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The purpose of this paper is to study the behaviour of glass reinforced epoxy tubes subjected to repeated indentation loads at two non-coincident indentations 180° apart.

Four geometrically scaled specimens ranging from 100 to 400 mm diameter were used in repeated indentation tests. Force, displacement and damage growth were recorded for loading and unloading until the indenter returned to its original starting point.

Similar scaled trends were observed between the non-coincidental loadings. Unlike reported response form coincidental loadings, the responses from non-coincidental loadings yield lower values for bending stiffness and peak load.

The differences in behaviour of the specimen between non-coincident loadings were attributed to reductions in fracture toughness and circumferential modulus.

Distant non-interacting damage and delamination around the circumference does reduce the structural performance.

Behaviour of composite tubes under different loading conditions, for example low speed impact or quasi static indentation, is widely studied, however little attention has been given to the repeated loading incidents.

The idea that a bank's overall performance is influenced by the regional economy in which it operates is intuitive and broadly consistent with historical bank performance. Yet, micro-level research on the topic has borne mixed results, failing to find a consistent link between various measures of bank performance and regional economic variables. This chapter attempts to reconcile the intuition with the micro-level data by aggregating bank performance, as measured by nonperforming loans, up to the state level. This level of aggregation reduces the influence of idiosyncratic bank effects sufficiently so as to examine more clearly the influence of state-level economic variables. We show that regional variables, such as employment growth and changes in real estate prices, are not particularly useful for predicting changes in bank performance, but that coincident indicators developed to track a state's gross output are quite useful. We find that these coincident indicators have a statistically significant and economically important influence on state-level, aggregate bank performance. In addition, the coincident indicators potentially contribute to the out-of-sample forecasts of the relative riskiness of state-level bank portfolios, which should be of interest to bankers and bank supervisors.

Value relevance studies, in particular international comparative studies, use market values sampled at different dates relative to the fiscal year-end. This paper aims to contribute a theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between value relevance and the month of market value sampling.

The paper examines two components of value relevance, coincident relevance and forecast relevance, which the paper develops on the basis of the Ohlson model. The paper measures value relevance by estimating separate panel-data regressions for each of the 12 months around fiscal year-end. The sample consists of companies listed in two continental European countries, France and Germany, over the 1989-2008 period.

In both country panels, the paper finds that overall value relevance is higher when market value is sampled before or close to fiscal year-end, but incremental value relevance varies between domestic and International Financial Reporting (IFRS) accounting standards. Regression results reveal significant variations in coefficients over the following months of market value in French panel and its IFRS sub-sample only.

The scope of the study is limited to the average value relevance parameters of companies listed on stock exchanges in France and Germany. Future research may be devoted to other countries and study additional determinants of value relevance.

The study shows that the selection of the month of market value sampling can have significant impact on value relevance regression results. Therefore, sensitivity analysis needs to be included in research studies which rely on the value relevance approach.

The paper contributes the first systematic analysis of the variation in value relevance parameters in response to the selection of the month in which market value is sampled.

The purpose of this paper is to present and analyze the iterative rules determining the impulsive behavior of a rigid disk having a single or possibly multiple frictionless impact with two walls forming a corner.

In the first part, two theoretical iterative rules are presented for the cases of ideal impact and Newtonian frictionless impact with global dissipation index. In the second part, a numerical version of both the theoretical algorithms is presented.

The termination analysis of the algorithms differentiates the two cases: in the ideal case, it is shown that the algorithm always terminates and the disk exits from the corner after a finite number of steps independently of the initial impact velocity of the disk and the angle formed by the walls; in the non-idealcase, although is not proved that the disk exits from the corner in a finite number of steps, it is shown that its velocity decreases to zero, so that the termination of the algorithm can be fixed through an “almost at rest” condition. It is shown that the stable version of the algorithm is more robust than the theoretical ones with respect to noisy initial data and floating point arithmetic computation. The outputs of the stable and theoretical versions of the algorithms are compared, showing that they are similar, even if not coincident, outputs. Moreover, the outputs of the stable version of the algorithm in some meaningful cases are graphically presented and discussed.

The paper clarifies the applicability of theoretical methods presented in Pasquero (2018) by analyzing the paradigmatic case of the disk in the corner.

This paper investigates the economic impact of corporate name changes around the time of their announcement. We analyse a sample of 107 listed Australian companies that changed their name over the period January 1995 to December 1999. We conduct separate analysis of firms having ‘major’ versus ‘minor’ name changes; of firms with coincident financial restructuring versus firms without restructuring; of small firms versus large firms and of dotcom firms versus non‐dotcom firms. Generally, we find some evidence of a negative association between the corporate name change event and abnormal returns. This seems particularly the case for those companies whose name change is deemed to be ‘major’.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between commercial bank lending and business cycle in South Africa. This paper attempts to know whether commercial bank lending in South Africa is procyclical.

The model assumed that the lending behaviour is related to the business cycle. In this study, vector error correction model (VECM) is used to capture the relationship between bank lending and business cycle to accurately elicit the macroeconomic long-run relationship between business cycle and bank lending, as some banks might slow down bank lending due to some idiosyncratic factors that are not related to the downturn in the economy. This paper uses data from South African Reserve Bank for the period of 1990-2015 using VECM to understand the extent to which business cycle fluctuation can affect credit crunch in the financial system. The Johansen cointegration approach is used to ascertain whether there is indeed a long-run co-movement between credit growth and business cycle.

Results from the VECM show that there are significant linkages among the variables, especially between credit to gross domestic product (GDP) and business cycle. The influence of business cycle is seen vividly after a period of four to five years, where business cycle explains 20 per cent of the variation in the credit to GDP. South African banks tend to change their lending behaviour during upturns and downturns. This result further confirms the assertion in theory that credit follows business cycle and can amplify credit crunch. The result shows that in the long run, fluctuations in the business cycle can influence the credit growth in South Africa.

The impulse analysis result shows that the impact of business cycle shock is very persistent and lasting. This also demonstrates that the shocks to the business cycle result have a persistent and long-lasting impact on credit. This study finds that commercial bank lending in South Africa is procyclical. It is suggested that the South African economy needs forward-looking policies that will mitigate the flow of credit to the real sector and at the same time ensure financial stability.

Most research papers rarely distinguish between the demand side and supply side of credit procyclicality. This report is presented to develop an econometric model that will examine demand side procyclicality. This study adopts more realistic and novel methods that will help in explaining the relationship between bank lending and business cycle in South Africa, especially after the global financial crisis. This report is presented with a concise and detailed analysis and interpretation.

The performance of earthmoving operations, in terms of emissions, production and cost, is dependent on many variables and has been the study of a number of publications. Such publications look at typical operation design and management, without establishing what the penalties or bonuses might be for non-standard, but still observed, practices. To fill this gap in knowledge, this paper examines alternative loading policies of zero waiting-time loading, fractional loading and double-sided loading, and compares the performance of these with standard single-sided loading.

Original recursive relationships, that are amenable to Monte Carlo simulation, are derived. Case study data are used to illustrate the emissions, production and cost penalties or bonuses.

Double-sided loading contributes the least impact to the environment and is the most cost effective. Zero waiting-time loading performs the worst in terms of environmental impact and cost. Minimizing truck waiting times through using fractional loading is generally not an attractive policy because it leads to an increase in unit emissions and unit costs. The consequences of adopting fractional loading are detailed. Optimum unit emissions and optimum unit cost are coincident with respect to fleet size for single- and double-sided loading policies. That is, by minimizing unit cost, as in traditional practice, then least impact on the environment is obtained. Not minimizing unit cost will lead to unnecessary emissions.

The results of this paper will be of interest to those designing and managing earthmoving operations.

All modeling and results presented in the paper do not exist elsewhere in the literature.

Transportation plays a central role in facilitating economic activities across sectors and between regions and thus should be essential to business cycle research. In this chapter, we identify four coincident indicators representing different aspects of the transportation sector. Foremost among them is the index of transportation services output (TSI) presented in the previous chapter. Following the long-standing methodology of National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) business cycle research, the other three indicators that we include are payroll, personal consumption and employment – all pertaining to the transportation sector. Using a composite of the four indicators, we define the classical business cycle and growth cycle chronologies for the transportation sector. We find that, relative to the economy, business cycles in the transportation sector have an average lead of nearly 6 months at peaks and an average lag of 2 months at troughs. Similar to transportation business cycles, growth slowdowns in this sector also last longer than the economy-wide slowdowns by a few months. This study underscores the importance of transportation indicators in monitoring cyclical movements in the aggregate economy.

This paper aims to document the proliferating range of alternatives to the impact factor that have arisen within the past five years, coincident with the increased prominence of open access publishing.

This paper offers an overview of the history of the impact factor as: a measure for scholarly merit; a summary of frequent criticisms of the impact factor's calculation and usage; and a framework for understanding some of the leading alternatives to the impact factor.

This paper identifies five categories of alternatives to the impact factor: measures that build upon the same data that informs the impact factor; measures that refine impact factor data with “page rank” indices that weight electronic resources or web sites through the number of resources that link to them; measures of article downloads and other usage factors; recommender systems, in which individual scholars rate the value of articles and a group's evaluations pool together collectively; and ambitious measures that attempt to encompass the interactions and influence of all inputs in the scholarly communications system.

Librarians can utilize the measures described in this paper to support more robust collection development than is possible through reliance on the impact factor alone.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical model for considering ease numerically in the clothing pattern. Classifying the pattern as a geometric Cartesian coordinate system, this model proposes the need to quantify the partly coincident variables of ease, which will enable greater control over garment fit and function, using traditional or CAD/CAM methods.

The principles of pattern/garment dimensions are considered with support from analysis of literature and contributing factors to the variables of ease are categorised. These principles support a proposed theoretical model for considering pattern/garment dimensions, in the numeric format that they exist within the context of pattern construction.

Pattern construction occurs in a 2D Cartesian coordinate system, guided by body dimensions and ease. This can be modelled in the form of an algorithm relating to the placement of cardinal points defining the pattern outline. Recognition of the numerical nature of the pattern, suggests the need to quantify the coincident variables of ease, to achieve greater control over garment fit and function.

Few sources exist enabling the recognition of ease requirements in the pattern/garment and when guidance on ease is presented, there is little rationale as to how it has been established, or what contributes to its definition.

The paper shows how current methods of pattern construction can be modelled more effectively, recognising the geometric nature on which they are based. Modelling these relationships highlights where quantification can be provided, by existing knowledge or future research.