This study investigates the influence of business-specific, bank-specific, and political-specific networks on small firm investments in Vietnam. Also, I aim to explain how these social networks substitute the weaknesses of local institutions. Examining a set of more than 9,800 firm-year observations of small businesses in Vietnam from 2005–2015, I find that social ties with bank officials can boost firm investments; social ties with government officials can help firms overcome institutional voids; whereas social ties with businesspeople appear trivial to investment decisions. More importantly, I propose that networking, especially networks built upon connections with government officials, can substitute local institutions by addressing weaknesses in (1) inefficient legal enforcement, (2) corruption, (3) bureaucratic compliance, and (4) non-transparent governance system.

We consider the adjoint representation of a Hopf algebra $H$ focusing on the locally finite part, $H_{{\textrm ad\,fin}}$, defined as the sum of all finite-dimensional subrepresentations. For virtually cocommutative $H$ (i.e., $H$ is finitely generated as module over a cocommutative Hopf subalgebra), we show that $H_{{\textrm ad\,fin}}$ is a Hopf subalgebra of $H$. This is a consequence of the fact, proved here, that locally finite parts yield a tensor functor on the module category of any virtually pointed Hopf algebra. For general Hopf algebras, $H_{{\textrm ad\,fin}}$ is shown to be a left coideal subalgebra. We also prove a version of Dietzmann's Lemma from group theory for Hopf algebras.

This study examines the relative importance of local institutions and external finance on small business investment. Utilising the institutional theory, we argue that local institutions and external finance have heterogeneous effects on firm investment. More importantly, they may interact and moderate each other. Analysing a set of 1.3 million observations of small businesses operating in Vietnam (2006–2016) obtained from the Annual Enterprise Survey data from the Vietnam Statistics Office, we find that local institutional settings and external finance are important determinants of firm investment. Moreover, local institutions are able to moderate the effects of external finance on firm investment. As such, this study asserts that conventional models cannot discern whether institutions or external finance are more important to firm investment. Rather, the relative importance of institutions and external finance should be investigated from the perspective of their interaction.

We investigated the electrical conduction and resistance switching mechanisms of TiOx thin films grown on three kinds of bottom electrode at room temperature (an inert Pt, an active Ti and fluorine tin oxide FTO electrodes). The bottom electrode materials strongly affect the I-V characteristics and switching parameters. The I-V characteristic is explained through the presence of interface states in the metal electrode devices (Pt and Ti) and the work function in the metal oxide device (FTO). The Pt device has the smallest VSET and largest switching ratio, while the Ti device shows the largest VSET and smallest switching ratio. XPS data shows non-lattice oxygen in TiOx films. Therefore, the proposed bipolar resistance switching arises from formation and rupture of filament paths, generated by the movement of oxygen vacancies. All devices depict the same electrical conductions, trap-controlled space-charge-limited, FN tunneling and Ohmic conductions for a high resistance state and a low resistance state, respectively. In this study, the rarely reported FN tunneling conduction in published TiOx-based ReRAM device was found, which can be attributed to an influence of the bottom electrode on the electronic distribution in devices.

The IRAM interferometer has been used to image the distribution and kinematics of the HCO+ line in the nuclear region of IC 342 and of the HCN line in the nuclear region of Maffei2. Both regions were also imaged in the continuum at 3mm. These observations are compared with observations of HCN in IC 342 and CO in both galaxies.