The multilingual landscape of Canada creates opportunities for many heterogeneous bilingual communities to experience systematic phonetic variation within and across languages and dialects, and exposes listeners to different pronunciation variants. This paper examines phonetic variation through the lens of an ongoing sound change in Cantonese involving word-initial [n] and [l] across two primed lexical decision tasks (Experiment 1: Immediate repetition priming task, Experiment 2: Long-distance repetition priming task). Our main question is: How are sound change pronunciation variants recognized and represented in a Cantonese-English bilingual lexicon? The results of both experiments suggest that [n]- and [l]-initial variants facilitate processing in both short and long-term spoken word recognition. Thus, regular exposure to Cantonese endows bilingual listeners with the perceptual flexibility to dually and gradiently map pronunciation variants to a single lexical representation.

Public interest issues have the potential to play a significant role in the evaluation of mergers and acquisitions in Africa's regional competition laws. A case in point is the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA): its regional competition authorities have jurisdiction to evaluate transactions within the Common Market. To that end, COMESA's regional competition law enumerates specific public interest factors regarding mergers and acquisitions. Further, COMESA's regional competition law permits the consideration of additional factors under the rubric of public interest, without specifying what these factors are. On this basis, COMESA's regional competition authorities have gradually created precedents on incorporating public interest considerations. This illustrates the point that purist positions towards competition law do not serve Africa's socio-economic development goals. Therefore, the challenge facing COMESA's regional competition authorities is the application of the public interest in a manner that remains faithful to the economic doctrine that underpins competition law.

At Corn Products Refining (CPR), stockholders so disagreed with one another that they threatened to undermine the merger itself. Its predecessor, Corn Products (1902–1906), nearly failed, and so might have CPR. For several years, from its organization in 1906 to perhaps 1915, CPR’s owners weighed paying dividends against funding factories. Because paying dividends chanced syphoning off sums needed for plants, this might cause facilities to deteriorate and workers to face threats like factory fires that often set off explosions. CPR President E. T. Bedford managed this test and strove to upgrade facilities, which, by design or not, helped improve safety. His efforts almost came to naught given CPR’s anticompetitive tactics, yet the court’s antitrust decision—although highly critical—inadvertently gave the merger the chance to enhance profits and safety.

We study the effect of minor mergers on star formation using simulations. We use GADGET4 code which has both collisionless and hydrodynamical particles. Our goal is to establish a relation between gas percentage present in the galaxies and the star formation in the merged galaxy. We use 1:10 minor mergers and we run the isolated simulations with varying gas percentages in the primary galaxy. We observe that the gas particles convert into stars due to the impact of the minor merger. As the gas percentage increases in the primary disk of the galaxy, more number of stars are formed. We also observed that newly formed star particles settle down in the disk of the primary galaxy and increase the thickness of the disk. We also observe that the thickness of the stellar disk containing the old stars also increases due to the impact of the merger.

The historical dynamics of entry and exit in the financial exchange industry are analyzed for a panel of 327 US exchanges from 1855 through 2012. We focus on economic, technological and regulatory factors. Using novel panel data evidence, we empirically test whether these factors are consistent with existing financial theories. We find that US exchanges are more likely to exit per year after the passage of the Securities Exchange Act. The telephone, literacy and regulation are robust predictors of financial exchange dynamics, whereby an upward trend in literacy is an important driver of exchange entry.

At International Harvester, a 1902 merger, the defining feature was discord. A J. P. Morgan financier by the name of George W. Perkins and a formal agreement initiated changes to mitigate stress and struggle. Existing research dates improvement to 1906. This paper extends the analysis and documents that, among changes, entrepreneur William Deering and his children parted with some holdings, helping to diminish tensions. Meanwhile, the McCormicks agreed to a stock dividend.  This action helped mellow strife and augment their power. How did discord affect efficiency? The conventional answer centers on management along with expansion abroad, but that analysis is enhanced through study of seven brands and their local factories, pricing, and an antitrust consent decree. When a voting trust ran out its clock in 1912, conflict at International Harvester was receding. The firm’s record suggests various governance formats could yield efficiency and profitability.

Agro-biotechnology is evolving from a pre-commerical phase dominated by basic research science to a commercial phase oriented around marketing products. In pursuing innovation rents in the commercial phase, firms are reorienting their strategies around complementary marketing and distribution assets. This is impacting vertical and horizontal industry structure. Conversely, industry structure is also impacting firm strategies. Horizontal alliances and consolidation continue from the pre-commercial phase into the commercial phase, while vertical coordination and integration strategies are accelerating rapidly. Interplay between firm strategy and industry structure is too complex for firms to anticipate early in the pre-commercial phase for long-term strategy formulation.

China and Australia are extremely significant trade partners and investors. Australia has a very well established competition law, now called the Competition and Consumer Law 2010, with a well-established merger regime. China has a relatively new competition law, the Anti-Monopoly Law 2007. This article compares merger control in the two jurisdictions. The Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) has already referred to an Australian decision in rejecting a merger, the only reference to a foreign decision to date, which confirms the utility of the comparison. This article critically evaluates the determinations of MOFCOM and compares the approach of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian regulator. It assesses the transparency and predictability of procedures and decision-making in the two jurisdictions.

The capture and disruption of stars by supermassive black holes (SMBHs), and the formation and coalescence of binaries, are inevitable consequences of the presence of SMBHs at the cores of galaxies. Pairs of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and binary SMBHs are important stages in the evolution of galaxy mergers, and an intense search for these systems is currently ongoing. In the early and advanced stages of galaxy merging, observations of the triggering of accretion onto one or both BHs inform us about feedback processes and BH growth. Identification of the compact binary SMBHs at parsec and sub-parsec scales provides us with important constraints on the interaction processes that govern the shrinkage of the binary beyond the “final parsec”. Coalescing binary SMBHs are among the most powerful sources of gravitational waves (GWs) in the universe. Stellar tidal disruption events (TDEs) appear as luminous, transient, accretion flares when part of the stellar material is accreted by the SMBH. About 30 events have been identified by multi-wavelength observations by now, and they will be detected in the thousands in future ground-based or space-based transient surveys. The study of TDEs provides us with a variety of new astrophysical tools and applications, related to fundamental physics or astrophysics. Here, we provide a review of the current status of observations of SMBH pairs and binaries, and TDEs, and discuss astrophysical implications.

Studies of dynamically close pairs of galaxies can serve as a powerful probe of the galaxy merger rate and its evolution. Here we present a large sample of dynamically close pairs of galaxies selected in the K-band from the UKIDSS LAS. These data span ~ 175 deg2 on the sky in the 2dFGRS equatorial region (10h < RA < 14h). Combining the 2dFGRS redshifts with those from the SDSS, our K-band selected catalog is > 90% spectroscopically complete at KAB < 16.4. In this study, we focus on quantifying the relative contributions of wet, dry, and mixed mergers to the stellar mass buildup of galaxies over the past 1-2 Gyr.

In January 2011, Harvey Ingram and Borneos merged their businesses creating a full service law firm with over 400 staff and approximately 200 fee-earners. The new organisation is based in five sites over the Midlands and the Home Counties. In this article the Information Officer, Helen Marshall, and the Head of Knowledge Management, Jon Beaumont, examine the practical elements of such a merger from the point of view of the Knowledge and Information Team.

The conditions under which pension schemes merge is an important issue which has been under-researched. Mergers can affect the strength of the sponsor's covenant and the balance of power between the trustees and the sponsor, as well as the deficit or the surplus of the receiving scheme and its funding ratio. This paper sets out two financial criteria to be met by any pension scheme merger: no profit or loss on merging with another scheme; and no dilution of the funding ratio. After defining a merger basis for valuing the assets and liabilities, and allowing for adjustments to the funding ratio via side receipts and payments; it is shown that, whether or not these criteria are met, depends on the state of the financial markets.

It is time to consider the lessons to be learned from the recent boom in private equity buyouts, not least in view of its abrupt termination in the wake of tightened credit. In the past, such inquiries have been undertaken in the context of agency theory and have focused on the buyout's implications for solving the problem of separation of ownership and control. This article reverses the pattern of inquiry to consider the buyout's implications for agency theory, pointing to three lessons. The first lesson addresses agency theory's three-way association among control transfers, governance discipline and hostile takeovers, suggesting that this triptych needs to be unbundled and reconsidered. The buyout's recent salience implies that we need no longer assume that hostility is the acquisition mode best suited to post-merger disciplinary governance. The second lesson concerns agency theory's account of buyout motivations. The theory posits a world where agency cost reduction determines control outcomes at the transactional margin. On first inspection, private equity buyouts neatly fit this picture. But a deeper examination shows that buyouts are driven by the economics of leverage, with agency cost reduction taking only a secondary motivational role. The third lesson follows from financial returns. Even as buyouts ameliorate the agency costs of separated ownership and control, buyout structures implicate their own agency costs in the form of fees paid to buyout firms. Studies show that buyout firms take so much of the gain that the institutions investing in buyout funds would be better off investing in market indices. There result questions for the line of agency theory that looks to institutional investors as agency cost-reducing monitors. There also result questions respecting buyouts' incentive compatibility, questions raising doubts as to whether buyout governance structures hold out a template for improving corporate governance generally, even as a matter of agency theory.