Can investors time their exposure to private equity?

Private equity performance, both for buyouts and venture capital, has been highly cyclical: periods of high fundraising have been followed by periods of low performance. Despite this seemingly predictable variation, we find modest gains, at best, to pursuing realistic, investable strategies that time capital commitments to private equity. This occurs, in part, because investors can only time their commitments to funds; they cannot time when commitments are called or when investments are exited. There is a high degree of time-series correlation in net cash flows even across commitment strategies that allocate capital in a very different manner over time.     

What does corporate social responsibility mean for charitable fundraising in the UK?

Coporate social responsibility (CSR) has grown enormously in the last ten years and the business case is compelling. That is not to say that CSR is the ‘silver bullet’ for achieving meaningful social change — this will require collaborative action. Part of this is a more mature relationship between charities and businesses — something beyond the worth ‘charitable donation’. Charities need to engage with business in a way that achieves mutual benefit; not ‘cap in hand’ but exploring the potential in shared objectives. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

The myth of purchasing professionals’ expertise. More evidence on whether computers can make better procurement decisions

In a previous experiment, we have shown that risk assessments of purchasing experts are certainly not better than that of subjects untrained in purchasing, and worse than the decisions made by formal models (J. Purchas. Supply Manage. 9 (2003) 191–198). Since both these results are rather counterintuitive, we conducted a series of experiments geared at replication and extension of these findings. These new experiments show that our previous results are robust, and reveal an additional finding that is both worrying and puzzling. It actually seems to be the case that for the purchasing decision tasks in our experiments, experts perform worse with growing experience. It therefore seems that, at least for the kinds of purchasing decisions under study, it does not make much sense to use expert judgments at all. However, we show that there is a way in which expert judgments can be used in combination with formal models to improve the predictive accuracy of purchasing predictions. In our case, superior predictions are made when we combine the prediction of a formal model with the prediction of the ‘average expert’, thereby combining the robust linear trends as encapsulated in the formal model with the more intuitive configural rules used by experts. We provide several explanations for this phenomenon.     

Risk-Adjusted Discount Rates and Projects of Unequal Lives

When evaluating mutually exclusive projects of unequal lives and with differing risk, standard approaches such as the constant chain of replacement, lowest common multiple and equivalent annual value techniques are usually applied. In using these techniques to rank projects, a critical issue is the manner in which uncertainty in the cashflows is resolved through time. We explore the applicability of net present value techniques to the problem of valuing assets with unequal lives, emphasising the use of equivalent annual value and lowest common multiple methods, and the correct choice of discount rate. Our results have direct application to practical capital budgeting problems such as choosing the optimum lifespan for a single asset, choosing between assets with different lifespans, and deciding whether to "run an asset for another year".     

Client, User and Architect Interactions in Construction: Implications for Analysing Innovative Outcomes from User-Producer Interactions in Projects

Three case studies of user/client-architect interaction, and their implications for an understanding of the design and innovation process in capital goods projects, are considered in this paper. The studies presented include a major 'City Challenge'-funded social housing development programme in the UK, a housing co-operative-driven workplace and housing scheme associated with the same programme and a new building for the business school of a major UK university. Reflecting upon existing literature on user-producer relationships, the paper draws two key conclusions from the case studies that add to this literature. The first points to the need to account for the broader strategic motivations of agents within projects. Two of the case studies describe how innovation driven by the architects involved exceeded the original requirements of the client, and in so doing reveal architects to be oriented toward non-project specific goals. The second conclusion focuses on the user/client and points to the importance of a strong and coherent 'customer vision' in 'enabling' the client to determine project outcomes more fully. Following from these conclusions, it is argued that an analysis of client/ user-producer interactions needs to account more fully for the effects of longer-term strategic planning by agents.     

Target marketing in a social marketing context: gender differences in importance ratings of promoted intrinsic and extrinsic restricted exchange benefits of military enlistment

Social marketing involves influencing voluntary behaviour of people towards a social end. Examples of social marketing range from campaigns to encourage healthy physical behaviour to efforts to encourage tax support for public education, overcome racism, or stimulate ‘patriotic’ behaviour. Using data from a summer 2001 telephone survey of 600 young adults, this paper investigates how recruitment campaigns may benefit from considering gender differences in importance ratings of a variety of benefits promoted by the military in the USA. Importance ratings are assessed using differences in means and variances tests. Findings identify gender specific differences that may be used to enhance recruitment campaigns. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

Tourism today: A geographical analysis : by D.G. Pearce Longman, Harlow, 1986, 229 pages, £9.95

Chris Cooper, of Surrey University's Department of Management Studies for Tourism and Hotel Industries, describes the uses and significance of the technique of interpretation in providing an interface between the tourist destination and the visitor. Interpretation can enhance the visitor experience by making the attributes of the resort more comprehensible.     

Foreign direct investment and vertical integration of production by Japanese multinationals in Thailand

We test the vertical model of foreign direct investment (FDI) empirically using firm level information on Japanese multinational activity in Thailand. These data allow us to investigate the effects of both home country (Japan) and host country (Thailand) characteristics on the inter-industry pattern of FDI. For 85 manufacturing industries over the period from 1985 to 1995, we find a positive influence of industry variation in skill intensity and market size in the host country and a negative effect of transport costs on the amount of FDI. These results provide strong direct econometric evidence of vertical integration of production across the countries. Journal of Comparative Economics 32 (4) (2004) 805–821.