Search results for "ACCOUNTING"
showing 10 items of 1961 documents
Greenfield FDI attractiveness index: a machine learning approach
2022
Purpose This study aims to propose a comprehensive greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI) attractiveness index using exploratory factor analysis and automated machine learning (AML). We offer offer a robust empirical measurement of location-choice factors identified in the FDI literature through a novel method and provide a tool for assessing the countries' investment potential. Design/methodology/approach Based on five conceptual key sub-domains of FDI, We collected quantitative indicators in several databases with annual data ranging from 2006 to 2019. This study first run a factor analysis to identify the most important features. It then uses AML to assess the relative importance of…
Disentangling Derivatives, Uncertainty and Error in Gaussian Process Models
2020
Gaussian Processes (GPs) are a class of kernel methods that have shown to be very useful in geoscience applications. They are widely used because they are simple, flexible and provide very accurate estimates for nonlinear problems, especially in parameter retrieval. An addition to a predictive mean function, GPs come equipped with a useful property: the predictive variance function which provides confidence intervals for the predictions. The GP formulation usually assumes that there is no input noise in the training and testing points, only in the observations. However, this is often not the case in Earth observation problems where an accurate assessment of the instrument error is usually a…
Heretical Mutiple Importance Sampling
2016
Multiple Importance Sampling (MIS) methods approximate moments of complicated distributions by drawing samples from a set of proposal distributions. Several ways to compute the importance weights assigned to each sample have been recently proposed, with the so-called deterministic mixture (DM) weights providing the best performance in terms of variance, at the expense of an increase in the computational cost. A recent work has shown that it is possible to achieve a trade-off between variance reduction and computational effort by performing an a priori random clustering of the proposals (partial DM algorithm). In this paper, we propose a novel "heretical" MIS framework, where the clustering …
Unbiased Estimators and Multilevel Monte Carlo
2018
Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) and unbiased estimators recently proposed by McLeish (Monte Carlo Methods Appl., 2011) and Rhee and Glynn (Oper. Res., 2015) are closely related. This connection is elaborated by presenting a new general class of unbiased estimators, which admits previous debiasing schemes as special cases. New lower variance estimators are proposed, which are stratified versions of earlier unbiased schemes. Under general conditions, essentially when MLMC admits the canonical square root Monte Carlo error rate, the proposed new schemes are shown to be asymptotically as efficient as MLMC, both in terms of variance and cost. The experiments demonstrate that the variance reduction…
A New Nonparametric Estimate of the Risk-Neutral Density with Applications to Variance Swaps
2021
We develop a new nonparametric approach for estimating the risk-neutral density of asset prices and reformulate its estimation into a double-constrained optimization problem. We evaluate our approach using the S\&P 500 market option prices from 1996 to 2015. A comprehensive cross-validation study shows that our approach outperforms the existing nonparametric quartic B-spline and cubic spline methods, as well as the parametric method based on the Normal Inverse Gaussian distribution. As an application, we use the proposed density estimator to price long-term variance swaps, and the model-implied prices match reasonably well with those of the variance future downloaded from the CBOE websi…
General framework for testing Poisson-Voronoi assumption for real microstructures
2020
Modeling microstructures is an interesting problem not just in Materials Science but also in Mathematics and Statistics. The most basic model for steel microstructure is the Poisson-Voronoi diagram. It has mathematically attractive properties and it has been used in the approximation of single phase steel microstructures. The aim of this paper is to develop methods that can be used to test whether a real steel microstructure can be approximated by such a model. Therefore, a general framework for testing the Poisson-Voronoi assumption based on images of 2D sections of real metals is set out. Following two different approaches, according to the use or not of periodic boundary conditions, thre…
What is the role of social media in several overtones of CSR communication? The case of the wine industry in the Southern Italian regions
2019
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand whether the companies most involved in communicating their responsible behaviour externally are those most active on the social media (SM) platform, with a philanthropic purpose rather than strictly aimed at economic aspects. Design/methodology/approach The authors, first, assess firms’ efforts on the SM platform using the model proposed by Chung et al. (2014), and, second, the authors analyze the content of messages in order to verify what dimensions of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) they contain. A multivariate modelling has been performed in order to verify whether the wineries that take most care to communicate their respons…
Like it or not? How the economic and institutional environment shapes individual attitudes towards multinational enterprises
2018
The integration of goods and factor markets has affected the lives of individuals all over the world. While some agents have reaped enormous benefits from this process, others have lost in terms of income and welfare. It is usually argued that individuals are aware of the distributional effects of globalization, and that this knowledge shapes their preferences over various policy issues such as protection, financial market regulation etc. In this chapter, we use a large surveybased data set to explore whether this conjecture is correct when it comes to individuals’ attitudes towards multinational enterprises (MNEs).
Market entry decisions of US small and medium‐sized software firms
2008
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate market entry decisions of the US software SMEs by analyzing the impact of the most obvious factors (cultural distance, geographical distance, country risk, and three market size variables) in traditional internationalization theories to target country selection. By investigating the influence of these commonly cited macro‐level factors, this study proposes the best indicator for market entry decisions of the US small and medium‐sized software firms.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses a quantitative research approach applied to a sample of 100 US small and medium‐sized software firms.FindingsEmpirical findings in this study indicate t…
Conceptual framework and measurement: A survey on the international debate
2015
In response to the ‘2011 Agenda Consultation’, the IASB launched in July 2013 a call for a new Discussion Paper on the ‘Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting’. This article aims to offer a contribution to the debate on the effectiveness of the theme of ‘Measurement’, by investigating the use of the current evaluation models in the literature and practice of Financial Reporting. The article proposes at first a historical survey both of the international debate on Fair Value Accounting vs. Historical Cost Accounting and of the Italian theories on the valuation. Later the paper proposes some considerations about the key questions related to Measurement and the possible policy implicatio…