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This paper examines whether securities litigation and sell‐side equity analysts play a substitutive versus complementary role as an external governance mechanism. We expect the 1999 ruling on the stricter interpretation of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act to make it easier for firms headquartered in the Ninth Circuit to defend against securities class actions filed by shareholders, resulting in weaker protection from a litigation channel and stronger demand for analyst activity. Using a difference‐in‐differences research design, we find that analyst coverage increases as litigation risk decreases in the Ninth Circuit firms. Moreover, we find that analyst earnings forecast accuracy increases for firms in the Ninth Circuit following the ruling, consistent with analysts exerting greater efforts to perform their monitoring role. In cross‐sectional tests, we find that the substitution relation between litigation risk and analyst research is more pronounced in firms with a high level of ex‐ante litigation risk. We conduct extensive robustness tests, including another legal event exogenously increasing the risk of litigation, to gain confidence in our interpretations. We contribute to the literature by documenting causal evidence that analysts have greater incentives to provide meaningful equity research as gatekeepers in times of weaker investor protection by securities litigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine whether the increased quantity of public information has a spillover impact on equity sales by private industry peer firms. To capture an increase in the quantity of public peer information, we use corporate spin‐offs as these events cause an increase in the number of independent public entities that mandatorily disclose financial reports. Using a unique dataset on private firms' equity sales extracted from the Securities and Exchange Commission filings pursuant to Regulation D, we find that private industry peers sell more equity following spin‐offs, but the increase is not statistically significant. When we divide our spin‐off sample based on the availability of segment information on subsidiaries before spin‐offs, however, we find a significant an increase in private firms' equity sales after spin‐offs when parent firms did not previously disclose segment reports. Additional test results suggest that our inferences regarding private industry peers are not entirely explained by an industry‐wide demand shock. Overall, we contribute to the literature by establishing an information spillover channel, incremental to the effect of common industry shocks, flowing from the public to private markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A hard breakdown phenomenon occurs in the TiN/WOX/Pt device owing to the metallic nature of the WOX layer deposited by pulsed direct current (DC) sputtering. In particular, analog resistive switching (RS) is achieved as the defect states of the naturally occurring TiON layer (oxygen vacancies region) between TiN and TiO2 fluctuate based on the polarity of the bias. Interestingly, the TiN/TiO2/WOX/Pt device displays gradual, bipolar, SET and RESET operations during DC voltage sweep cycling without requiring an electroforming process. Excellent linearity in potentiation and depression is demonstrated via identical pulse trains based on the analog RS behavior. Additionally, the neuromorphic system simulation achieved a pattern‐recognition accuracy of over 95% when conductance is employed as the weight in the neural network. Furthermore, essential synaptic functions, such as spike‐rate‐dependent plasticity (SRDP), spike‐number‐dependent plasticity (SNDP), the transition from short‐term plasticity to long‐term plasticity, "learning‐experience" behaviors, and paired‐pulse facilitation (PPF), are demonstrated to emulate biological synapses for neuromorphic computing applications. Lastly, a reservoir computing system (RC) is implemented using the short‐term memory effect of the TiN/TiO2/WOX/Pt device. Specifically, it is deployed to differentiate all 16 (4‐bit) states using various pulse trains, and a simple algorithm is suggested to implement a low‐power consumption system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]