We study the interaction between interbank competition and accounting information quality and their effects on banks’ risk-taking behavior. We identify an endogenous false-alarm cost that banks incur when forced to sell assets to meet capital requirements. We find that when the interbank competition is less intense, an improvement in the quality of accounting information encourages banks to tak...

The aim of this audit was to assess the effect of the Quality Mark programme on the quality of acute care received by older patients by comparing the experiences of staff and older adults before and after the programme. Data from 31 wards in 12 acute hospitals were collected over two stages. Patients and staff completed questionnaires on the perceived quality of care on the ward. Patients rated...

Industries having poor power factor face the problem of reduced power quality and increased electricity charges. To improve the power factor, capacitor banks of appropriate KVAR ratings are to be placed. In this paper the inductive loads in a sugar mill are investigated and suitable power factor improvement capacitors are recommended. The effect of low power factor on distribution losses and KV...

needs to explain how third-party elections produce strongly reversed effects of stochastic learning. Also, he could validate his model for two party elections if he used data—from other two-party election years or countries—that were not used to build his original model. However, given the apparently small effects of stochastic learning and various problems with data quality, this could be a di...

in recent years, the water quality of karun river, iran, has been affected by different pollutant loads such as agricultural drainages, municipal and industrial wastewaters.water quality index (wqi) and gis as an efficient tool can be used to provide necessary support for decisions of the management actions in this river and also capability of time series models can be beneficial for forecastin...

This paper discusses how to make a distributed object system flexible so as to satisfy applications’ requirements in change of the system environment. The system change is modeled to be the change of not only types of service but also quality of service (QoS) supported by the objects. There are two types of methods changing the objects, one for manipulating the states of the objects and another...

There is an increasing interest in the design and development of smart environments as they can be used to implement valuable applications aiming at improving the quality of life. However, another important issue, which has not been yet fully investigated, concerns the design and development of agents able to effectively and efficiently act in the new and emerging smart environments characteriz...

Wireless sensor networks have become extremely popular in a number of fields in recent years, the cultural heritage among them. To date, however, communications quality has not been technically validated in any of the various built (churches, museums, archaeological sites) or natural (caves, lava tubes) heritage scenarios. The present study establishes methodology for assessing the quality of w...

Effective communication between patients, their families, their carers and health care professionals is paramount to the delivery of high quality care. Addressing the ideas, concerns and expectations of these groups may improve their healthcare experience. We propose that opening a new channel of communication between patients, families, carers and healthcare professionals on the wards would im...

IT SHOULD come as no surprise to most nurses that the best and most experienced clinical members of wards or unit teams do not necessarily make the most effective managers. Yet employers persist in appointing senior clinical staff into ward or unit managerial posts, or worse, encourage clinical staff to take up managerial posts and then burden them further by asking them to retain clinica! resp...