To identify the polymyxin receptor molecules in the membranes of living microorganisms, fusion of intact Acholeplasma laidlawii B with lipid vesicles was investigated according to the procedure of Grant and McConnell (1973). The naturally polymyxin-resistant A. laidlawii B was treated with phospholipid vesicles prepared from purified phospholipids of the polymyxin-susceptible Salmonella typhimu...

This work explores a number of properties investigated in the empirical literature on firm size and growth dynamics: (i) the distribution and the autoregressive structure of firm size; (ii) the existence of size-growth scaling relationships; (iii) the distribution and the autoregressive structure of scaling-free growth rates. The major novelty concerns our exploiting of a credit rating index to...

We investigate the disciplining role of debt in the publicly held firm by examining the relation between employee productivity and financial leverage. The unique feature of our study is that we incorporate outside employment opportunities for employees into the analysis. Consistent with the notion that the debt serves as a bonding mechanism because agents exert additional effort to avoid the pe...

Article history: Received 9 May 2011 Received in revised form 24 October 2011 Accepted 1 November 2011 Available online 9 November 2011 We survey 290 LATAM firms on capital budgeting, cost of capital and capital structure issues. We analyze the results and compare them to those of other studies. We interpret differences according to special features characterizing both emerging markets and SME....

This paper investigates politically connected firms in Germany. With the introduction of a new transparency law in 2007, information on additional income sources for all members of the German parliament became publicly available. We find that members of the conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the liberal party (FDP) are more likely to work for firms than members of left-wing parties (SPD and The L...

This study sets up a compound option approach for evaluating pharmaceutical R&D investment projects in the presence of technical and economic uncertainties. Technical uncertainty is modeled as a Poisson jump that allows for failure and thus abandonment of the drug development. Economic uncertainty is modeled as a standard di¤usion process which incorporates both up-and downward shocks. Practica...

We develop a rational expectations equilibrium model in which noise trading comes from discretionary liquidity traders. The equilibrium quantity of aggregate noise trading is endogenously determined by the population size of liquidity traders active in the financial market. By improving market liquidity, public information reduces the expected trading loss of liquidity traders and thus attracts...

We examine the voluntary disclosure policy of a ®rm where the manager has private information and opportunities to trade on it. The equilibrium disclosure policy ranges from full disclosure to partial disclosure to nondisclosure depending on whether the manager's pay±performance sensitivity is high, medium or low, respectively. In the partial disclosure equilibrium, good news is more likely to ...

9 Employing data sets from 46 countries, this paper identifies a significant positive rela10 tionship between the performance of the financial sector and the non-financial ones in the 11 presence of a growth rate in the GDP and in inflation rates. To account for this relationship, 12 we initially put forth four hypotheses. Results show that “bank concentration” (the first hy13 pothesis) conside...

This paper examines how collateral and personal guarantees affect firms’ ex-post performance employing a propensity score matching estimation approach. Based on a unique firm-level panel data set of more than 500 small-and-medium-sized borrower firms in Japan, we find that borrowers that provide collateral to lenders experience larger increases in profitability and reductions in riskiness than ...