Management buy-outs,trade unions and employee ownership

Management buy-outs developed rapidly throughout the 1980s in the UK and continental Europe. The shift to managerial and employee ownership involved, has major implications for trade unions and industrial relations. This article examines these issues using survey and case study evidence from the UK.     

THE NEW LEVERAGED LOAN SYNDICATION MARKET

Over the past ten years, commercial lending has been transformed from a one-off, bilateral "market" in which issuers maintained one or more separate banking relationships into a capital market in which one or more underwriters structure and price loans for syndication to groups of investors. This market-driven evolution has been most dramatic in the leveraged lending segment (defined as loans priced at LIBOR plus 150 basis points or more), where wide margins have attracted a large and growing field of underwriters, intermediaries, and investors.
Liquidity is the overriding theme in today's syndicated loan market, making the market a more user-friendly one for corporate borrowers and deal sponsors. As a result, a record number of corporate issuers are taking advantage of the syndicated loan market to finance strategic transactions or simply to reduce their borrowing costs. Deal sponsors, too, are tapping the market to finance leveraged buyouts, recapitalizations, and acquisitions at a pace not seen since the late 1980s. But, although acquisition pricing has reached cash flow multiples that recall those of the late '80s, equity contributions by sponsors are larger and credit structures are more conservative.
For banks and other investors, reduced loan pricing and more flexible credit structures have been balanced by much greater access to a large volume of diversified assets, as well as the ability to manage asset-specific and portfolio risk more effectively. As a result of more effective portfolio management strategies, lenders today are less vulnerable to credit problems with individual issuers or a given industry segment, and the bank market as a whole should be much less subject to disruption than it proved to be in the early 1990s.     

The relationship between rents and prices of owner-occupied housing in Taiwan

This article analyzes the changes of equilibrium rent and equilibrium price of owner-occupied housing in Taiwan, and also computes the rent multiplier and its trend in the past ten years in Taiwan to show how the housing consumption and housing investment change. A hedonic rent equation and a hedonic housing price equation are built first. Then, we apply the Housing Survey Report data from 1979 to 1989, and employ ordinary-least squares method to estimate the two equations. Using estimated coefficients of the two equations, we compute the market rents for owner-occupied housing and the market prices for rental housing. Finally, the rent multipliers are calculated from the market rents and market prices. The article finds that (1) changes of housing prices in Taipei lead to price changes in Kaoshung, and the latter leads Taiwan province; (2) changes of rent are much smaller than the changes of housing price; and (3) housing prices in Taiwan increased drastically. We also find: (1) at the peak of the housing market cycle, the rent multiplier is extremely high; (2) the rent multiplier drops in the year after the peak year because the rent catches up; (3) the rent multiplier in Taipei is greater than that of Kaoshung, and the multiplier in Kaoshung is greater than that of Taiwan province; and (4) overall, the rent multiplier in Taiwan is much greater than that of the United States.     

Recovering the production technology from the cost function

An alternative technique for recovering the technology from the cost function is investigated. The recovery method uses an optimization problem with a finite number of constraints that, under appropriate conditions, has, the equations of Shephard's lemma among the first order conditions. Hence, a justification is provided for the technique of recovering the production function from the cost function by solving the system of equations generated by Shephard's lemma. The alternative technique also recovers the output distance function from the cost function in the multioutput case.The editor for this paper was R. Robert Russell.     

Cash flow analysis for energy impacted local governments—a case study of mercer county,north dakota

Energy resource taxation policy has become a major issue in a number of energy producing areas and particularly in the western united States. This paper compares alternative energy taxation systems in terms of their implications for local governments and local planning. A fiscal impact simulation model is utilized to evaluate a severance-production tax system and, alternatively, an ad valorem property tax system. The results indicate that the form of taxation system adopted can have a major influence on the fiscal outlook for local governments in areas affected by large scale development projects and thus on the welfare of area residents. These results also suggest that local fiscal considerations should receive careful attention in local planning and policy formulation.     

Financial distress, corporate borrowing, and industrial decline: the Lancashire cotton spinning industry, 1918-38

The analysis presented is based on a case study of Lancashire cotton textile firms. It traces their financial history through the sharp boom of 1919-20, and the sudden crisis that followed. Using a sample of representative companies it is shown that firms unwittingly adopted inappropriate financial structures that acted as the decisive constraint on the adoption of recovery strategies in the subsequent slump. The paper explains how the relationship between indebtedness and asset values prevented subsequent internal financial retrenchment, restructuring and re-equipment, and dictated the competitive processes within the industry. It is demonstrated that financial constraints were the decisive factor determining the feasibility of competitive strategies available to the industry's leaders.     

Entry and Exit in a Transition Economy: The Case of Poland

The purpose of this paper is to examine the industrialentry and exit in a transitioneconomy, over the interval of change from a predominatelystate-owned productivesystem. The data set employed offers a near-exhaustivecoverage of manufacturingfirms in Poland. The paper estimates entry and exit equationsacross 152 3-digitindustries, using an adaptation of an Orr–Shapiro/Khemani-typemodel to allow for thespecial circumstances of a transition economy. Theresults suggest that, despite theturbulence of the immediate post-transition period,the patterns of entry and exitbehaviour in Poland correspond closely to thoseobserved in more mature marketeconomies.     

Investment decisions when utility depends on wealth and other attributes

The problem of optimal investment under a multivariate utility function allows for an investor to obtain utility not only from wealth, but other (possibly correlated) attributes. In this paper we implement multivariate mixtures of exponential (mixex) utility to address this problem. These utility functions allow for stochastic risk aversions to differing states of the world. We derive some new results for certainty equivalence in this context. By specifying different distributions for stochastic risk aversions, we are able to derive many known, plus several new utility functions, including models of conditional certainty equivalence and multivariate generalisations of HARA utility, which we call dependent HARA utility. Focusing on the case of asset returns and attributes being multivariate normal, we optimise the asset portfolio, and find that the optimal portfolio consists of the Markowitz portfolio and hedging portfolios. We provide an empirical illustration for an investor with a mixex utility function of wealth and sentiment.     

与府合作开发商业地产

过去20年里,政府与企业间的合作已成为美国城市与商业地产开发商增强当地经济活力、改善基础设施、提高工作效率的不二选择.在英国和澳大利亚,企业集资开发项目也由来已久.而欧洲,直到2010年才开始有政企合作开发的商业地产项目,并得到迅速发展.据欧洲投资银行统计,这些合作项目的总和大约为2 600亿欧元.但是,商业地产开发商...