optimal number of financial holding companies (FHCs) has become an economic as well as political concern since 2002. This paper is different from most early papers by focusing solely on the measure of the change in synergies around the mergers of financial services companies, by...

This research reported on the successfully production of biodiesel by transesterification of crude rice bran oil (RBO). The process included three-steps. Firstly, the acid value of RBO was reduced to below 1 mg KOH/g by two-steps pretreatment process in the presence of sulfuric acid...

In this paper, we consider the parallel machine scheduling with a simultaneity constraint and unit-length jobs. The problem can be described as follows. There are given m parallel machines and a graph G, whose vertices represent jobs. Simultaneity constraint means that we can process a vertex...

Fossil fuel resources are decreasing daily. As a renewable energy, biodiesel has been receiving increasing attention because of the relevance it gains from the rising petroleum price and its environmental advantages. This review highlights some of the perspectives for the biodiesel industry to...

A conceptual analysis of the mechanism of the Miller cycle for reducing NOx emissions is presented. Two versions of selected Miller cycle (1 and 2) were designed and realized on a Rover "K" series 16-valve twin-camshaft petrol engine. The test results showed that the application of the Miller...

This paper examines the effectiveness of monitoring function from institutional investors on corporate hedging strategy in Taiwan over the period from 2005 to 2012. The empirical results show that institutional investors are effective monitors of corporate risk management to enhance the...

As a response to growing concerns regarding the call for clean energy and its impact on future automobile sales, this study uses a classical factor model and the Peña-Box model to examine the contemporary and time-varying relationships of different brands/models of cars in Taiwan between 2003...