This paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the adjustments of dividends and share repurchases of publicly listed firms in the G-7 countries. Firms in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Italy experienced a widespread cut in dividends, while firms in the United States and...

In a “perfect” market, Miller and Modigliani's celebrated dividend irrelevance argument holds, whereby a dividend payment or omission is identical in impact to changes in a firm's share structure. Consequently, the dividend payment itself is irrelevant to valuation; what matters is the...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings and lessons that were learned from the many cases of internet fraud complaints that are gathered by the Federal Trade Commission in the USA. The implications that are contained in the behavior of the complaints and trends identified...

Discrepancy measure can be utilized as a uniformity measure for comparing factorial designs. A so-called discrete discrepancy has been used to evaluate the uniformity of factorials. In this paper we give linkages among uniformity measured by the discrete discrepancy, generalized minimum...

The objective of this paper is to study the issue of lower bound of the wrap-around L2-discrepancy value on asymmetrical designs with two and three mixed levels. We present a new lower bound of wrap-around L2-discrepancy, and by numerical simulation and some examples, we show that our lower...

This article develops a new mechanism to foldover designs involving factors with multi-level. By exhaustive search we identify the optimal foldover plans. This paper aims to study the issue of the optimal foldover plans for three-level designs, in view of the uniformity criterion measured by the...

Maximum entropy models, motivated by applications in neuron science, are natural generalizations of the β-model to weighted graphs. Similar to the β-model, each vertex in maximum entropy models is assigned a potential parameter, and the degree sequence is the natural sufficient statistic....

In the PV system with storage batteries, as a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) device is used to enhance battery charging, the enhancement must be greater than the internal loss of the device itself, or there will be no net gain at all. To evaluate the MPPT device benefits under different...

Supersaturated designs have become increasingly popular in recent years because of their potential in saving run size and the technical novelty. In this paper, the minimum generalized aberration (MGA) criterion proposed by Ma and Fang (2001) (and another two equivalent criteria proposed by Xu...