Finance - Research Publications

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    Succession financing in family firms
    Koropp, C ; Grichnik, D ; Gygax, AF (SPRINGER, 2013-08)
    Business succession is one of the primary management challenges for family firms. However, many family firms fail at this task because of financial issues. Although a vast number of studies have investigated the succession process, research thus far has failed to determine how and why family firms select particular forms of financing for succession-related expenditures. Accordingly, this study conceptually and empirically investigates succession financing. We introduce a conceptual framework that investigates the reasons behind an owner-manager’s intent to use debt for succession financing. Specifically, our model accounts for general and succession-related personal factors. However, we also include a set of firm-specific financing behavioral controls in our research. The empirical results are derived from a sample of 187 German family firms, and the results highlight financial knowledge, attitudes, succession experience, and succession planning as significant determinants of the owner-managers’ debt usage intentions. The implications and avenues for future research are discussed.
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    Modeling the Total Energy Consumption of Mobile Network Services and Applications
    Yan, M ; Chan, CA ; Gygax, AF ; Yan, J ; Campbell, L ; Nirmalathas, A ; Leckie, C (MDPI, 2019-01-07)
    Reducing the energy consumption of Internet services requires knowledge about the specific traffic and energy consumption characteristics, as well as the associated end-to-end topology and the energy consumption of each network segment. Here, we propose a shift from segment-specific to service-specific end-to-end energy-efficiency modeling to align engineering with activity-based accounting principles. We use the model to assess a range of the most popular instant messaging and video play applications to emerging augmented reality and virtual reality applications. We demonstrate how measurements can be conducted and used in service-specific end-to-end energy consumption assessments. Since the energy consumption is dependent on user behavior, we then conduct a sensitivity analysis on different usage patterns and identify the root causes of service-specific energy consumption. Our main findings show that smartphones are the main energy consumers for web browsing and instant messaging applications, whereas the LTE wireless network is the main consumer for heavy data applications such as video play, video chat and virtual reality applications. By using small cell offloading and mobile edge caching, our results show that the energy consumption of popular and emerging applications could potentially be reduced by over 80%.
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    Network Energy Consumption Assessment of Conventional Mobile Services and Over-the-Top Instant Messaging Applications
    Yan, M ; Chan, CA ; Li, W ; I, C-L ; Bian, S ; Gygax, AF ; Leckie, C ; Hinton, K ; Wong, E ; Nirmalathas, A (IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC, 2016-12)
    The rapid growth in the energy consumption of mobile networks has become a major concern for mobile operators. Today’s mobile networks’ usage is dominated by over-the-top (OTT) applications and operators are keen to determine the network energy consumed by these OTT applications. With a recent shift in user behavior towards a preference for instant messaging (IM) applications over conventional mobile services, operators are interested in exploring what impact OTT IM applications such as WeChat will have on the energy consumption of a network when compared to a corresponding conventional mobile service. Here, we present for the first time energy assessment models for mobile services based on real network and service measurements to address this need. Using WeChat as an OTT IM application example, our results show that WeChat consumes more network energy than conventional mobile services for both light users and heavy text users due to the network signaling energy overhead. In comparison, for heavy voice users, WeChat consumes less network energy since voice messages are first recorded and then sent in packet bursts. Our findings provide a quantitative analysis of the energy consumption of mobile services, which should be valuable for mobile operators and OTT application developers to improve the energy-efficiency of mobile applications and services.
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    Telecommunications energy and greenhouse gas emissions management for future network growth
    Chan, CA ; Gygax, AF ; Leckie, C ; Wong, E ; Nirmalathas, A ; Hinton, K (ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2016-03-15)
    A key aspect of greener network deployment is how to achieve sustainable growth of a telecommunications network, both in terms of operational and embodied energy. Hence, in this paper we investigate how the overall energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of a fast growing telecommunications network can be minimized. Due to the complexities in modeling the embodied energy of networks, this aspect of energy consumption has received limited attention by network operators. Here, we present the first model to evaluate the interdependencies of the four main contributing factors in managing the sustainable growth of a telecommunications network: (i) the network’s operational energy consumption; (ii) the embodied energy of network equipment; (iii) network traffic growth; and (iv) the expected energy efficiency improvements in both the operational and embodied phases. Using Monte Carlo techniques with real network data, our results demonstrate that under the current trends in overall energy efficiency improvements the network embodied energy will account for over 40% of the total network energy in 2025 compared to 20% in 2015. Further, we find that the optimum equipment replacement cycle, which will result in the lowest total network life cycle energy, is directly dependent on the technological progress in energy efficiency improvements of both operational and embodied phases. Our model and analysis highlight the need for a comprehensive approach to better understand the interactions between network growth, technological progress, equipment replacement lifetime, energy consumption, and the resulting carbon footprint.
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    Assessing network energy consumption of mobile applications
    Chan, CA ; Li, W ; Bian, S ; I, C-L ; GYGAX, AF ; Leckie, C ; Yan, M ; Hinton, K (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2015-11-15)
    Continuous growth in the energy consumption of mobile networks has become a major concern for mobile carriers. Since current mobile networks are dominated by mobile data traffic generated by over-the-top mobile applications, it is crucial for mobile carriers to understand how much network energy is used to deliver these applications. Here, we use real network and application measurements to comprehensively analyze the energy consumption of 12 common mobile applications by breaking down their total energy consumption into data and signaling energy components. The results provide insights into the different proportions of data and signaling energy (due to LTE signaling) for different mobile applications. They show that the energy consumption of a mobile application can vary at different base station cell sites due to different ratios of throughput to physical resource block utilization. We estimate the total monthly energy consumption of all 4G users of a major mobile carrier using conventional mobile services, such as voice and the short messaging service, and two over-the-top applications, i.e. a popular instant messaging application in China and an online video application. The results show that signaling energy consumption may become a major concern for mobile carriers, and that this issue will be exacerbated as the usage of over-the-top applications continues to grow. Energy assessment of mobile applications provides valuable information to enable mobile carriers to improve the energy efficiency of their networks. An energy assessment tool that enables real-time network and service energy monitoring will also assist in developing energy-efficient network policies for diverse applications with different energy consumption profiles. Furthermore, given our signaling energy consumption findings for over-the-top applications, there may be benefits for mobile operators to introduce a surcharge for signaling traffic to mitigate the high signaling energy consumption of some over-the-top mobile applications.
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    Board interlocking network and the design of executive compensation packages
    Wong, LHH ; Gygax, AF ; Wang, P (Elsevier, 2015-05)
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    Index composition changes and the cost of incumbency
    Gygax, AF ; Otchere, I (ELSEVIER, 2010-10)
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    Pricing errors and estimates of risk premia in factor models
    Sawyer, KR ; Gygax, AF ; Hazledine, M (SPRINGER HEIDELBERG, 2010-07)