This study examines the significance of corporate governance mechanisms during the corporate governance reform using a sample of 117 non-financial Japanese firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange over the period 1989 to 2001. Japans prolonged recession brought about numerous reforms in post-bubble Japan. Although it is plausible to infer that the corporate governance system in Japan may have been a factor that led to the sustained recession in Japan, it is vague as to how deep and thorough the changes to Japanese corporate governance have been. The inference is that adverse impact of corporate governance may have been one of the factors that led to the sustained recession in Japan. Numerous proposals have been offered and some implemented in an attempt to fix problems exposed during the recession period in the 1990s. Remedies include instituting reforms to corporate governance by establishing new standards, punishing malpractice, and changing corporate board structures. Many Japanese firms look abroad for alternate governance mechanisms to integrate into their own system of control. As such, most reforms propose changes, for the most part, reflecting the American-style of corporate governance: alignment in incentives between top management and shareholders, board size reductions, and greater board independence to promote better monitoring and firmer discipline. <p>The significance of proposed changes to traditional Japanese corporate governance is examined in this study. Using a different econometric approach from that of previous studies, the relationship between board composition and firm performance is examined with a simultaneous framework of equations. The purpose of this empirical framework is to tackle potential endogeneity problems between board composition, governance and performance variables. Results show that: (1) there exists a significantly negative relationship between turnover of members of the board of directors and firm performance; (2) board size reduction is significant, but there is no evidence of consistent relationship between outside directorship and firm performance. (3) While keiretsu membership is generally relevant in linking board turnover and performance in Japan, board turnover is sensitive to performance in firms where ownership is concentrated than where ownership is dispersed. (4) President turnover, whether routine or non-routine, is unrelated to performance. Overall, results support that the entire board assumes responsibility for the firms performance and the 2SLS model is an effective estimator for estimating the relationship between board composition and firm performance.

The trapping behavior of deuterium and helium in polycrystalline tungsten (PCW) under D+-only, He+-only, sequential and simultaneous irradiation was studied as a function of incident ion fluences and irradiation temperature. Deuterium implanted at 300 and 500 K gets trapped at surface adsorption sites, vacancy-related traps, or extended defects. No deuterium was trapped for 700 K implantations. Results were affected by tungsten-carbide impurities in PCW specimens. It is suggested that He trapping occurs via the formation of He clusters, at impurity sites, or as part of He-vacancy complexes. For sequential implantations, D and He were found to de-trap each other, with He impeding the trapping of D when implanted first at 300 K. Under simultaneous irradiation a decrease in D inventories was observed for all cases, and a re-distribution of He to higher energy traps (associated with He-vacancy complex formation) was observed for higher fluences and temperatures.

The trapping behavior of deuterium and helium in polycrystalline tungsten (PCW) under D+-only, He+-only, sequential and simultaneous irradiation was studied as a function of incident ion fluences and irradiation temperature. Deuterium implanted at 300 and 500 K gets trapped at surface adsorption sites, vacancy-related traps, or extended defects. No deuterium was trapped for 700 K implantations. Results were affected by tungsten-carbide impurities in PCW specimens. It is suggested that He trapping occurs via the formation of He clusters, at impurity sites, or as part of He-vacancy complexes. For sequential implantations, D and He were found to de-trap each other, with He impeding the trapping of D when implanted first at 300 K. Under simultaneous irradiation a decrease in D inventories was observed for all cases, and a re-distribution of He to higher energy traps (associated with He-vacancy complex formation) was observed for higher fluences and temperatures.

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No description available.

No description available.

We discuss the problem of embedding planar graphs onto the plane with pre-specified vertex locations. In particular, we introduce a method for constructing such an embedding for both the case where the mapping from the vertices onto the vertex locations is fixed and the case where this mapping can be chosen. Moreover, the technique we present is sufficiently abstract to generalize to a method for constructing simultaneous planar embeddings with fixed vertex locations. In all cases, we are concerned with minimizing the number of bends per edge in the embeddings we produce. In the case where the mapping is fixed, our technique guarantees embeddings with at most 8n - 7 bends per edge in the worst case and, on average, at most 16/3n - 1 bends per edge. This result improves previously known techniques by a significant constant factor. When the mapping is not pre-specified, our technique guarantees embeddings with at most O(n^(1 - 2^(1-k))) bends per edge in the worst case and, on average, at most O(n^(1 - 1/k)) bends per edge, where k is the number of graphs in the simultaneous embedding. This improves upon the previously known O(n) bound on the number of bends per edge for k at least 2. Moreover, we give an average-case lower bound on the number of bends that has similar asymptotic behaviour to our upper bound.

This study examines the significance of corporate governance mechanisms during the corporate governance reform using a sample of 117 non-financial Japanese firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange over the period 1989 to 2001. Japans prolonged recession brought about numerous reforms in post-bubble Japan. Although it is plausible to infer that the corporate governance system in Japan may have been a factor that led to the sustained recession in Japan, it is vague as to how deep and thorough the changes to Japanese corporate governance have been. The inference is that adverse impact of corporate governance may have been one of the factors that led to the sustained recession in Japan. Numerous proposals have been offered and some implemented in an attempt to fix problems exposed during the recession period in the 1990s. Remedies include instituting reforms to corporate governance by establishing new standards, punishing malpractice, and changing corporate board structures. Many Japanese firms look abroad for alternate governance mechanisms to integrate into their own system of control. As such, most reforms propose changes, for the most part, reflecting the American-style of corporate governance: alignment in incentives between top management and shareholders, board size reductions, and greater board independence to promote better monitoring and firmer discipline. <p>The significance of proposed changes to traditional Japanese corporate governance is examined in this study. Using a different econometric approach from that of previous studies, the relationship between board composition and firm performance is examined with a simultaneous framework of equations. The purpose of this empirical framework is to tackle potential endogeneity problems between board composition, governance and performance variables. Results show that: (1) there exists a significantly negative relationship between turnover of members of the board of directors and firm performance; (2) board size reduction is significant, but there is no evidence of consistent relationship between outside directorship and firm performance. (3) While keiretsu membership is generally relevant in linking board turnover and performance in Japan, board turnover is sensitive to performance in firms where ownership is concentrated than where ownership is dispersed. (4) President turnover, whether routine or non-routine, is unrelated to performance. Overall, results support that the entire board assumes responsibility for the firms performance and the 2SLS model is an effective estimator for estimating the relationship between board composition and firm performance.

This study examines the significance of corporate governance mechanisms during the corporate governance reform using a sample of 117 non-financial Japanese firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange over the period 1989 to 2001. Japans prolonged recession brought about numerous reforms in post-bubble Japan. Although it is plausible to infer that the corporate governance system in Japan may have been a factor that led to the sustained recession in Japan, it is vague as to how deep and thorough the changes to Japanese corporate governance have been. The inference is that adverse impact of corporate governance may have been one of the factors that led to the sustained recession in Japan. Numerous proposals have been offered and some implemented in an attempt to fix problems exposed during the recession period in the 1990s. Remedies include instituting reforms to corporate governance by establishing new standards, punishing malpractice, and changing corporate board structures. Many Japanese firms look abroad for alternate governance mechanisms to integrate into their own system of control. As such, most reforms propose changes, for the most part, reflecting the American-style of corporate governance: alignment in incentives between top management and shareholders, board size reductions, and greater board independence to promote better monitoring and firmer discipline The significance of proposed changes to traditional Japanese corporate governance is examined in this study. Using a different econometric approach from that of previous studies, the relationship between board composition and firm performance is examined with a simultaneous framework of equations. The purpose of this empirical framework is to tackle potential endogeneity problems between board composition, governance and performance variables. Results show that: (1) there exists a significantly negative relationship between turnover of members of the board of directors and firm performance; (2) board size reduction is significant, but there is no evidence of consistent relationship between outside directorship and firm performance. (3) While keiretsu membership is generally relevant in linking board turnover and performance in Japan, board turnover is sensitive to performance in firms where ownership is concentrated than where ownership is dispersed. (4) President turnover, whether routine or non-routine, is unrelated to performance. Overall, results support that the entire board assumes responsibility for the firms performance and the 2SLS model is an effective estimator for estimating the relationship between board composition and firm performance.

The main objective of this thesis is to develop models for the power distribution network of high performance gigascale chips. The two main concerns in distributing power in a chip are voltage drop and electromigration-induced reliability failures. The voltage drop on the power distribution network is due to IR-drop and simultaneous switching noise. IR-drop is the voltage drop due to current passing through the resistances of the power distribution network. Simultaneous switching noise is due to varying current passing through the inductances of the power distribution network. Compact physical models are derived for the IR-drop and electromigration for different types of packages. These chip-package co-design models enable designers in the early stages of the design to estimate the on-chip interconnect resources, and also to choose type and size of the package required for power distribution. Modeling of the simultaneous switching noise requires the simulation of a large circuit with thousands of inductances. The main obstacle challenging the simulation of a simultaneous switching noise circuit model is the computing resources required to solve the dense inductance matrix. In this work, a new relative inductance matrix is introduced to solve massively coupled RLC interconnects. It is proven that the analysis using this method is accurate for a wide frequency range and all configurations. Using the new inductance matrix makes the circuit simulations significantly faster without losing accuracy.