The evolution of Australia's natural resource management programs: Towards improved targeting and evaluation of investments

This paper examines the evolution of Australia's natural resource management programs over the past two decades. The story is one of major paradigmatic shifts with implications for the design and operation of similar programs worldwide. Since 1983, Australian Governments have approved the National Soil Conservation Program, the National Landcare Program, the Natural Heritage Trust, the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality and a new program called Caring for Our Country. These programs have seen a transition from the early days of attitude change to the creation of new regional institutions and direct payment systems for environmental stewardship. Despite these advances recent audit reports have mirrored those from the United States and the Europe. They identify problems of ineffective targeting, monitoring and evaluation of expenditure. This paper considers the efficiency and effectiveness of alternative program designs in Australia. Two major design improvements are suggested: (a) systems for linking expenditure to outcomes and (b) adopting standardised metrics for valuing outcomes. This will permit the application of benefit-cost and cost-effectiveness analysis and, ultimately, improved returns on investment.     

Evaluation uncertainty of venture capitalists' investment criteria

This paper analyzes the decision process of venture capitalists. The study focuses on aligning the evaluation uncertainty in the decision criteria of venture capitalists with the progress of the process. The reasoning builds from the concept of search, experience and credence qualities, which was developed in the economics of information and allows the identification of the varying uncertainty of a single decision criterion compared to other criteria, along with uncertainty variations throughout the process. Exploratory empirical evidence suggests that in the early steps of the process in particular, management criteria are uncertain, while at the end of the process other criteria couple with uncertainty.     

Excessive(?) entry of national telecom networks, 1990–2001

This paper documents entry and capacity expansion in US long-distance fiber–optic networks before and during the “telecom boom.” It disentangles the many swaps and leases between networks in order to measure owned route miles versus route miles shared with other carriers. Entry is still extensive, but more moderate when these shared miles are not counted. It concludes that entry was excessive primarily with regard to swaps and leases, but less so with regard to the physical building of the networks.     

International investment and Nazi politics: The cloaking of German assets abroad, 1936–1945

This article deals with the relationship between business and government during the Third Reich in making policy toward attempts by German companies to protect their foreign assets. In contrast to the widely held view of many professional historians and journalists, we argue that business engaged in these efforts largely without governmental assistance, indeed often in the face of resistance from the regime, since for the most part companies set up structures that were contrary to the wishes of the National Socialist political bureaucracy. Although some of the evidence we present here is known to historians, much of our interpretation of the data has not penetrated professional accounts of the period. The cloaking story, moreover, has implications for contemporary multinational business. As the Second World War approached, fear of expropriation became a more important motivation for cloaking, but even in the late 1930s German managers created these structures for a variety of commercial reasons. Firms are still confronted by a myriad of pressures and political risks, not the least of which are those posed by their own home countries' actions that affect the value of their foreign assets. We argue here that one of the commercial objectives of German businesses' cloaking efforts was to reduce the political risk of the actions of the country in which they were incorporated.     

Management of Sino-Sino Joint Ventures

Abstract

Since China's implementation of its open-door policy in 1979, the most effective way to obtain a foothold has proved to be to create joint ventures (JV) with a Chinese business partner. The foreign partner provides the transfer of technology, management skills, financing and access to international markets, whilst the Chinese partner contributes a production base with cheap land and labor, contacts with central and local government officials and access to the domestic Chinese market. The Chinese economy has benefited to a large extent from the creation of joint ventures in the past two decades. Hong Kong firms have used China as a production base for many years, usually with great success and to the mutual benefit of both. However, although Hong Kong firms had considerable experiences in running business and manufacturing operations in China, several have suffered substantially from their investment in joint ventures with Chinese partners. This paper evaluates various issues relating to the performance of equity joint ventures in China. The evaluation is based on a case study of four Sino-Hong Kong joint venture manufacturing firms in the electronics industry, and the findings of this paper indicate that there are number of important factors affecting the stability of joint ventures in China. Foreign investors' experiences in other areas may not be applicable to their investment in China because the operation of a joint venture in China is inevitably faced with a variety of problems that the foreign firms may not have encountered before.     

旁地产价格增长是否阻碍城镇化进程——基于我国31个省级单位面板数据的经验分析

通过对我国31个省级单位面板数据进行实证研究，发现从全国整体来看，房地产价格上涨对城镇化进程体现出正向促进作用，但是根据地区层级上的分析，在中西部地区房地产价格增长对城镇化具有显著的负向抑制作用。可见，现阶段房地产价格显然在阻碍城乡间劳动力要素流动方面扮演了重要角色。不断增长的房价增加了城镇化成本，对于农村劳动力转移起到阻碍作用。因此，为了保障新型城镇化的实现，必须通过土地、财政、金融等制度变革与其他市场化手段相结合，遏制房地产价格继续过快上涨，从而实现房地产市场与新型城镇化的协调发展。     

基于扩散指数模型的房地产市场景气循环研究——以北京市为例

基于扩散指数模型构建房地产市场景气循环指标体系，采用北京市住宅市场与经济基本面的历史数据，计算不同时期北京市房地产市场的扩散指数，绘制北京市房地产市场的景气循环曲线，并根据景气循环曲线与历史数据对北京市未来房地产市场的景气情况进行预测。最后，提出在上述市场预测情况下的市场调控策略。     

Investment policy with time-to-build

Most capital projects have an implementation lag. We examine the effect of implementation lag on a levered firm’s investment decision. The main finding is that implementation lag can potentially have a substantial effect on a levered company’s investment trigger, and this effect can be significantly different from that of an unlevered company. The exact relationship between lag and investment trigger depends on the level of debt used by the firm. For an optimally-levered firm, a crucial determinant of the lag-investment relationship is the fraction of investment cost that has to be incurred upfront. If this fraction is small, investment trigger is a decreasing function of implementation lag and the effect can be economically significant. If this fraction is large, investment trigger can be either increasing or decreasing in lag, depending on parameter values, but the magnitude of the effect is not large. Optimally levering a firm makes the implementation lag more investment-friendly relative to an unlevered firm, thus it is possible that the lag has a negative effect on investment if the firm is unlevered but a positive effect if the same firm is optimally-levered. For an optimally-levered firm, implementation lag generally has a non-negative effect on investment.     

Does financial integration affect real exchange rate volatility and cross-country equity market returns correlation?

Existing empirical studies show that financial integration affects the behavior of average excess returns, cross-country equity market returns (EMR) correlations and real exchange rate (RER) volatility. We employ a recently developed two-country model with recursive preferences, frictionless and complete markets and highly correlated long-run innovations to examine whether full financial integration (i.e. full risk-sharing) affects the US-Canada EMR correlation and the US RER volatility, consistently with existing empirical findings. First, full risk-sharing gives rise to a relatively high RER volatility. Second, it induces very strong positive cross-country EMR correlations. Both quantities are higher than those observed in the US-Canada asset pricing data, and increase as the risk-sharing incentive increases. In contrast, “international consumption quantities” are weakly sensitive to changes in the level of aversion to consumption and utility risk.     

Effects of speculation and interest rates in a “carry trade” model of commodity prices

The paper presents and estimates a model of the prices of oil and other storable commodities, a model that can be characterized as reflecting the carry trade. It focuses on speculative factors, here defined as the trade-off between interest rates on the one hand and market participants' expectations of future price changes on the other hand. It goes beyond past research by bringing to bear new data sources: survey data to measure expectations of future changes in commodity prices and options data to measure perceptions of risk. Some evidence is found of a negative effect of interest rates on the demand for inventories and thereby on commodity prices and positive effects of expected future price gains on inventory demand and thereby on today's commodity prices.