Capital structure and financing of SMEs: Australian evidence

This paper investigates the determinants of capital structure and use of financing for small and medium sized enterprises. Hypotheses utilising static trade-off and pecking order arguments are empirically examined using a series of firm characteristics including: size, asset structure, profitability, growth and risk. The hypotheses developed are tested using a large Australian nationwide panel survey. The results suggest that asset structure, profitability and growth are important determinants of capital structure and financing. For asset structure the direction of the influence is reliant upon the capital structure or financing measure employed. The results generally support static trade-off and pecking order arguments proposed by theoretical models.     

TECHNOLOGY SHOPS: EFFICIENT PRICING IN BUSINESS-UNIVERSITY COLLABORATIONS

Recently, business–university collaborations have become the subject of much interest. It is important to distinguish between ‘blue-sky’ research and more directly commercially applicable research. This paper provides a framework in which to think about the latter. A simple screening model is proposed to study the ways in which a university might sell its research to the private sector. It demonstrates that ‘technology shops’, where firms pay a fixed fee to join and a relatively low marginal cost for each piece of research, would increase the amount of research commercially developed and would be beneficial to all parties.     

The future of small-scale mining: environmental and socioeconomic perspectives

Although small-scale mining provides innumerable benefits to the rural inhabitants and governments of the developing world, its operations have been responsible for a wide range of environmental and socioeconomic complications. This article examines the impacts of small-scale mining, and provides a perspective on the future of the industry. It first describes small-scale mining activity, emphasizing key definitional and locational characteristics. Next, it examines the socioeconomic impacts of the industry, along with its environmental problems. The article concludes by discussing the future of small-scale mining in developing countries.     

Recovery of hidden state participation effects on oil and gas asset values

Commodity price shocks are shown to cause shifts in both the quantity and timing of risk in natural resource assets. We provide evidence that static risk measures understate the periodicity of price risk implicit in depleting assets. Risk measurement is demonstrated to be asset specific and to vary heterogeneously in response to the combined effects of state participation and market factors. We use a global sample of oilfield assets to demonstrate that oilfield participation terms cause corporate asset cash flows, volatility horizons and minimum variance hedge ratios to vary in response to oil price. We provide additional insights into movements in the timing of physical oil and gas asset risk, a hidden effect not recoverable from market oil prices. Temporal variance for physical assets is shown to be a hidden dimensional outcome of the effects of market factors and state participation.     

中央银行治理与金融稳定——在2010年春季拉丁美洲货币研究中心会议上的发言

本文译自盖文·宾汉姆在2010年春季拉丁美洲货币研究中心会议上的发言.文章认为:对于央行在维护金融稳定的职能过程中应充当什么样的角色目前还含糊不清,这显然不正常.因此给央行赋予一种更加明确和宽泛的维护金融稳定的职权对于央行的正常履职是十分必要的.这需要考虑什么是适当的金融稳定目标,对于不同的责任需要什么样的职权、手段和组织结构;还要考虑央行在保持其行政职能的独立性时,需要哪些机制来保证.     

Integrated models of capital adequacy – Why banks are undercapitalised

With the majority of large UK and many US banks collapsing or being forced to raise capital over the 2007–9 period, blaming bankers may be satisfying but is patently insufficient; Basel II and Federal oversight frameworks also deserve criticism. We propose that the current methodological void at the heart of Basel II, Pillar 2 is filled with the recommendation that banks develop fully-integrated models for economic capital that relate asset values to fundamental drivers of risk in the economy to capture systematic effects and inter-asset dependencies in a way that crude correlation assumptions do not. We implement a fully-integrated risk analysis based on the balance sheet of a composite European bank using an economic-scenario generation model calibrated to conditions at the end of 2007. Our results suggest that the more modular, correlation-based approaches to economic capital that currently dominate practice could have led to an undercapitalisation of banks, a result that is clearly of interest given subsequent events. The introduction of integrated economic-scenario-based models in future can improve capital adequacy, enhance Pillar 2’s application and rejuvenate the relevance of the Basel regulatory framework.     

Black Liberation and the Foundations of Social Control

In regards to funding for the civil rights and black power movements in the United States, the major philanthropic foundations pursued their primary goals of social engineering and implementation of reforms designed to establish and maintain social control. They operated in the ultimate interests of the wealthy corporate and financial interests that dominated foundation boards and founders, promoting incremental reforms in order to secure their own long‐term systemic interests.     

Applying the Elaboration Likelihood Model to increase recall of conservation messages and elaboration by zoo visitors

Zoos aspire to facilitate sustainable behaviours in visitors and conservation messages are plentiful in zoos. However, the degree to which these messages are being received and processed by visitors on site has rarely been studied. In our paper, we studied the effectiveness, as measured in message recall, of a common mode of face-to-face communication used in zoos, animal talks. We compared animal talks based on a theoretical framework, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), to a control group in which no framework was used. A two-phase ELM-based training programme, which instructed staff in techniques to increase cognitive possessing in visitors, led to increased visitor satisfaction after one training programme and increased relevancy (connected to the visitor's life) and elaboration (provoked thinking) after a second training session. There was a small number of staff who did not integrate conservation messages into talks despite repetitive training. Implications for zoos and their goal of effectively communicating conservation messages to visitors are discussed.     

The dominant firm with convex technology

The paper analyses a dominant firm model in which firms have convex production sets. The model is shown to be determinate, and to be expressible by a set of (n+1) equilibrium conditions. A previous attempt to obtain comparative statics results is criticized as being invalid, and a new framework for comparative statics is developed.