谈高校图书馆特色馆藏的建设

本文简述了高校图书馆特色馆藏建设的原则,并从地方特色、专业特色、虚拟馆藏建设等三个方面进行了探讨.     

How Do Institutional Factors Affect International Real Estate Returns?

Prior international real estate studies recognize the importance of country-specific factors for explaining real estate security returns. Using firm level observations from the FTSE NAREIT/EPRA Index for 2004?C2006, we construct a set of multifactor multivariate statistical regression models to identify and pin-point country-specific institutional features that determine differences for excess real estate security returns. Our analyses indicate that the excess real estate returns (i.e., required risk premiums) are, in part, determined by the quality of a country??s legal system and the corporate governance environment, controlling for various country-specific macro-economic variables and firm-level characteristics. We further find that the impact of institutional factors on international real estate returns is more prominent in the Asia-Pacific Region, and recent development of the REIT structure across the world does not alter the importance of corporate governance and legal system quality for determining real estate returns.     

A Relook into the Impact of Divestitures in the Presence of Agency Conflicts: Evidence from Property Subsidiary Sell-Offs in China

We analyze property subsidiary sell-offs in China to examine her market reaction to firms’ divestiture decisions. Overall, the response from the stock market is neutral. However, detailed analysis reveals that the market reacts differently to property subsidiary sell-off announcements by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-SOEs. Consistent with findings from extant literature, we find statistically positive market returns associated with non-SOE sell-off announcements. However, we find statistically negative market returns associated with SOE sell-off announcements. We suggest that this divergent market reaction is influenced by the institutional feature of the Chinese market and is consistent with the high agency costs associated with state ownership.     

Finite Prandtl number 2-D convection at high Rayleigh numbers

Finite Prandtl number thermal convection is important to the dynamics of planetary bodies in the solar system. For example, the complex geology on the surface of the Jovian moon Europa is caused by a convecting, brine-rich global ocean that deforms the overlying icy “lithosphere”. We have conducted a systematic study on the variations of the convection style, as Prandtl numbers are varied from 7 to 100 at Rayleigh numbers 106 and 108. Numerical simulations show that changes in the Prandtl number could exert significant effects on the shear flow, the number of convection cells, the degree of layering in the convection, and the number and size of the plumes in the convecting fluid. We found that for a given Rayleigh number, the convection style can change from single cell to layered convection, for increasing Prandtl number from 7 to 100. These results are important for determining the surface deformation on the Jovian moon Europa. They also have important implications for surface heat flow on Europa, and for the interior heat transfer of the early Earth during its magma ocean phase. Electronic Supplementary Material is available if you access this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10069-002-0004-4. On that page (frame on the left side), a link takes you directly to the supplementary material.     

Web-cam’s potential for collaborative activities in the Earth sciences

We report here our experiences from using easily acquired web-cam components for collaborative ventures in the Earth sciences. We have used a variety of hardware and different software. We demonstrate from various locations in the U.S.A. the feasibility of using web-cam in multitudinous activities, relevant for conducting research and knowledge dissemination. We summarize the quality of the connections from the various combinations of communicating parties. Today, web-cams can be utilized as an economical and viable means of point-to-point communication in the Earth science community. Greater bandwidth is sorely needed for activities such as multi-party conferencing on the present internet network. We propose that web-cam can be readily deployed as a web-service for facilitating collaborative research over the GRID infrastructure, using the middleware Narada-Brokering. Web-cam will play an important role in the emerging field of geoinformatics.     

Management forecasts and the cost of equity capital: international evidence

We examine international differences in the effect of management forecasts (which we use to proxy for voluntary disclosure) on the cost of equity capital (COC) across 31 countries. We find that the issuance of management forecasts is associated with a lower COC worldwide but that the effect of management forecasts on the COC depends on country-level institutional factors. Specifically, management forecasts have a stronger effect on the COC in countries with stronger investor protection and better information dissemination and a weaker effect in countries with higher mandatory disclosure requirements. Further analyses reveal that these relations are more pronounced when management forecasts are more frequent, more precise, and more disaggregated. Overall, our findings suggest that the ability of management forecasts to reduce firms’ COC derives not only from country-level factors that enhance the credibility of their forecasts but also from factors that reflect the quality of the information environment in terms of the distribution of news and the availability and quality of alternative information. Thus, investor protection, media penetration, and mandatory disclosure requirements have an important effect on the ability of management forecasts to lower the COC.     

Impact of US monetary policy rate shock and other external shocks on the Hong Kong economy: A factor‐augmented vector autoregression approach

This paper uses the factor‐augmented vector autoregression framework to study the impact on the Hong Kong economy of the diverging monetary policies by the Fed, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of Japan as well as the slowdown of the Mainland economy. The empirical results show that shocks in US monetary policy rate mainly affect interest rate‐sensitive sectors in Hong Kong and that monetary easing from the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan somewhat offsets the impact of tightening of the Fed. The transmission of external shocks is through trade and capital markets. Real variables such as real GDP growth and the unemployment rate are more sensitive to the economic slowdown in Mainland China. It is estimated that the combined effect of the four external shocks will on average lower Hong Kong's quarterly GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points and quarterly inflation by 0.2 percentage points in the first four quarters. However, Hong Kong's financial stability, particularly with regard to loan quality, banks’ capital and liquidity, is well maintained by macroprudential policies, suggesting that Hong Kong's financial system is resilient to external shocks.