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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of financial ratios on the financial performance of a chemical company: LyondellBasell Industries (LYB). Some selected ratios: current ratio (CR) and quick ratio (QR) represent the liquidity ratios, debt ratio (DR) and debt equity ratio (DTER) represent the leverage ratios, while operating profit margin (OPM) and net profit margin (NPM) represent the profitability ratios. LYB faced financial problems after its merger and the financial performance of the company shrank to negative due to the world financial crisis. However, this company has bounced back after a year and is now the world's third largest chemical company based on revenue.

The financial ratios were measured from 2004 to 2011, quarterly. A multiple regression model has been used and secondary data has been analyzed.

The results shows that CR, QR, DR and NPM have a positive relationship while DTER and OPM have a negative relationship with the company's financial performance. Among the six ratios, CR, DR and NPM show the highest significant impact on the company's performance.

This research paper contributed the result of the impact of financial ratios on the financial performance of a chemical company as the previous studies with this focus are hard to find and some of the sources are not specifically related to the topic.

The problem of cyclic variation has been an interesting area of research and has been investigated by many researchers. It is more severe in the case of two‐stroke engines compared with four‐stroke engines. One of the reasons for these cycle‐to‐cycle variations is the variations in the air‐fuel ratios of individual cycles and, if these values of individual cycle air‐fuel ratios are available by some means, they can be used for controlling the cyclic variations. The purpose of this paper is to find a technique to predict the air‐fuel ratio of the individual cycles and use the same for reducing cyclic variations.

In this work, a neuro‐fuzzy model was developed using MATLAB software to compute the air‐fuel ratio of the individual cycles based on the relationship between the air‐fuel ratio and the combustion parameters such as those indicating mean effective pressure (IMEP), crank angle occurrence of peak pressure, and angles of different percentages of heat releases. In‐cylinder pressure traces of 1,000 continuous cycles were measured using a Personal Computer (PC)‐based data acquisition system and an investigation was carried out. The readings were taken for two modes of operations, namely gasoline carburetion and electronic gasoline injection. The engine was loaded by an eddy current dynamometer. The air‐fuel ratio was varied from rich to lean by adjusting the fuel quantity in the carburetion mode and adjusting the pulse width (measure of quantity of fuel to be injected) in the injection mode, at constant throttle. The cyclic variation was identified by the variations in the peak pressures and IMEPs of the individual cycles. The stored data were given as input to the developed neuro‐fuzzy model and, using SIMULINK, the air‐fuel ratios of individual cycles were obtained. These predicted values are fed to the electronic control module (ECM) (meant for injecting the fuel) for refining the pulse width to get cyclic variations reduced.

Results show that cyclic variation increases when the mixture becomes lean. It was also found that cyclic variation in an injected engine was less in comparison with the carbureted engine, as the precise control of air‐fuel mixture was possible in the case of the injected engine.

The technique used in this work may be modified to give more precise pulse width by incorporating various other parameters like exhaust temperature, etc. Future research may be focused to incorporate this system in a moving vehicle to get more fuel efficiency and fewer emissions.

The design of vehicle and engine should be slightly modified to incorporate the ECM and various sensors.

The originality in this paper is that a new technique was developed to find the air‐fuel ratio of individual cycles. This will be useful for the engine manufacturers and for those researchers doing research on the engine side.

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the financial performance measures calculated and reported by the Economic Resource Service (ERS) from Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) data. The evaluation includes the calculation method and the underlying assumptions used in obtaining the reported values. Recommendations for improving the information reported are proposed to ERS.

The financial measures calculated and reported are compared with those recommended by the Farm Financial Standards Council (FFSC). The underlying assumptions are identified by analyzing the software code used in calculating the values reported. The values reported by ERS are duplicated and alternative methods for calculating the financial performance measures are considered. The values obtained from the various calculation methods are compared and contrasted.

Recommendations for ERS include: calculate and report the financial measures recommended by FFSC, note values that are imputed, periodically update and validate assumptions used in calculating imputed values, review its policy for flagging estimates as statistically unreliable, report medians and other select percentiles, and consider reporting the percent of farm businesses that have values within critical zones.

A total of four methods for calculating financial performance measures are compared and contrasted. These are the aggregate mean, sample mean, sample median, and percentage of farm businesses with values in critical zones.

This paper analysises China’s optimal scale of foreign reserve during 1985‐2004 with single ratio and synthesis ratio. The single ratio analysis shows that China’s foreign reserve to import ratio has exceeded 40 per cent after foreign exchange rate united in 1994. The foreign reserve to money supply ratio is high as 23.8 per cent, and will exceed 25 per cent of international alertness in 2005. The foreign reserve to debt ratio largely exceeded 30 per cent of international alertness. The current account balance to GDP ratio and the current account balance plus FDI to GDP ratio is out of international alertness in most years. The synthesis ratio analysis show that China’s real foreign exchange reserve exceeded foreign exchange demand of debt, FDI and import during 1996‐2004, and the exceeded ratio is close to 90 per cent in 2004. This paper also discusses influence of capital flight after 1995 and international hot money after 2002 to China’s optimal scale of foreign exchange.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the dynamic effect of Tobin's q ratio on price-to-earnings (PE) ratio.

The objective of this study is to investigate the dynamic effect of Tobin's q on PE ratio. To achieve this objective, a vector autoregressive analysis (Equation (1)) is employed to analyze the quarterly data from 1951Q4 to 2012Q4 to determine the generalized impulse response functions and perform the variance decomposition of Tobin's q ratio on PE ratio. The Granger causality Wald test is performed to determine if Tobin's q ratio causes PE ratio and vice versa.

Based on the analysis of the quarterly market-level data from 1951Q4 to 2012Q4, the results show that PE ratio significantly drops immediately following the shock to the change in Tobin's q ratio. The results from the Granger-causality test indicate that Tobin's q ratio change causes PE ratio to drop. There is not a reverse causation from PE ratio to Tobin's q ratio change. The variance decomposition results reveal that Tobin's q ratio change forecasts about 67.53 to 67.78 percent of PE ratio at the two-quarter to eight-quarter horizons.

Up to this point, there is not a single study in the literature investigating the relationship between Tobin's q and PE ratios. Consequently, the current study is set up to investigate the dynamic effect of Tobin's q ratio on PE ratio. A major contribution of this study is to provide empirical evidence of the dynamic effect of Tobin's q ratio on PE ratio.

The purpose of this paper is to present key points relating to the development of micro drill bits with high aspect ratios and to provide a solution for high aspect ratio hole drilling.

Based on the analysis of challenges in high aspect ratio hole drilling, key points for the development of micro drills bit with high aspect ratio are discussed. A design example of a micro drill bit with 0.3 mm diameter and a 7.2 mm flute length is presented. Experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the developed micro drill bit.

Helix angle, web thickness and flute land ratio are three key parameters that significantly influence the behaviour of micro drill bits with high aspect ratios. Large helix angle, web thickness and flute land ratio are beneficial in terms of improving the performance of high aspect ratio micro drill bits. Step drilling is essential to prevent drill breakage and to ensure smooth debris evacuation. Meanwhile, proper steps and drilling parameters are of great importance to complete high aspect ratio hole drilling.

The paper highlights key points relating to the development of micro drill bits with high aspect ratios that can provide a satisfactory solution for high aspect ratio micro drill bit design.

Ratios were constructed using bidding data for highway construction projects in Texas to study whether there are useful patterns in project bids that are indicators of the project completion cost. The use of the ratios to improve predictions of completed project cost was studied.

Ratios were calculated relating the second lowest bid, mean bid, and maximum bid to the low bid for the highway construction projects. Regression and neural network models were developed to predict the completed cost of the highway projects using bidding data. Models including the bidding ratios, low bid, second lowest bid, mean bid and maximum bid were developed. Natural log transformations were applied to the data to improve model performance.

Analysis of the bidding ratios indicates some relationship between high values of the bidding ratios and final project costs that deviate significantly from the low bid amount. Addition of the ratios to neural network and regression models to predict the completed project cost were not found to enhance the predictions. The best performing regression model used only the low bid as input. The best performing neural network model used the low bid and second lowest bid as inputs.

The nature of bid ratios that can describe the pattern of bids submitted for a project and the relationship of the ratios to project outcomes were studied. The ratio values may be useful indicators of project outcome that can be used by construction managers.

This study aims to analyze the relationship between the financial crisis of Korean construction firms and macroeconomic fluctuations.

In this study, current ratio has been used an acting variable for liquidity ratio, and debt ratio for leverage ratio. GNI (Gross National Income), L (index of Liquidity), exchange rate, interest, and CPI (Consumer Price Index) were used for the macroeconomic variables. VECM consisted of Cr_t model and Dr_t model to analyze the relationship between current ratio and macroeconomic variables, and between debt ratio and macroeconomic variables, in order to analyze each model through variance decomposition and impulse response function.

In Cr_t model, L is revealed as highly influencing current ratio. In other words, most fundraising is focused on highly capable financial institutes, investment corporations and public funds, since the scale of construction project funds is huge. Such financial sources actually belong to index L (index of Liquidity), but are calculated as current liability in the financial statements of construction firms, knotting an inverse relationship with current ratio. In Dr_t model, interest is revealed as significant against debt ratio. This seems to be because each construction project needs to raise substantial funds, and the amount to repay is directly influenced by interest fluctuation.

The collected data are limited, as the time series data of current ratio and debt ratio were secured based on the financial statements of the most capable 30 construction firms in Korea. If the sample companies were divided in future research according to scale, in order to analyze the relation between financial crisis and macroeconomic fluctuation by company scale, a more developed result could be obtained.

This study is a useful research to analyze the dynamic relationship between the financial crisis of construction firms and macroeconomic fluctuations. This study can be used to establish a set of countermeasures to apply in the event of macroeconomic fluctuation.

The financial ratios of construction firms are directly used for analysis, making this a more practical analysis than studies of the relationship between macroeconomic fluctuations and the comprehensive indices of construction business.

This paper extends previous research by reexamining the difference in cross‐sectional variability of Japanese and U.S. price‐to‐earnings (PE) ratios. A simple model is developed to decompose the variance of the PE ratio into three components: the variance of the price‐to‐book (PB) ratio, the variance of the book‐to‐earnings (BE) ratio and the covariance of the PB and BE ratios. We analyze the behavior of the cross‐sectional variability of the PE ratio and its components and compare the behavior of these ratios across the U.S. and Japanese markets. We find that the cross‐sectional variability of the PE ratio in the Japanese market is consistently lower than that of the PB ratio and the converse is true for the U.S. market. The cross‐sectional variability of PE ratios in Japan is lower than that in the U.S. and the converse is true for the PB ratio. Our results are inconsistent with those reported by Bildersee et al. and indicate that the main factor causing the differences between the cross‐sectional variability of PE ratios and PB ratios is the high negative covariance of the PB and BE ratios.

To investigate the relation between the Poisson's ratio of a re‐entrant honeycomb structure by varying the micropolar material constants such as micropolar Young's modulus E_m, micropolar Poisson's ratio V_m, characteristic length l, coupling factor N, and micropolar elastic constants in accordance with the micropolar elastic restrictions, a 2‐D triangular finite element formulation including an extra degree of freedom was derived on the basis of Eringen's micropolar elasticity theory by using a linear triangular element. The effects on the structural Poisson's ratio of the honeycomb structure are studied in detail.