Ž . We examine the pricing of initial public offering IPO and seasoned equity offering Ž . SEO firms using a stochastic frontier methodology. The stochastic frontier framework models the difference between the maximum possible value of the firm and its actual market capitalization at the time of the offering as a function of observable firm characteristics. Using a new data set, we find that co...

Indole-3-carbinol (I3C) is a plant compound derived from glucosinolates, found in cruciferous vegetables. Researchers have indicated that I3C shows great promise as a cancer preventative and hormone-balancing agent. HyperChem 7.5 software was used for quantum mechanical calculations. The geometry optimization was carried out using Ab Initio method. QSAR parameters were generated with semi empir...

This paper addresses a visibility-based pursuit-evasion problem in which a team of mobile robots with limited sensing and communication capabilities must coordinate to detect any evaders in an unknown, multiply-connected planar environment. Our distributed algorithm to guarantee evader detection is built around maintaining complete coverage of the frontier between cleared and contaminated regio...

Step-flow growths of diamond on single-layer steps of hydrogenated diamond (001) surface have been investigated using the semiempirical molecular orbital method PM5. The chemical reactions at the first stage of growth have been calculated as a function of the charges biased to the substrates. When the frontier orbits of a pair of surface hydrogen atoms of step edge by negative charge 2 interact...

An alternative approach for evaluating the efficiency of integrated circuit (IC) design firms is presented in this paper. We took into account the differences between technology groups, containing one or more design firms, and input and output factors to prevent influences of scale (e.g., firm size). Specifically, we employed a directional distance function approach to data envelopment analysis...

This paper studies the time-consistent investment strategy for a defined contribution (DC) pension plan under the mean–variance criterion. Since the time horizon of a pension fund management problem is relatively long, two background risks are taken into account: the inflation risk and the salary risk. Meanwhile, there are a risk-free asset, a stock and an inflation-indexed bond available in th...

Despite remaining the most important type of animal production, pig production in Poland and Hungary declined after their accession to European Union (EU) 2004. This paper investigated evolution technical efficiency pork industry both countries. We applied stochastic frontier analysis, which takes into account heterogeneity environment functions countries—true random effects, a metafrontier mod...

Strong gravitational lensing provides a powerful means for studying faint galaxies in the distant universe. By magnifying the apparent brightness of background sources, massive clusters enable the detection of galaxies fainter than the usual sensitivity limit for blank fields. However, this gain in effective sensitivity comes at the cost of a reduced survey volume and, in this Letter, we demons...

Data swapping makes it impossible for an intruder to be certain of having identified an individual or entity in the database, because no record is certain to be unaltered. At the same time, the data are distorted (joint distributions involving both swapped and unswapped attributes change), decreasing their utility for purposes such as statistical inference. Implementation of data swapping entai...