An empirical procedure for enhancing the impact of road investments

The importance of ‘needs based planning’ is increasingly being recognised by road authorities. Such planning entails allocation of resources to explicitly account for the requirements of the community well into the future. Accomplishing what the community requires of a road system, at least at a level desired by them and ensuring regional equity in meeting community requirements, are two issues that are at the fore-front of needs based planning. This paper demonstrates that, in order to achieve these planning objectives it is necessary to adopt a procedure that can identify road investment proposals with the maximum ability to cost-effectively generate what the community perceive as gain in value to them due to road investment. Using data collected for Western Australia, the paper illustrates that generating investment proposals by commonly used approaches—including conventional multi-criteria analysis—cannot satisfactorily address these issues.     

The order of integration for quarterly macroeconomic time series: A simple testing strategy

An empirical example and a simulation study show that much more attention should be devoted to the practical issue of selecting the maximum admissible order of integration for quarterly macroeconomic time series. In fact, it is shown that when that order is too high, one may get (spurious) evidence for an excessive number of unit roots, resulting in an overdifferenced series. Besides introducing a simple and intuitive definition for the order of integration of quarterly time series, this paper also presents a simple testing strategy to determine that order for the case of macroeconomic data.Helpful comments and suggestions from João Santos Silva and Paulo Rodrigues are gratefully acknowledged. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees, whose comments and suggestions helped improving this paper. Obviously, the usual disclaimer applies. This work has also benefited from financial support from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), through Programa POCTI (ECO/33778/2000). A previous version of this paper was presented at the Royal Economic Society Conference, March 2002, Warwick.     

Capital structure decisions: old issues,new insights from high-tech small- and medium-sized enterprises

Using panel data models and this study analyses the capital structure decisions of high-tech small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and non-high-tech SMEs. The results suggest that the capital structure decisions of high-tech SMEs are closer to what is predicted by the Pecking Order Theory. However, the results also suggest a modified version of the Pecking Order Theory for high-tech SMEs that have relied on venture capital. These firms prefer equity issues to debt, when internal finance is exhausted. The empirical evidence suggests that problems relating to information asymmetry as well as technological and market uncertainty influence the capital structure decisions of high-tech SMEs.     

A systematic review of risk management in innovation-oriented firms

Innovation and risk are inseparable. In fact, literature on innovation management often recommends that innovation-oriented firms must actively monitor, evaluate, analyze and treat future events in order to mitigate risks whenever possible. This approach is particularly important in emergent economies characterized by unstructured national innovation systems and constant economic and market instability. However, there has been no systematic effort to identify and categorize risks that potentially impact businesses based on innovation. Thus, we propose an interpretative framework of risk events with potential financial impact in innovation-oriented firms constructed and tested by means of a mixed studies review. The risk events were identified through a comprehensive systematic search and review of the published literature on risk and innovation. From the 115 works that were analyzed, it was possible to identify nine categories of risk events frequently associated with innovation-oriented businesses that may generate financial impacts. The proposed interpretative framework was tested in an empirical study with 13 innovation-oriented firms located in six Brazilian technological parks. Results from the empirical study suggest that managers found the proposed interpretative framework complete and comprehensive. Moreover, the empirical study signaled which risk events are more relevant for the Brazilian context. The proposed framework is a first necessary step for future development of ERM models applicable in innovation-intensive contexts.     

Tax on emissions or subsidy to renewables? Evaluating the effects on the economy and on the environment

We examine the relationship between the economy and the environment in a model where production uses nonpolluting renewable and polluting nonrenewable resources. There is policy intervention through a tax on emissions and a subsidy to renewables extraction/production. Results show that both instruments are able to decrease emissions intensity of output. However, when used together, the desired effect is higher. Empirically it is shown that the subsidy achieves higher renewables intensity and although present emissions per output are similar for both instruments, the subsidy achieves lower future levels.     

Deadlines and software: disentangling local government accounting reforms in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This paper shows how ongoing accounting reforms in Brazilian local governments were affected by a shift from a universal to a gradual implementation approach. Deadlines being postponed led to a decrease in local governments’ willingness to reform. This effect varied according whether the accountants involved depended on commercial software to operate a particular accounting policy. An important finding from this research was that software providers are to some extent setting the IPSAS implementation agenda in Brazil.     

Separation costs, job heterogeneity and labor market volatility in the matching model

This paper extends the standard matching model by introducing a gap in separation costs between entrant and incumbent workers. We show that when this gap is omitted from the model, these costs do not improve the labor market volatility without introducing unrealistic unemployment responses to unemployment benefits.     

On the efficiency of a global market for carbon dioxide emission permits: Type of externality and timing of policymaking

We demonstrate that global permit markets are Pareto efficient despite the externality type, production or consumption, when income redistribution occurs after regional environmental policymaking. Ex-ante income redistribution is neutral if emissions affect production only, but non-neutral if emissions affect consumption.     

Selecting sustainable electric bus powertrains using multipreference evolutionary algorithms

Constant improvement of vehicle technologies towards more efficient powertrains and reduced pollutant emissions, frequently leads to the increase of the vehicle or fuel costs, compromising its viability. Multi-objective optimization methods are commonly used to solve such problems, finding optimal trade-off solutions relatively conflicting objectives. Nevertheless, vehicle driving performance, is often disregarded from the optimization process or considered only as a fixed constraint. This may raise some issues, which are discussed in this paper: (a) vehicle dynamics are not improved, (b) trade-off optimal solutions are not distinguishable, (c) interesting solutions near constraints limits won´t be considered if constraints are not marginally relaxed.

This paper proposes a method to optimize three electric-drive vehicle options for an urban bus, a battery electric (BEV), a fuel cell hybrid (FC-HEV) and a plug-in hybrid (FC-PHEV), aiming minimum carbon footprint, maximum financial indicator and simultaneously improved driving performance (speed, acceleration, and electric range). The carbon footprint is assessed by a life cycle (LC) approach, considering the impact of the fuel production and use, and vehicle embodied materials; while the financial assessment considers the vehicle and fuel costs. The spherical pruning multi-objective differential evolution algorithm (spMODE-II) is used in the optimization, considering different preference regions within the problem constraints and objectives. The vehicle solutions optimality and suitability are compared with other multi-objective algorithm, NSGA-II.

The FC-HEV achieved the lowest LC emissions (547 g/km), and the FC-PHEV the maximum financial gain (0.19 $/km), while the BEV achieved the best trade-off of solutions.