American University in Cairo

About: American University in Cairo is a education organization based out in Cairo, Egypt. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 2472 authors who have published 5339 publications receiving 73741 citations.

The Egyptian revolution: A triumph of poetry

Abstract: The 11-day interval between the fall of Tunisia's Ben Ali and the onset of the Egyptian revolution is now almost forgotten. These days were important mainly as the time when inspiration was nurtured and the big question on people's minds was, could a revolution happen in Egypt? Never before had this question been debated so intensely. I look at two contrasting ways of addressing it. On the one hand, seasoned political analysts (mostly political scientists) were predominantly saying no, Egypt is not Tunisia. On the other hand, activists were talking dreams and poetry, especially invoking lines from two famous Arab poets on the power of popular will and the inevitability of revolution. In this case, poetry prevailed. It was not only a source of inspiration but also carried more explanatory power than much social science. Here I document this moment and pay tribute to poetry and dreams. [Egypt, revolution, Tunisia, poetry, experts]

The Impact of Institutional Ownership and Dividend Policy on Stock Returns and Volatility: Evidence from Egypt

Abstract: This paper examines the effect of institutional ownership on stock volatility, returns, and dividend policy in Egypt. It also investigates the impact of dividend policy on the direction of the relation between institutional ownership and stock volatility and returns. Our main results show that private institutional ownership has significant and positive effect on stock volatility while it has no effect on returns. We find that private institutional ownership has negative effect on dividend payout ratio. Finally, we show that private institutional ownership significantly increases volatility for non-dividend paying stocks only because these stocks are more subject to institutional herding than dividend paying stocks.

Earnings management behaviour of Shariah-compliant firms and non-Shariah-compliant firms: Evidence from the MENA region

Abstract: Purpose – This paper aims to answer the following questions by using the data from the MENA region (Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain): Do Shariah-compliant firms differ from other firms in the quality of information disclosure? and Can investors consider information disclosed by Shariah-compliant firms more truthful than information disclosed by other firms? Design/methodology/approach – Using regression analysis, this paper examines the relationship between earnings management and Shariah compliance during the period between 2005 and 2009. Findings – Results show that Shariah-compliant firms engage in lower earnings management than non-Shariah-compliant firms. This paper argues that financial characteristics of Shariah-compliant firms (i.e. low leverage, low account receivables and low cash) provide lower chances to managers to misreport earnings. It is also shown that external conditions can minimize the difference in earnings management between the two grou...

A Statistical Priority-Based Scheduling Metric for M2M Communications in LTE Networks

Abstract: Resource allocation, or scheduling, is one of the main challenges that face supporting machine-to-machine (M2M) communications on long term evolution networks. M2M traffic has unique characteristics. It generally consists of a large number of small data packets, with specific deadlines, generated by a potentially massive number of devices contending over the scarce radio resources. In this paper, we introduce a novel M2M scheduling metric that we term the “statistical priority”. Statistical priority is a term that indicates the uniqueness of the information carried by certain data packets sent by machine-type communications devices (MTCDs). If an MTCD data unit is significantly dissimilar to the previously sent data, it is considered to carry non-redundant information. Consequently, it would be assigned higher statistical priority, and this MTCD should then be given higher priority in the scheduling process. Using this proposed metric in scheduling, the scarce radio resources would be used for transmitting statistically important information rather than repetitive data, which is a common situation in M2M communications. Simulation results show that our proposed statistical priority-based scheduler outperforms the other baseline schedulers in terms of having the least number of deadline misses (less than 4%) for critical data packets. In addition, our scheduler outperforms the other baseline schedulers in non-redundant data transmission as it achieves a success ratio of at least 70%.

Gigabit Ethernet for redundant networked control systems

Abstract: In this paper, the use of fast and Gigabit Ethernet in advanced networked control systems is studied. Redundant control node scenario is the key factor for minimum down-time. Ethernet 802.3 protocol is tested without modification in frame format. Gigabit Ethernet succeeded to absorb the control traffic of several working machines while fast Ethernet could not.