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After loan interest rate upper limit deregulation in October 2004, the financing environment in China changed dramatically, and the banks were eligible for risk compensation. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the influence of the loan interest rate liberalization on firms’ loan maturity structure.

Based on Rajan's (1992) model, the authors constructed a trade-off model of how the banks choose long-term and short-term loans scales, and further analyzed banks’ loan term decisions under the loan interest rate upper limit deregulation or collateral cases. Then the authors used an unbalanced panel data set of 586 Chinese listed manufacturing companies and 9,376 observations during the period 1996-2011 to testify the theoretical conclusion. Furthermore, the authors studied the effect on firms with different characteristics of ownership or scale.

The results show that the loan interest rate liberalization significantly decreases the private companies’ reliance on short-term loans and increases sensitivity to interest rates of state-owned companies’ long-term loans. But the results also show that the companies’ ownership still plays a key role on the long-term loans availability. When monetary policy tightened, small companies still have to borrow short-term loans for long-term purposes. As the bank industry is still dominated by state-owned banks and the deposit interest rate has upper limits, the effect of the loan interest rate liberalization on easing long-term credit constraints is limited.

From a new perspective, the content and findings of this paper contribute to the study of the effect of the interest rate liberalization on China economy.

The purpose of this study is to propose a new consumer value segmentation method for low-dimensional dense market datasets to quickly detect and cluster the most profitable customers for the enterprises.

In this study, the comprehensive segmentation bases (CSB) with richer meanings were obtained by introducing the weighted recency-frequency-monetary (RFM) model into the common segmentation bases (SB). Further, a new market segmentation method, the CSB-MBK algorithm was proposed by integrating the CSB model and the mini-batch k-means (MBK) clustering algorithm.

The results show that our proposed CSB model can reflect consumers' contributions to a market, as well as improve the clustering performance. Moreover, the proposed CSB-MBK algorithm is demonstrably superior to the SB-MBK, CSB-KMA and CSB-Chameleon algorithms with respect to the Silhouette Coefficient (SC), the Calinski-Harabasz (CH) Index , the average running time and superior to the SB-MBK, RFM-MBK and WRFM-MBK algorithms in terms of the inter-market value and characteristic differentiation.

This paper provides a tool for decision-makers and marketers to segment a market quickly, which can help them grasp consumers' activity, loyalty, purchasing power and other characteristics in a target market timely and achieve the precision marketing.

This study is the first to introduce the CSB-MBK algorithm for identifying valuable customers through the comprehensive consideration of the clustering quality, consumer value and segmentation speed. Moreover, the CSB-MBK algorithm can be considered for applications in other markets.

Conventional frequent itemsets mining ignores the fact that the relative benefits or significance of “transactions” belonging to different customers are different in most of the relevant applied studies, which leads to failure to obtain some association rules with lower support but from higher-value consumers. Because not all customers are financially attractive to firms, it is necessary that their values be determined and that transactions be weighted. The purpose of this study is to propose a novel consumer preference mining method based on conventional frequent itemsets mining, which can discover more rules from the high-value consumers.

In this study, the authors extend the conventional association rule problem by associating the “annual purchase amount” – “price preference” (AP) weight with a consumer to reflect the consumer’s contribution to a market. Furthermore, a novel consumer preference mining method, the AP-weclat algorithm, is proposed by introducing the AP weight into the weclat algorithm for discovering frequent itemsets with higher values.

The experimental results from the survey data revealed that compared with the weclat algorithm, the AP-weclat algorithm can make some association rules with low support but a large contribution to a market pass the screening by assigning different weights to consumers in the process of frequent itemsets generation. In addition, some valuable preference combinations can be provided for related practitioners to refer to.

This study is the first to introduce the AP-weclat algorithm for discovering frequent itemsets from transactions through considering AP weight. Moreover, the AP-weclat algorithm can be considered for application in other markets.

With the analysis of the causes of corruption, this study aims to investigate specific anti-corruption measures that can be implemented to reform the political system and the social climate of China.

This study examines 97 severe corruption cases of high-ranking officials in China, which occurred between 2012 and 2015. As this insinuates that both institutional and social corruption are major problems in China, the analysis delves into multiple facts of corruption, including different types, four primary underlying causes, and suggestions regarding the implementation of three significant governmental shifts that focus on investigation, prevention tactics and legal regulations.

China’s corruption is not only individual-based but also it has developed into institutional corruption and social corruption. Besides human nature and instinct, the causes of corruption can be organised into four categories, namely, social customs, social transitions, institutional designs and institutional operations. For the removed high-ranking officials, the formation of interest chains was an important underlying cause behind their corruption.

This study makes a significant contribution to the literature because this study provides a well-rounded approach to a complex issue by highlighting the significance of democracy and the rule of law as ways to regulate human behaviour to combat future corruption.

This study aims to investigate the spectral illumination characteristics and geometric features of bicycle parts and proposes an image stitching method for their automatic visual inspection.

The unrealistic color casts of feature inspection is removed using white balance for global adjustment. The scale-invariant feature transforms (SIFT) is used to extract and detect the image features of image stitching. The Hough transform is used to detect the parameters of a circle for roundness of bicycle parts.

Results showed that maximum errors of 0°, 10°, 20°, 30°, 40° and 50° for the spectral illumination of white light light-emitting diode arrays with differential shift displacements are 4.4, 4.2, 7.8, 6.8, 8.1 and 3.5 per cent, respectively. The deviation error of image stitching for the stem accessory in x and y coordinates are 2 pixels. The SIFT and RANSAC enable to transform the stem image into local feature coordinates that are invariant to the illumination change.

This study can be applied to many fields of modern industrial manufacturing and provide useful information for automatic inspection and image stitching.