Understanding New Resource Projects

The surge in new resource projects has been a prominent feature of the recent strong performance of the Australian economy, with mining and energy investment accounting for almost one‐half of all private investment. Although the current round of resource investment has now peaked, as swings in the resource sector tend to repeat themselves, there is an ongoing need to carefully understand the available information sources. We use a specially developed panel of matched projects from three widely followed, but under‐researched, sources to analyze cost inflation, the biases, the degree of independence, and timeliness of each source. This information is of use to policy makers who have to closely monitor these developments, analysts following the resources sector, and project proponents wanting to know something about the typical cost profile of a project.     

Cost of capital,discounting and relational contracting: endogenous optimal return and duration for joint investment projects

Concession, project financing and public–private partnership schemes are investment projects that are generally submitted to valuation criteria based on discounted cash flow analysis. The theoretical basis of these valuation criteria are now at issue. Pursuant to recent advances in relational contracting economics and behavioural finance, joint investment projects can be considered as special relational environments where the project's returns improve on alternative replacement opportunities. This article seeks to bridge the gap between new theories and widely used valuation techniques by providing a generalized approach to investment valuation. This article suggests reasonable valuation criteria that fit these new theoretical developments, including an endogenous optimal duration function that may be integrated into the project's contractual agreement.     

Understanding resource investments

The Millennium Boom of 2003–2011 made the resources industry highly profitable and led to a surge in new projects around the world. This had major implications for the Australian economy: Resource investment accounted for almost half of all business investment at the peak and the buoyancy of the sector helped Australia to avoid the worst of the global financial crisis. Using the event-study approach, this article examines the wealth-creating effects of new resource projects at the individual company level. The results indicate substantial increases in shareholder returns occur around the time of announcements of government approval for projects, the finalization of feasibility studies and changes in the status of projects such as when a company decides to finally commit to invest in a project. Government approval is the most important milestone in the life cycle of a project, where abnormal returns around 4% are realized on announcement day.     

Unexpected Share Repurchase Announcements

Abstract

Open-market stock repurchase announcements are generally perceived by the stock market as a signal of firm undervaluation. Our study shows that repurchase announcements that were preceded by SEOs of other firms in the same industry within the prior six months (namely SEO-RPs) are more likely the result of lacking investment opportunities than signaling undervaluation, especially in concentrated industries. Specifically, we find investors response negatively to SEO-RP announcements while react positively to regular repurchase announcements. The higher the intensity of SEO activities in the industry, the more negative market reaction to SEO-RP announcements. We argue that the market doesn’t expect a repurchase announcement when other rival firms are raising more capital via SEOs. These SEO-RPs represent a negative surprise to the market and lead to a downward adjustment in value of the repurchasing firms in the announcement window. In the three-year post-announcement periods, the SEO-RP firms underperform regular repurchasing firms in both stock return and operating performance. Moreover, while regular repurchasing firms gradually increase their capital expenditures, SEO-RP firms significantly reduce their capital expenditures. These findings support our arguments that repurchase announcements that immediately follow SEOs of rival firms (SEO-RPs) more likely indicate the announcing firms entering a slower growth rate with fewer investment opportunities than signal the undervaluation problem. The underperformance in stock return and operation combined with a significant reduction in capital expenditures in the post-announcement periods are consistent with this logic and also explain why the market reacts negatively to SEO-RP announcements.     

Malinvestment

In the Austrian business cycle theory, monetary expansion lowers the interest rate and sends misleading relative price signals to investors, who then make investments that turn out to be unprofitable. One criticism of the theory is that if malinvestment is predictable, investors should understand their businesses well enough to see and avoid the temptation to be lured into unprofitable investments. A broader understanding of the Austrian school's framework explains why malinvestment takes place. The economy is a complex order, and while the theory explains that malinvestment will rise during the expansionary phase, it cannot identify which investment projects will eventually become unprofitable, nor can investors themselves tell ahead of time. Furthermore, applying the fallacy of composition, it may be that one investor could profitably invest based on those price signals, but all investors cannot. Monetary expansion lowers the informational content of prices, making it more likely that unprofitable investments will take place. Even if investors become more cautious, the percentage of investment projects that eventually will prove unprofitable will rise.     

基于实物期权的企业信息化多项目投资决策研究

企业投资信息化项目不同于一般的项目,信息化项目具有高度的不确定性、收益的无形性和延迟性等特点,传统的投资决策评价方法面对不确定性很高的信息化项目无法作出科学的判断,无法赋予投资者更多的灵活性。由于企业信息化项目投资及其产生的效益的不确定性具有许多实物期权的特点,因此,将运用实物期权方法来解决企业信息化多项目投资决策风险控制问题。     

Local inequality and project choice: Theory and evidence from Ecuador

This paper provides evidence consistent with elite capture of Social Fund investment projects in Ecuador. Exploiting a unique combination of data sets on village-level income distributions, Social Fund project administration, and province-level electoral results, we test a simple model of project choice when local political power is unequally distributed. In accordance with the predictions of the model, poorer villages are more likely to receive projects that provide excludable (private) goods to the poor, such as latrines. Controlling for poverty, more unequal communities are less likely to receive such projects. Consistent with the hypothesis of elite capture, these results are sensitive to the specific measures of inequality and elite power used in the empirical analysis, and are strongest for expenditure shares at the top of the distribution.     

经济责任审计风险成因分析

近年来,高校工程建设项目数量不断增多,随着高校基建工程投资的质量、效益越来越受到人们的关注,基建工程投资审计的重点领域己开始向效益审计延伸。在新形势下,高校内部审计机构和人员应正确认识工程建设项目效益审计,并进一步推进基建工程投资效益审计,监督和规范投资行为,提高建设资金使用效率。     

Infrastructure: What Is Needed and How Do We Pay for It?

Claims of an infrastructure crisis lack definition, and fail to provide evidence that investment projects that would generate an economic return, including both private and social benefits, are not being funded. This paper shows how setting economic prices for energy, water, transport and communications will provide a better guide to the optimal amount of future infrastructure investment than the likely responses by proponents of an alleged infrastructure crisis.     

Preemptive investment game with alternative projects

This paper investigates a duopoly with two alternative investment projects. We examine a situation in which a firm cannot invest in any project that has been taken by the rival firm. The first mover's advantage in project choice leads to an equilibrium quite different from that in previous studies. Specifically, we show that in equilibrium, the investment time and the option value are between those in a duopoly with one project and a monopoly with one project. Moreover, we show that a high correlation between project values, unlike in a monopoly with two projects, plays a positive role in mitigating preemptive competition. The results complement the literature of real options games and of max-options and entail new empirical implications.     

Battle royal in biotechnology: R&D vs. product vs. process innovations

Companies regard innovation as a central element of their business. However, as not all innovation types are the same, the central question is: should their announcements bring about the same effect on performance? This article analyses potential differences in firm value derived from the innovation-type announcements ‘R&;D’, ‘product’, and ‘process’, made by intensive news-generating firms such as biotech companies. The empirical application shows a significantly positive reaction to innovation announcements, with the prospect of future innovation (‘R&;D’ investment announcements) having greater impact on firm value than ‘product’ and ‘process’ innovations. Firm experience also acts as a moderator in this innovation–performance relationship, which is particularly relevant for entrepreneurs who need to develop and send credible signals indicating the value of the firm's intangible assets to the market.     

The Lao Economy: Capitalizing on Natural Resource Exports

Trade and investment reforms in Laos since the mid‐1980s have boosted natural resource‐based exports, underpinning recent economic growth. A high proportion of the proceeds from these exports accrue directly to the government. Over the 8 years preceding 2011, total government revenue increased from 11% to over 19% of gross domestic product, due almost entirely to revenues derived from mining and hydropower. The effect on the Lao people depends on how the government uses these revenues. This paper examines how Laos' export‐led growth can be channeled into directions that deliver the greatest benefit to the Lao people.     

从紧货币政策下的资金管理

在从紧货币政策下,企业的长期股权投资尤其应该慎之又慎。如果筹资方案明确筹集的资金是为了某一长期投资项目,在经过必要的投资决策程序的前提下,就可以进行此项目的投资,并在投资过程中,加强监督和管理,以取得预期的投资效果。如果投资项目未经科学、严密的评估和论证,或者在投资后又缺乏有效的管理,就有可能因决策失误或管理不善而招致重大损失。     

Perspectives on Australian Retirement Incomes

With important developments over the past two decades in Australian retirement income policy, projected future outcomes—for the public purse, for the national economy and for the future retired—have received considerable attention. This focus on the future should not, however, cause us to lose sight of the present. While the major changes in retirement income policy outcomes will not occur for some decades, the picture for current and recent cohorts of retired people is not static. This article begins with an account of the important policy developments since the 1980s in the Australian retirement income arena—the Australian retirement income system still differs radically from that in most other countries, in relying heavily on a means‐tested income maintenance system, rather than on social insurance. The outcomes for current and recent cohorts of retired people are then examined from two perspectives. The first perspective is an examination of the incomes of the aged in the mid 1990s and of trends over the 1980s and 1990s—including consideration of changes in the level, composition and distribution of aged incomes. The second perspective is an international comparison of the incomes of the aged.     

The effect of GNP announcements on fluctuations of GNP growth

This paper is an empirical study of the degree in which perceptions affect the evolution of the economy. We study the effects of the announcements that the government makes on GNP growth. These announcements are subject to a substantial degree of noise and its accuracy improves with time. A revised number is published several years after the first announcement was made public. We consider that the final revision is the “true” value of GNP growth. We show that once announcements are taken into account, the true value of GNP growth at time t has no predictive power in determining growth at any future time. All the predictive power lies in the announcements, and not in the true level of growth. Actually, we show that the variable that determines future growth is the unexpected part of the announcements. We also show that announcements affect growth via aggregate investment.     

A Cautionary Note on the Use of Benefit Metrics for Cost-Effective Conservation

Cost-effective land conservation techniques, such as optimization, have the potential to contribute substantially to the provision of many important environmental benefits, such as biodiversity protection, flood control, food security, water quality, and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. There has been a recent push for conservation organizations to adopt project selection optimization approaches such as binary linear programming. The metrics used to measure the benefits of a project however, are often poorly defined in that they do not directly compute a value. These scores represent normalized measurements of underlying values that are likely log-normally distributed. Applying such metrics in optimization will tend to undervalue high-benefit projects and select a suboptimal portfolio of projects relative to simpler approaches. This suboptimal performance can lead to losses in efficiency as high as 30%. We propose a hybrid optimization heuristic that can improve performance and, additionally, provide conservation professionals with more flexibility and freedom to select conservation projects at their discretion—potentially overcoming a substantial real-world adaptation hurdle.     

Leveraging private capital for climate mitigation: Evidence from the Clean Development Mechanism

To mitigate climate change, states must make significant investments into energy and other sectors. To solve this problem, scholars emphasize the importance of leveraging private capital. If states create institutional mechanisms that promote private investment, they can reduce the fiscal cost of carbon abatement. We examine the ability of different international institutional designs to leverage private capital in the context of the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Empirically, we analyze private capital investment in 3749 climate mitigation projects under the CDM, 2003–2011. Since the CDM allows both bilateral and unilateral implementation, we can compare the two modes of contracting within one context. Our model analyzes equilibrium private investment in climate mitigation. When the cost of mitigation is high, unilateral project implementation in one host country, without foreign collaboration, draws more investment than bilateral contracting, whereby foreign investors participate in the project.     

Water and vertical territory: the volatile and hidden historical geographies of Derbyshire’s lead mining soughs, 1650s–1830s

ABSTRACT

This paper is concerned with the complex subterranean politics of lead mining in the Derbyshire Peak District. We focus specifically on the implications of lead mining ‘soughs’ – underground channels driven to drain water out of mines to allow for mineral extraction. Built during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, soughs were substantial, capital and labour intensive projects which served a key function in the refashioning of subterranean and surface hydrological landscapes. They were ‘driven’ at a time when water was both a major hindrance to mining endeavour and the primary energy source for industrial expansion, such that historical disputes surrounding sough drainage were common. Here, we draw on unpublished historical legal records to explore the ways in which vertical conceptualisations of space were central to the legal discourse over soughs and extend the so called ‘vertical turn’ in geography to include subterranean proto-historical landscapes. Drawing on a high profile conflict between English entrepreneur Richard Arkwright and Conservative politician Francis Hurt, we go some way to addressing recent claims for more ethnographic detail in studies of verticality by considering the people who legally and physically negotiated sough development below as well as above ground. We also illustrate the range of temporalities which framed sough developments and highlight the cross-generational nature of the legal disputes over soughs and the productive landscapes they drained.     

R&D项目风险管理的实证研究

近年来我国企业特别是高新科技企业纷纷加大了对RD活动的投入力度,但相对滞后的RD投资中风险项目的管理方法已经不再适用于如今具有高技术特征的RD投资的快速发展。故而,文章在深入分析RD投资中风险项目影响因素的基础上,提出了不确定环境下的RD投资项目的风险管理框架,利用QFD软件平台上的风险管理框架评估实验方法,邀请行波型超声电动机研发中的实验人员分组进行了风险评估决策对比实验。最终,对该项目运行的QFD风险管理框架的试验和评估结果表明,QFD软件平台不仅能够在客户需求数量及风险类别数量方面为决策者提供较为充足的现实数据还能大大减少决策者执行决策所耗费的时间。对此,文章认为QFD风险管理方法能够行之有效地影响到决策者决策的执行,可被广大投资商引为一种灵活有效的RD项目风险及不确定性管理办法。     

实物期权方法在房地产投资项目评估中的运用

随着我国房地产市场的不断发展与壮大,房地产类投资项目评估作为为企业带来利润、推动房地产市场发展的一项重要工作,越来越受到投资人士的重视.在房地产类投资项目的评估过程中,房地产类项目投资的不可逆、可延迟等特性使得传统的净现值法出现了自身难以克服的缺陷,而实物期权在评估过程中的运用能够使项目评估更加全面、充分、科学.