Search results for " INDEPENDENCE"
showing 10 items of 128 documents
Can Auditors Be Independent? – Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Client Type
2012
Recent regulatory initiatives stress that an independent oversight board, rather than the management board, should be the client of the auditor. In an experiment, we test whether the type of client affects auditors’ independence. Unique features of the German institutional setting enable us to realistically vary the type of auditors’ client as our treatment variable: we portray the client either as the management preferring aggressive accounting or the oversight board preferring conservative accounting. We measure auditors’ perceived client retention incentives and accountability pressure in a post-experiment questionnaire to capture potential threats to independence. We find that the type …
Beyond the audit expectations gap
1992
In seeking to encourage a broader, European dimension to research on auditing and audit expectations, this paper examines the recent history of auditing and its regulation in Spain within the context of international developments in the accounting profession. The more expansive role being assigned to the audit function in Spain following the implementation of the Fourth and Eighth European Company Law Directives is generally viewed by Spanish writers as a progressive step, with largely positive effects. Such views stand in some contrast to the history of auditing in Britain, where the prevalence of an ‘audit expectations gap’ suggests a rather more problematic state of affairs. In exploring…
Energetic Sustainability Using Renewable Energies in the Mediterranean Sea
2016
The paper is focused on the analysis of the electrical energy sector in the Maltese islands, focusing on the employment of Renewable Energies in order to increase its energy independence. The main renewable source here proposed is wave energy: thanks to its strategic position, Malta will be able to generate electrical energy through the use of an innovative type of Wave Energy Converter (WEC) based on the prototype of linear generator designed and developed by the University of Palermo. This new technology will be able to cut down the electrical energy production from traditional power plants and, consequently, the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Wave energy source and off-shore photovoltai…
Renewable energy sources to fulfill the global energy needs of a country: The case study of Malta in Mediterranean Sea
2016
The paper shows the advantages using different energy resources for the islands of Malta. Moreover, this work is focused on the analysis of the wave energy potential along Malta's coasts. This important resource can be exploited to produce electrical energy using an innovative Point Absorber based on a new generator prototype realized by University of Palermo. The use of renewable source will reduce greenhouses emissions and increase the energy independence of Malta. The procedures applied in the present article, as well as the main equations used, are the result of previous applications made in different technical fields that show a good replicability [1]-[7].
Latvijos ginkluotųjų pajėgų partizanų daliniai 1919 metais | From Guerrillas to Soldiers: The Activities of Guerrilla Units of the Latvian Army in 19…
2014
On the basis of documents in the Latvian State Archives, this paper discusses the armed struggleagainst the Soviet authorities in Vidzeme, in northern Latgala, and Sela, which took placeduring the Latvian Wars of Independence, and was joined voluntarily by the local populationin an organised way. The discussion tells about the armed guerrilla groups that operated inVidzeme and northern Latgala in 1919, and formed a serious obstacle to the establishmentof Soviet power, the participation of ethnic minorities in guerrilla groups, and the features ofthe guerrilla fighting. The collaboration between Latvian guerrillas and Lithuanian troops, andtheir role in the expulsion of Soviet Latvian troops…
An upper bound of the index of an equilibrium point in the plane
2012
Abstract We give an upper bound of the index of an isolated equilibrium point of a C 1 vector field in the plane. The vector field is decomposed in gradient and Hamiltonian components. This decomposition is related with the Loewner vector field. Associated to this decomposition we consider the set Π where the gradient and Hamiltonian components are linearly dependent. The number of branches of Π starting at the equilibrium point determines the upper bound of the index.
Backwards Martingales and Exchangeability
2020
With many data acquisitions, such as telephone surveys, the order in which the data come does not matter. Mathematically, we say that a family of random variables is exchangeable if the joint distribution does not change under finite permutations. De Finetti’s structural theorem says that an infinite family of E-valued exchangeable random variables can be described by a two-stage experiment. At the first stage, a probability distribution Ξ on E is drawn at random. At the second stage, independent and identically distributed random variables with distribution Ξ are implemented.
Estimation of causal effects with small data in the presence of trapdoor variables
2021
We consider the problem of estimating causal effects of interventions from observational data when well-known back-door and front-door adjustments are not applicable. We show that when an identifiable causal effect is subject to an implicit functional constraint that is not deducible from conditional independence relations, the estimator of the causal effect can exhibit bias in small samples. This bias is related to variables that we call trapdoor variables. We use simulated data to study different strategies to account for trapdoor variables and suggest how the related trapdoor bias might be minimized. The importance of trapdoor variables in causal effect estimation is illustrated with rea…
Identifying Causal Effects via Context-specific Independence Relations
2019
Causal effect identification considers whether an interventional probability distribution can be uniquely determined from a passively observed distribution in a given causal structure. If the generating system induces context-specific independence (CSI) relations, the existing identification procedures and criteria based on do-calculus are inherently incomplete. We show that deciding causal effect non-identifiability is NP-hard in the presence of CSIs. Motivated by this, we design a calculus and an automated search procedure for identifying causal effects in the presence of CSIs. The approach is provably sound and it includes standard do-calculus as a special case. With the approach we can …
Robust Conditional Independence maps of single-voxel Magnetic Resonance Spectra to elucidate associations between brain tumours and metabolites.
2020
The aim of the paper is two-fold. First, we show that structure finding with the PC algorithm can be inherently unstable and requires further operational constraints in order to consistently obtain models that are faithful to the data. We propose a methodology to stabilise the structure finding process, minimising both false positive and false negative error rates. This is demonstrated with synthetic data. Second, to apply the proposed structure finding methodology to a data set comprising single-voxel Magnetic Resonance Spectra of normal brain and three classes of brain tumours, to elucidate the associations between brain tumour types and a range of observed metabolites that are known to b…