Search

This book explores the rich and unique quasiparticle properties of emergent materials through a VASP-based theoretical framework. It illustrates various quasiparticle phenomena and considers such emerging materials as zigzag nanotubes, nanoribbons, germanene, plumbene, bismuth chalcogenide insulators, and many others as well as applications.

Proceedings of the Annual International Conference on Towards Excellence in Leadership and Management in Higher Education, held at SEAMEO RETRACâs premises in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in July 2016. The theme of the conference is the need for strengthening and enhancing quality in leadership and management in higher education, focusing on providing the participants who are educators, leaders, administrators, researchers and professionals of universities and colleges with opportunities for sharing information, expertise and experiences in such sub-areas as redefining the roles of higher education leaders in the 21st century, teacher education, integration of 21st century skills in curriculum (and curriculum innovation), ICT integration to achieve effectiveness in teaching and management and quality assurance and accreditation in higher education. [p.3, ed].

My research interests focus on the economic behavior, choices, and actions of organizations as well as individuals given their incentives, and analyze the consequences of such decisions to the financial health of firms and the macro economy. A firm is incentivized by the value investors place on its operations; while employees, particularly the management team, is incentivized by the private benefits the firm gives them. Understanding the impact of such incentives will help alleviate the classic agency costs in modern organizations. Stock illiquidity raises the cost of share ownership to outside investors. The sizable adverse price impact of trading increases transactions costs and stock volatility. The reduced gains from informed trading discourages the acquisition of private information and impedes the price discovery process. The first essay substantiates that shares of financially constrained firms are significantly more illiquid than shares of similar but financially unconstrained firms. Acting as buyers of last resort for their own shares, share repurchases by financially constrained firms enhance stock liquidity, which alleviates the cost of external financing and underinvestment. Increased stock liquidity improves information efficiency, inducing higher value-added from incremental capital investments. Further, higher stock liquidity lowers stock volatility and allows financially constrained firms to issue equity. In the second and third essays, I investigate whether the incentives given to the employees and the management team at banks contribute to the financial crisis. I provide evidence that CEO compensation is weakly related to bank risk measures and risky bank activities. However, when looking at banks with regards to their reward cultures, I find that during the 2008 crisis period, banks either at the high or low reward culture groups perform worse, and are more risky than banks in the average reward culture group. The reward culture score represents the common factor in incentives across all levels of the bank, from CEO, Vice Presidents to all other employees. The findings are consistent with the problems of adverse selection and moral hazard associated with incentive misalignment when incentives are too low or too high. This shows the importance of reward culture in understanding the role of performance-based compensation.

The paper compares fiscal cyclicality across regions and countries from 1960 to 2016. It finds that more than half of 170 countries analyzed in seven regions had, in more recent years, limited fiscal space, and that their fiscal policy was either cyclical or procyclical. This was particularly apparent since the 2008−2009 global financial crisis, which was marked by increased procyclical government spending when accounting for net acquisition of nonfinancial assets and capital expenditure. We construct a limited-fiscal-capacity statistic, measured by public debt−average tax revenue ratio and its volatility, which is found to be positively associated with fiscal procyclicality. The cyclicality is asymmetric: on average, a more indebted government (relative to the tax base) spends more in good times and cuts back spending indifferently compared with low-debt countries in bad times. Having sovereign wealth funds is also associated with larger countercyclicality. An enduring interest rate rise entails diminished fiscal space−a 10% increase in the public debt−tax base ratio is associated with an upper bound of a 5.6% increase in government-spending procyclicality.

This study explores the effect of stock liquidity on firm value in the context of Vietnam. Theory suggests that liquid stocks have been shown to facilitate more efficient management compensation, reduce managerial opportunism decisions and promote trade by informed investors; hence improving the firm performance. Based on a sample of largest firms in Vietnam from 2012 to 2016 and panel regression models, we find that there is no relationship between Tobin's Q and turnover volume as a proxy of stock liquidity. However, a significant relationship between Tobin's Q and Amihud Illiquidity has been confirmed from the random effect regression model. For instance, a rise in stock liquidity in one stand deviation improves the firm value by 7.31%.

Soybean is influenced by temperature and light, and global warming has been shown to reduce soybean yields. In this study we tested the germination of TM-Miniature, a soybean mutant with dwarf phenotype, and TM-Normal and two other genotypes in response to high temperatures of 38 °C, 40 °C, and a control temperature of 28 °C. The results showed that a mutation might cause TM-Miniature seedlings to be more thermotolerant than TM-Normal and the two other genotypes at emergence. We also examined the morphology and anatomy of TM-Miniature and TM-Normal in response to a range of temperature and photoperiods conditions. The data indicated clearly that TM-Miniature phenotype was influenced by night temperature and light interruption of the dark period. Leaves of TM-Miniature plants were very small at low night temperature while the leaf thickness remained unchanged. The upper and lower epidermal cell layers decreased in thickness as nighttime temperature increased. In addition, stomatal density and stomatal index decreased in TM-Miniature. TM-Miniature is controlled by a single mutant gene. Glyma14g36890 is an interesting candidate gene and was found near the Satt560 marker that co-segregated with the miniature trait. This gene was amplified and sequenced to study nucleotide differences between TM-Normal and William 82. The sequenced armadillo gene in our study did not show nucleotide differences in the predicted promoter region and exon gene region. However, there appear to be sequence differences in a predicted intron.

Almost all countries announced fiscal support programs once COVID-19 hit. However, there was significant diversity in the magnitude and composition of these fiscal stimulus programs. These differences were determined by myriad political, financial, social, and economic factors - these factors are our focus. We ask what were the factors that are associated with the structure of the fiscal programs that governments chose to adopt in the early stage of the pandemic in 2020. We answer this question using details about the fiscal programs that were announced by 98 governments in the first six months of the pandemic, together with a large set of explanatory variables. Maybe not surprisingly, we find that politics played a very significant part in determining the size and composition of these fiscal programs. Governments and societies that are less polarized and more capable were able to mobilise more fiscal resources. We also find that it was governments with bigger debt loads that announced bigger programs, but that sovereign spreads were not so clearly associated with the size of these program plans. There is a limit, however, to what we can glean from these cross-country comparisons. Ultimately, the understanding of the politics and political-economy considerations that led to the specific content of each fiscal program will have to rely on information about the actual deliberations in each government's halls of power, should these ever become public.

This paper examines the association between episodes of large fiscal impulses (expansions and adjustments) and sustainable development indicators (prosperity, resilience, and inclusivity). We provide country studies of Chile, Poland, South Africa, and Thailand, examining the components of government expenses and tax revenues, and reporting four stylized patterns from the analysis. (i) Fiscal expansions led to higher growth rates and reduced negative trade-offs, e.g., pollution and poor-health mortalities associated with economic growth. (ii) Fiscal adjustments led to a more inclusive economy, lowered poverty headcounts, improved sanitation, and cleaner technology access. (iii) Fiscal expansions followed an increase in direct taxes (especially corporate taxes) and a decline in social contributions, and preceded a decline in other direct taxes and an increase in wage bills. (iv) Fiscal adjustments followed a decline in other direct taxes and social contributions, an increase in wage bills, and preceded a decline in government consumption expenditure and transfers. In light of these findings, the domestic resource mobilization should consider the time paths of the taxes and expenditure components to understand their empirical linkages with the sustainable development outcomes in the respective countries.