Information in Tender Offers With a Large Shareholder

We study takeovers of firms whose ownership structure is a mixture of minority block‐holders and small shareholders. We show that the combination of dispersed private information on the side of small shareholders and the presence of a large shareholder can facilitate profitable takeovers. Furthermore, our analysis implies that even if some model of takeovers predicts a profit for the raider, for example, due to private benefits, the profit will be underestimated unless the large shareholder and the dispersion of information among the small shareholders are modeled.     

Androgen status in non-diabetic elderly men with heart failure

Purpose: We aimed at evaluating androgen status (serum testosterone [TT] and estimated free testosterone [eFT]) and its determinants in non-diabetic elderly men with heart failure (HF). Additionally, we investigated its associations with body composition and long-term survival.

Methods: Seventy three non-diabetic men with HF and 20 healthy men aged over 55?years were studied. Echocardiography, 6-min walk test, grip strength, body composition measurement by DEXA method were performed. TT, sex hormone binding globulin, NT-proBNP, and adipokines (adiponectin and leptin) were measured. All-cause mortality was evaluated at six years of follow-up.

Results: Androgen status (TT, eFT) was similar in elderly men with HF compared to healthy controls (4.79?±?1.65 vs. 4.45?±?1.68?ng/ml and 0.409?±?0.277 vs. 0.350?±?0.204?nmol/l, respectively). In HF patients, TT was positively associated with NT-proBNP (r=?0.371, p?=?0.001) and adiponectin levels (r?=?0.349, p?=?0.002), while inverse association was noted with fat mass (r?=??0.413, p?<?0.001). TT and eFT were independently determined by age, total fat mass and adiponectin levels in elderly men with HF (p?<?0.05 for all). Androgen status was not predictor for all-cause mortality at six years of follow-up.

Conclusions: In non-diabetic men with HF, androgen status is not altered and is not predictive of long-term outcome.     

Residential care for children with intellectual disabilities in the social protection system in Serbia

This paper presents and discusses the characteristics of the social protection of children with intellectual disabilities who are placed in children's homes in Serbia. It draws on a survey that covered the entire population—586 users in all five institutions for children with intellectual disabilities who resided there in 2009. The analysis shows the heterogeneity of users in relation to age and degree of intellectual disability, their long-term stay in homes, the inadequate structural and functional standards, and insufficient health care. Residential care becomes the most common form of permanent rather than temporary care. These findings suggest the need for a number of strategies to be adopted, and the paper concludes by outlining potential ways forward.     

Complement to a comparative analysis of heuristics for the <Emphasis Type="Italic">p</Emphasis>-median problem

A recent comparison of evolutionary, neural network, and scatter search heuristics for solving the p-median problem is completed by (i) gathering or obtaining exact optimal values in order to evaluate errors precisely, and (ii) including results obtained with several variants of a variable neighborhood search (VNS) heuristic. For a first, well-known, series of instances, the average errors of the evolutionary and neural network heuristics are over 10% and more than 1000 times larger than that of VNS. For a second series, this error is about 3% while the errors of the parallel VNS and of a hybrid heuristic are about 0.01% and that of parallel scatter search even smaller.