Potential demand for hedging by Australian wheat producers

The potential for hedging Australian wheat with the new Sydney Futures Exchange wheat contract is examined using a theoretical hedging model parametised from previous studies. The optimal hedging ratio for an ‘average’ wheat farmer was found to be zero under reasonable assumptions about transaction costs and based on previously published measures of risk aversion. The estimated optimal hedging ratios were found by simulation to be quite sensitive to assumptions about the degree of risk aversion. If farmers are significantly more risk averse than is currently believed, then there is likely to be an active interest in the new futures market.     

带来机遇的泰国自由贸易区

在泰国，出于进口税收体制的原因，许多产品从他国进口时所承担的税负比使用进口部件所生产的产品还要低。对此，泰国政府采用“自由贸易区”（Free Zone）这一概念和体制予以改善，目的是把泰国打造成国内市场乃至亚洲（尤其是东盟）市场首选的制造基地。     

Über die konstruktion der ausscheidetafel der aktiven

Abstract

In der technischen Behandlung der Invaliden- oder Krankenversicherung kommt die Aufgabe vor, aus der Gruppe der Lebenden die Gruppe der Aktiven auszuscheiden. Dies wird in der Praxis vielleicht ausnahmslos derart ausgeführt, dass die Gruppe derjenigen Invaliden gleichen Alters, welche im Laufe eines Jahres invalid werden, weiter Jahr für .Jahr verfolgt wird. Angenommen, dass die Anzahl der Aktiven in einem Zeitpunkt gegeben ist, lässt sich vermittels der gegebenen Wahrscheinlichkeiten die Anzahl der während eines Jahres invalid Gewordenen und am Ende des ersten Jahres und späterer Jahre lebenden Invaliden ermitteln. Die Ausscheidetafel der Aktiven wird auf diese Weise Schritt für Schritt von dem jüngsten Alter zu den höheren weiter aufgebaut.     

Morgan Stanley Roundtable on The State of Global Private Equity

In this discussion led by Alan Jones, Morgan Stanley's head of Global Private Equity, the University of Chicago's Steve Kaplan begins by surveying 25 years of academic research on private equity. Starting with Kaplan's own Ph.D. dissertation on leveraged buyouts during the 1980s, finance academics have provided a large and growing body of studies documenting the ability of private equity firms to make “sustainable” (that is, maintained over a three‐ or four‐year period) improvements in the operating performance of their portfolio companies, whether operating abroad or in the U.S. Even more impressive, the findings of Kaplan's new study (with Tim Jenkinson of Oxford and Bob Harris of the University of Virginia) suggest that these improvements have been large enough to enable PE funds raised between 1990 and 2008 to deliver returns to their limited partners that have averaged 300 to 400 basis points higher per year than the returns to the S&P 500. And given the “persistence” of PE fund returns—the tendency of the funds of the same PE firms to show up in the top quartile of performers year after year—that Kaplan has documented in earlier work, the performance of private equity seems notably different from that of mutual funds and hedge funds, where there has been little if any consistency in the returns provided by the top performers. Following Kaplan's overview of the research, four representatives of today's leading private equity firms explore questions like the following:

• ? How do the best PE firms, after paying premiums to acquire their portfolio companies and collecting large management fees, provide such consistently high returns to their limited partners?
• ? How did PE portfolio companies perform during the last recession, when many popular business publications were predicting the death of private equity—and what, if anything, does that tell us about how private equity adds value?
• ? What can PE firms do to avoid, or at least limit the damage from, the overpricing and overleveraging that tend to occur near the end of the boom‐and‐bust cycle that appears to be a permanent feature of private equity?

As Jones notes in his opening comments, the practitioners' answers to such questions “should help investors distinguish between the alpha that the firms represented at this table have generated through active management from the ‘closet beta’ that critics say results when private equity firms simply create what amounts to a levered bet on the public equity markets.”