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An expense is an item requiring an outflow of money, or any form of fortune in general, to another person or group as payment for an item, service, or other category of costs. For a tenant, rent is an expense. For students or parents, tuition is an expense. Buying food, clothing, furniture, or an automobile is often referred to as an expense. An expense is a cost that is "paid" or "remitted", usually in exchange for something of value. Something that seems to cost a great deal is "expensive". Something that seems to cost little is "inexpensive". "Expenses of the table" are expenses for dining, refreshments, a feast, etc. In accounting, expense is any specific outflow of cash or other valuable assets from a person or company to another person or company. This outflow is generally one side of a trade for products or services that have equal or better current or future value to the buyer than to the seller. Technically, an expense is an event in which a proprietary stake is diminished o

IT Investment and its impacts

Shameem Hasan

This thesis empirically explored the impacts of IT investment on three different scenarios under the common denominator / threads of IT investments. It comprises three different essays on the impacts of IT investments. IT investments and its impact on many aspects of the firms are well known - like performance / productivity, output, market value etc. But I looked into areas that were not explored before and examined events that didnât take place after the advent and integration of Information Technology â like the past financial crisis. The main contribution of my dissertation is to examine how IT investments helps in the debt market, how it helps firms fare comparatively better during crisis period and how CEO characteristics influence the well-established existing link between IT investment and Innovation intensity. The first essay examines the effect of IT investment on the cost of bank loan for firms. We argue that IT affects the decision of banks through three mechanisms: wealth effect, risk effect, and information effect. First, IT investment serves as a signal for higher future revenue and lower operational costs, thus greater future cash flows. Second, on one hand, IT may be able to reduce the risk of being locked out to competition or adverse situations; on the other hand, IT investment itself can bring risk to business. Last, the use of IT can lead to better information quality and thus reduce the information asymmetry between firms and banks. Using a sample of 270 firms between the year of 1991 and 2006, we find that IT investment is associated with lower interest rate from banks. More important, we find the strength of this relationship is contingent upon the role of IT in the industry and time period. In my second essay, the goal was to investigate whether IT investment contributed to better or worse performance during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. We took the available data for U.S. public companies (the final sample comprises 570 companies) and traced IT investments made in the years prior to the crisis period, we checked the impact of IT investments on the annual stock returns and relative changes in return (as well as for book values). After controlling for relevant risk and other independent variables during the 2007-2009 periods, we found evidence that indicates that although most of the firms suffered during the crisis period, expenditure in IT was significantly associated with relatively better performance for sample firms during the crisis period. The third essay brings in the role of CEO to examine whether CEOâs characteristics affects the already established link between IT investments and Innovation activities. We constructed data from multiple sources; we also developed empirical model to test our hypothesis and ran a series of regression tests. We find that CEOâs managerial ability and risk-taking incentive (determined by compensation scheme) are complements for IT investment. Thus for CEOs with lower ability and/or lower risk-taking incentive, firms can still achieve higher innovation efficiency by increasing expenditure in IT. On the other hand, CEOâs ownership of the firm substitutes the link. CEO with larger ownership enhances firmâs innovation efficiency by due diligence, but not necessarily through the channel of IT investment. In together, this paper shows that CEO is an important and significant factor in the conversion of IT investment to innovation efficiency.

EPFL2018

Institutional Investors and Mutual Fund Governance: Evidence from Retail-Institutional Fund Twins

Rüdiger Fahlenbrach

Advisors often manage multiple versions of a fund. These "twins" have the same manager and similar performance but are sold to different investors with differing abilities to select and monitor managers. Comparing investor flows in retail and institutional twins, we find that institutional investors are more sensitive to high fees and poor risk-adjusted performance. Consistent with the reduction of agency problems from greater monitoring, retail funds with an institutional twin outperform other retail funds by 1.5% per year. After the institutional twin is created, expenses decrease while measures of managerial effort at the retail fund increase.

Oxford University Press2012

Compiling Lisp Programs for Parallel Execution

James Richard Larus

Curare, the program restructurer described in this paper automatically transforms a sequential Lisp program into an equivalent concurrent program that runs on a multiprocessor. Data dependences constrain the program's concurrent execution because, in general, two conflicting statements cannot execute in a different order without affecting the program's result. Not all dependences are essential to produce the program's result.Curare attempts to transform the program so it computes its result with fewer conflicts. An optimized program will execute with less synchronization and more concurrency. Curare then examines loops in a program to find those that are unconstrained or lightly constrained by dependences. By necessity,Curare treats recursive functions as loops and does not limit itself to explicit program loops. Recursive functions offer several advantages over explicit loops since they provide a convenient framework for inserting locks and handling the dynamic behavior of symbolic programs. Loops that are suitable for concurrent execution are changed to execute on a set of concurrent server processes. These servers execute single loop iterations and therefore need to be extremely inexpensive to invoke. Restructured programs execute significantly faster than the original sequential programs. This improvement is large enough to attract programmers to a multiprocessor, particularly since it requires little effort on their part.

1991

IT Investment and its impacts

Shameem Hasan

EPFL2018