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The authors study the effects of altruism and intention for succession on family firm's reputation risk-taking behaviors in Chinese publicly listed companies.

The authors use earnings management as a proxy for reputation risk in family firms, and hand-collected relationship between family members to measure the closeness of incumbent family members and their potential successors as a proxy for the altruistic degree.

Results show that, in developing countries like China, familial altruism in family firms with succession plans, which does not reduce the practice of earnings management, should be considered by practitioners while detecting it.

The hand collected data are very unique; the authors have focused on the relationship between incumbents and successors and the authors define their closeness by using genes shared between them.

This paper aims to investigate the collision avoidance problem for a mobile robot by constructing an artificial potential field (APF) based on geometrically modelling the obstacles with a new method named the obstacle envelope modelling (OEM).

The obstacles of arbitrary shapes are enveloped in OEM using the primitive, which is an ellipse in a two-dimensional plane or an ellipsoid in a three-dimensional space. As the surface details of obstacles are neglected elegantly in OEM, the workspace of a mobile robot is made simpler so as to increase the capability of APF in a clustered environment.

Further, a dipole is applied to the construction of APF produced by each obstacle, among which the positive pole pushes the robot away and the negative pole pulls the robot close.

As a whole, the dipole leads the robot to make a derivation around the obstacle smoothly, which greatly reduces the local minima and trajectory oscillations. Computer simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

For gravity dams built on foundations with directional joint sets, the seepage in the foundation possesses anisotropic characteristics and may have adverse effects on the foundation stability. A methodology for system reliability analysis of gravity dam foundations considering anisotropic seepage and multiple sliding surfaces is proposed in this paper.

Anisotropic seepages in dam foundations are simulated using finite element method (FEM) with the equivalent continuum model (ECM), and their effect on dam foundation stability is involved by uplift pressures acting on the potential sliding surfaces. The system failure probability of the dam foundation is efficiently estimated using Monte Carlo method (MCM) combined with response surface method (RSM).

The case study shows that it is necessary to consider the possibly adverse effect of anisotropic seepage on foundation stability of gravity dams and the deterministic analysis of the foundation stability may be misleading. The system reliability analysis of the dam foundation is justified, as the uncertainties in shear strength parameters of the foundation rocks and joint sets as well as aperture, connectivity and spacing of the joint sets are quantified and the system effect of the multiple potential sliding surfaces on the foundation reliability is reasonably considered.

(1) A methodology is proposed for efficient system reliability analysis of foundation stability of gravity dams considering anisotropic seepage and multiple sliding surfaces (2) The influence of anisotropic seepage on the stability of gravity dam foundation  is revealed (3) The influence of estimation errors of RSMs on the system reliability assessment of dam foundation is investigated.

Exit strategies are critical for external private equity holders, such as venture capitalists and business angels, to receive investment returns successfully. The paper models the exit decision as a fixed date with the option to exit early, and develop an approach to help private equity holders determine an optimal early exit region based on a target equity value and the time remaining.

The paper sets up a continuous time model to derive analytical solutions and apply simulations to numerical examples in this study.

By numerically analyzing the nature of the solution the paper illustrates that a higher return drift of the investee company, a lower return volatility of the investee company, and a higher target return of the private equity holder results a smaller early exit region.

This study helps determine the optimal time of stopping investments, and provides venture capitalists with a usable way to make exit decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to study factors that affect the success of technology parks in terms of fostering entrepreneurial firm formation, growth, and financing.

Based on a new international dataset of technology parks (tech parks) from 13 countries (eight developing countries and five developed countries), the paper relates the success of technology transfer to the legal environment within which the tech park operates, as well as the characteristics of the tenants in the tech park and the services provided by the tech park.

The data indicate entrepreneurial success is more likely to be facilitated when there is better legal protection offered to companies in the jurisdiction within which the tech park is located, when there is a greater presence of foreign university- and government-affiliated companies in tech parks, and a smaller presence of foreign private companies in tech parks, particularly foreign subsidiaries. The data further indicate entrepreneurial success is more likely when tech park tenants have greater testing/analysis focus, and when tenants have less assembly- and service-focussed activities. Also, entrepreneurial success is more likely to be facilitated by tech parks with on- and off-site technology licensing offices that promote trade shows, provide access to funds for commercialization and distribute information on the R&D outcomes of tech park tenants.

The data offer insights into efficient design of tech parks. Coarse measures from survey data are limitations yet offer scope for further examination in future research.

The paper provides guidance for entrepreneurs and their investors in terms of ways maximize value in terms of entrepreneurial growth and financing from selecting appropriate tech parks.

Corporate risk management is one of the critical concerns of managers when they make investment allocation decisions among multiple projects. The purpose of this paper is to address corporate investment issues illustrated by target‐beating in capital budgeting, and further discuss their applications in financial management, especially in venture capital finance.

Value‐at‐risk, a typical down‐side risk measure which is considered more appropriate for economic agents, is applied to the analysis. Probability theory and optimal control methodologies are used to derive analytical solutions.

By maximizing the probability of beating a pre‐determined target, an analytical optimal corporate investment allocation strategy is presented, and the corresponding probability and expected earliest time of success derived.

Various types of utility functions of economic agents and other dynamic downside risk measures can be considered in future research along this line.

This paper paves the road for applications of continuous‐time downside risk in making corporate investment decisions, especially in the field of new venture finance.

As one of the early studies investigating optimal investment decisions in continuous‐time downside risk‐based capital budgeting system, this project sheds light on corporate risk management, and provides risk‐averse decision makers with an effective tool.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how foreign and domestic investors differ in their beliefs about the relative merits of a firm's political connections.

These differences are employed to explain cross-sectional variation in the previously documented premium in A-share prices relative to otherwise equivalent foreign currency denominated B-shares for Chinese firms.

Chinese domestic individual investors were excluded from owning B-shares of Chinese firms prior to February 20, 2001. The authors find that firms with more political connections have higher premiums and a smaller reduction in premiums associated with this event.

This is consistent with domestic block holders deriving additional benefits from politically connected firms.

The findings also have important policy implications by showing that government can have a strong effect on the economy even without applying macro-policy tools.

Government ownership in listed companies can result in discrepancies among classes of investors with respect to their valuations. Furthermore, the prohibition of short sales prevents arbitrage from correcting this bias, and eventually the role of the market in allocating resources efficiently is undermined.

The authors investigate the role of political connections as implied by the proportion of state ownership in explaining the A-share premium. Unlike previous studies that associate state ownership with political risk, the paper relates state ownership to political connections that are particularly beneficial to domestic large block shareholders. This interpretation is consistent with the findings and with previous literature on state ownership and political connections of Chinese firms.

Board monitoring should affect a firm's access to debt financing because it improves firm performance and the board is ultimately responsible for the firm's debt. In this study, we show empirically that access to debt financing indeed benefits in two ways from board monitoring: directly from the monitoring and indirectly from improvement in performance. The methodological challenge is in separating the two effects from each other and from those of other drivers of debt financing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between IPO lockups and founder-CEOs’ compensation and incentives in newly public firms. The paper argues that existence and length of lockup agreements are affected by bargaining power of founders, which will consequently influence the determination of their compensation contracts.

Multivariate tests are constructed to examine the relationship between IPO lockups and executive compensation. OLS, fixed-effect panel data model, and the Heckman two-stage model are all utilized to conduct the tests.

The study finds that lockup existence and lockup length are negatively related to founder-CEOs’ total compensation and positively related to founder-CEOs’ equity incentives. The results hold after controlling for the endogenous decision to sign a lockup agreement at the IPO.

The paper's results suggest that the power of founders and other insiders is a crucial factor in the lockup determination process besides economic factors identified in previous studies. The paper's results also echo the political power theory in the management literature which suggests that an organization's decision making is heavily influenced by relative power of organizational members and reflects their preference.

The paper raises a new explanation for the determinant of IPO lockups that supplements the extant theories. The paper argues that existence and length of lockup agreements could be affected by bargaining power of insiders.