Business Commons^™

Relative Corporate Social Performance And Cost Of Equity Capital: International Evidence, Benjamin Lynch, Martha O'Hagan-Luff

Articles

This research examines the relationship between firms' corporate social performance (CSP) and the implied cost of equity capital using a sample of 25,938 firm-year observation from 49 countries during the period from 2002 to 2021. Using estimates of the firms' ex ante cost of equity capital, we examine its relationship with industry-relative measures of the firms' CSP, its environmental and social pillars and sub-pillars. We find that increased overall CSP reduces a firm's cost of equity capital up until a point, beyond which the marginal benefits of further CSP investment decrease. We find that the social pillar is the main …

Shifting The Eu Taxonomy From Theory To Practice: A Review Of The Literature Highlighting Potential Academic Contributions To Its Adoption, Implementation, And Impact, Dylan Kirby, Sandra Thompson, Cormac H. Macmahon

Articles

The EU Taxonomy seeks to identify those sustainable economic activities, thereby supporting climate change mitigation and adaptation. Recent legislation underpinning the EU Taxonomy, such as the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), highlight the urgency for academic contributions that might shed light on its operationalisation. At this embryonic stage in the Taxonomy’s lifecycle, there is potential for the academic community to contribute to understanding its implications. Hence, we undertake a thematic analysis of predominantly, but not exclusively, professional literature to prioritise potential empirical research or conceptualisations that might offer insights for finance and accounting professionals, …

Overview Of Hybrid Financial Instruments And Investment Leverage Enablers For Cultural Heritage Adaptive Reuse, Tracy Pickerill

Articles

Cultural heritage adaptive reuse investment strategies involve long-term, sometimes perpetual, investment horizons, which necessitate the integration of sustainable funding mechanisms. In order to achieve participatory circular human prosperity, the sustainable finance movement must re-evaluate investment leverage approaches including value creation models, the design of hybrid financial instruments, analytical decision-making frameworks,collaborative social enterprise structures, impact performance metrics and evolving mindsets.

In the context of this overview of financial and non-financial instruments, cultural heritage adaptive reuse activities include:

• Adaptive reuse of cultural built heritage structures

• Energy retrofit of cultural built heritage structures

• Protection and management of natural eco-systems;

• …

Investment Leverage For Adaptive Reuse Of Cultural Heritage, Tracy Pickerill

Articles

This article tracks the design of a panoptic toolkit of complementary financial (grant and endowment, tax, debt and equity) and non-financial (regulation, real estate, risk mitigation and performance, capacity building, impact metric and digital network) instruments, designed to leverage capital investment and engender collaborative partnerships, to encourage investment capital to flow to cultural heritage adaptive reuse activities.

How Does Convergence Influence Cluster-Based Economic Growth In Regions?, Jamie Meehan

Doctoral

This thesis is a novel study examining the influence of convergenceon cluster-based economicgrowth in regions. The goal of which isto provide exploratory insights frombothnational and international perspectives. This research study examines the relevant literature in thefieldsof convergence,clusters,and regions. It thenadoptsideologies from the most salient studies,to create a conceptual framework. There is limitedextantliterature currently available on the connection between convergence, cluster-based economicgrowth,and regions. AnOECD (2011) report identified the importance of regions as they are themost effective place to make economic decisions. The convergence approachof moving towards equality, bottom-up growth,and co-opetition can be regarded as being imperative to the successful augmentation of …

A Proposal Digital Marketing Strategy For Marcheluzzo Srl: Training And Evaluating A Prediction Model For The Number Of Adv. Impressions, Charles Alves De Castro

Articles

This research aims to describe a digital marketing strategy elaborated to be deployed in the MarcheluzzoSrl Company located in Italy. In addition, it intends to give a wide range of information to the company about its customers, target, competitors, market, digital marketing strategy, and potential recommendations. It is also important to highlight that this strategy is focused on the Brazilian market. Most of the information collected for the situational analysis and many other components for this research were gathered through the author`s perception during his internship in the company. The methodology includes secondary data collected through field observation in the …

Valuation Of American Options And Employee Stock Options, Qianru (Jennifer) Shang

Doctoral

Options play an important role in the financial world and are actively traded with huge trading volume. Most of the options traded on exchanges are American options. Spanning over a few decades, the American option pricing problem continues to intrigue scholars and practitioners in finance. The employee stock options (ESOs), a variant of American options, has been increasingly popular for firms to compensate, motivate and retain employees. ESOs importantly do not trade in markets nevertheless fair value must be determined – often by accountants. Unique features of ESOs however complicate the valuation. Our research, consisting of three papers, focuses on …

Risk Management And Hedging Approaches In Energy Markets, Jim Hanly

Articles

Energy based assets are showing increased susceptibility to volatility arising out of geo-political, economic, climate and technological events. Given the economic importance of energy products, their market participants need to be able to access efficient strategies to effectively manage their exposures and reduce price risk. This chapter will outline the key futures based hedging approaches that have been developed for managing energy price risk and evaluate their effectiveness. A key element of this analysis will be the breadth of assets considered. These include Crude and Refined Oil products, Natural Gas, and wholesale Electricity markets. We find significant differences in the …

American Option Pricing: Optimal Lattice Models And Multidimensional Efficiency Tests, Qianru Shang, Brian Byrne

Articles

We introduce a set of lattice techniques to the Leisen‐Reimer and Tian binomial models with a view to accelerating computation time and improving accuracy of American Option valuation. A level of accuracy and efficiency combined can be achieved that surpass commonly used analytical analogues. We compare these efficient lattice models with analytical formulae for pricing different groups of options according to the deepness of American quality and moneyness. Our results reveal that counter to received wisdom, lattices constructs produce greater speed and accuracy for all option categories relative to the best performing closed form American analogues.

The Impact Of Brexit Debates On Irish Exports: A Causality Analysis, Rawayda Abdou, Klavs Ciprikis, Lucia Morales, Damien Cassells

Conference papers

The UK decision to leave the EU has larger implications for Ireland due to its significant exposure to the UK economy. As such a no-deal Brexit scenario raises significant concerns regarding the impact, the magnitude and the lasting effects of the shock to the Irish economy. Leading up to the final weeks before the UK leaves the EU, this study explores the relationship between economic and political uncertainty surrounding Brexit and its potential causal effects to the Irish economy. The agriculture, manufacturing, chemical and pharmaceutical sectors are the focus of attention as they are considered to be the most exposed …

The Impact Of Firm Characteristics On Speed Of Adjustment To Target Leverage: A Uk Study, James Fitzgerald, J. Ryan

Articles

Responding to the need to investigate heterogeneity in the speed of adjustment (SOA) to target leverage in a manner that reflects the fractional nature of leverage, we estimate SOA across sub-samples of UK firms using the Dynamic Panel Fractional (DPF) estimator. Using firm characteristics to identify firms subject to varying costs of deviation from and adjustment to target leverage, we find significant evidence of heterogeneity in the speeds at which UK firms adjust to target leverage. Our results show that small, high growth and low dividend paying firms adjust to target leverage faster than their large, low growth and high …

An Analysis Of The Effects Of Political Events On Oil Price Volatility And Consequential Spillover Effects On Selected Gcc Stock Markets: An Emphasis On The Case Of Kuwait, Yousef Abdulrazzaq

Doctoral

The purpose of this research is to identify how episodes of sustained market uncertainty due to political events can affect oil price behavior and potentially generate spillover effects to the stock markets of Kuwait, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the UAE. Three major events associated with significant levels of market uncertainty are examined: the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 2003, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC or the US Financial Crisis) in 2008, and the Arab Spring Revolution in 2011 – with the aim of identifying interlinkages between oil prices and the performance of the Kuwaiti, Saudi and the …

Hong Kong Unrest And Implications For The Hang Seng Index, Lucia Morales, Bernadette Andreosso-O’Callaghan

Articles

With the September 2014 ‘Umbrella Revolution’ in Hong Kong, China faced one of the biggest political challenges since the Tiananmen Square events. Beijing’s proposed electoral reform was perceived as a direct attack to democracy, and the ensuing protest triggered concerns amid local and international investors; the financial sector took the hardest hit, with stocks of companies exposed to the Hong Kong market facing significant losses. Volatility continued to increase to a seven-month high over worries that the student blockade in Hong Kong’s streets could drag on for longer than expected. The econometric-based analysis in this paper looks at the implications …

Relating Group Size And Posting Activity Of An Online Community Of Financial Investors: Regularities And Seasonal Patterns, P. Racca, R. Casarin, Pierpaolo Dondio, F. Squazzoni

Articles

Group size can potentially affect collective activity and individual propensity to contribute to collective goods. Mancur Olson, in his Logic of Collective Action, argued that individual contribution to a collective good tends to be lower in groups of large size. Today, online communication platforms represent an interesting ground to study such collaborative dynamics under possibly different conditions (e.g., lower costs related to gather and share information). This paper examines the relationship between group size and activity in an online financial forum, where users invest time in sharing news, analysis and comments with other investors. We looked at about 24 million …

Developing And Assessing The Drivers Of Usage Of Computer-Assisted-Audit-Techniques (Caats) And The Factors That Impact Audit Quality Perceptions In Government Internal Audit, Ashraf Alhabsi

Doctoral

This research aims to develop two models, the first of which is capable of predicting the internal auditor’s intention to adopt audit technologies, and second of which is to predict the factors that impact on the internal auditor’s perception of internal audit quality in the context of public sector auditing in Oman. The models proposed by this research are developed from existing research on technology adoption in general, as well as research on technology adoption specific to the internal audit context (Curtis & Payne, 2014; Dowling & Leech, 2014; Mahzan & Lymer, 2014). Given that Oman is only in the …

Heterogeneity In The Speed Of Adjustment To Target Leverage: A Uk Study, James Fitzgerald, James Ryan, Sheila Killian

Conference papers

Responding to the need to address heterogeneity in the speed of adjustment (SOA) to target leverage in a manner that reflects the fractional nature of leverage, we estimate SOAs across sub-samples of UK firms using the Dynamic Panel Fractional estimator (DPF). Using firm risk as a categorising variable, we show that riskier firms tend to adjust to target leverage at a faster rate, suggesting opportunity costs of being away from target leverage are higher for riskier firms. We also demonstrate the bias in SOAs as estimated using a model that does not account for the fractional nature of leverage, and …

Managing Energy Price Risk Using Futures Contracts: A Comparative Analysis, Jim Hanly

Articles

This paper carries out a comparative analysis of managing energy risk through futures hedging, for energy market participants across a broad dataset that encompasses the largest and most actively traded energy products. Uniquely, we carry out a hedge comparison using a variety of risk measures including Variance, Value at risk (VaR), and Expected Shortfall as well as a utility based performance metric for two different investor horizons; weekly and monthly. We find that hedging is effective across the spectrum of risk measures we employ. We also find significant differences in both the hedging strategies and the hedging effectiveness of different …

International Construction Measurement Standard, Charles Mitchell

Other Resources

The International Construction Measurement Standard Coalition (the Coalition) was formed on 17 June 2015 after meeting at the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC, USA. The Coalition, comprising the organisations listed below at the date of publication, aims to bring about consistency in construction cost reporting standards internationally. This is achieved by the creation and adoption of this ICMS, an agreed international standard for the structuring and presentation of cost reports. ICMS sets out a structure for describing construction costs in terms of project scope, attributes and values descriptors. This document setting out the provisions of ICMS is the first …

Volatility And Risk Management In European Electricity Futures Markets, Jim Hanly, Lucia Morales

Articles

This paper estimates and applies a risk management strategy for electricity spot exposures using futures hedging. We apply our approach to three of the most actively traded European electricity markets, Nordpool, APXUK and Phelix. We compare both optimal hedging strategies and the hedging effectiveness of these markets for two hedging horizons, weekly and monthly using both Variance and Value at Risk (VaR). We find significant differences in both the Optimal Hedge Ratios (OHR’s) and the hedging effectiveness of the different electricity markets. Better performance is found for the Nordpool market while the poorest performer in hedging terms is Phelix. However …

Performance Of Utility Based Hedges, Jim Hanly, John Cotter

Articles

Hedgers as investors are concerned with both risk and return. However when measuring hedging performance, the role of returns and investor risk aversion has generally been neglected in the literature, by its focus on minimum variance hedging. In this paper we address this by using utility based performance metrics to evaluate the hedging effectiveness of utility based hedges for hedgers with both moderate and high risk aversion together with the more traditional minimum variance approach. To examine this for an energy hedger, we apply our approach to WTI Crude Oil, for three different hedging horizons, daily, weekly and monthly. We …

Derivatives Pricing With Accelerated Trinomial Trees, Conall O'Sullivan, Stephen O'Sullivan

Articles

Accelerated Trinomial Trees (ATTs) are a derivatives pricing lattice method that circumvent the restrictive time step condition inherent in standard trinomial trees and explicit finite difference methods (FDMs) in which the time step must scale with the square of the spatial step. ATTs consist of L uniform supersteps each of which contains an inner lattice/trinomial tree with N non-uniform subtime steps. Similarly to implicit FDMs, the size of the superstep in ATTs, a function of N, are constrained primarily by accuracy demands. ATTs can price options up to N times faster than standard trinomial trees (explicit FDMs). ATTs can be …

A Narrative Investigation Of Consumer Non-Exit In Problematic Irish Retail Financial Service Relationships, Tara Rooney

Doctoral

This study aims to provide understanding as to how customers remain in Irish banking relationships which they acknowledge to be problematic. While the banking industry asserts that inertia is the reason underpinning consumer inaction, the question remains as to how consumers rationalise the decision not to exit when dissatisfied. To this end, the literature review presents a synthesis of consumer relationship theory, dissolution theory and the role of inertia on consumer inaction. The methodology took an interpretative perspective applying a Narrative Analysis approach of fifteen varied participants in Dublin. In semi-structured life history interviews participants outlined their past experiences with …

"Through The Looking Glass; Understanding Consumer Inaction In Retail Financial Services", Tara Rooney, Katrina Lawlor, Eddie Rohan

Reports

Understanding why consumers choose to remain in relationships which they find less than satisfactory is a key concern for relationship marketing theory. In this paper we explore the alternative choices available to consumers after exit has been considered and then declined. Applying a narrative methodology within a social constructionist framework, the paper presents a theory of Relationship Neutrality. We go through the looking glass, into to a world of relationship contradictions and irrationality to consider long term relationship engagement which is different from the one theory has grown accustomed to.

Words Worth Price And Value, Tom Dunne

Articles

TOM DUNNE explains the terms used in relation to the valuation of property, and the need for common understanding among all parties using those terms. -

Pricing European And American Options In The Heston Model With Accelerated Explicit Finite Differencing Methods, Conall O'Sullivan, Stephen O'Sullivan

Articles

No abstract provided.

Stock Market Prediction Without Sentiment Analysis: Using A Web-Traffic Based Classifier And User-Level Analysis, Pierpaolo Dondio

Conference papers

This paper provides further evidence on the predictive power of online community traffic with regard to stock prices. Using the largest dataset to date, spanning 8 years and almost the complete set of SP500 stocks, we train a classifier using a set of features entirely extracted from web-traffic data of financial online communities. The classifier is shown to outperform the predictive power of a baseline classifier solely based on price time-series, and to have similar performances as the classifier built considering price and traffic features together. The best predictive performances are achieved when information about stock capitalization is coupled with …

Engineering Project Appraisal (2nd. Ed), Martin G. Rogers, Aidan Duffy

Books/Book Chapters

In most cases of civil engineering development, a range of alternative schemes meeting project goals are feasible, so some form of evaluation must be carried out to select the most appropriate to take forward. Evaluation criteria usually include the economic, environmental and social contexts of a project as well as the engineering challenges, so engineers must be familiar with the processes and tools used.

The second edition of Engineering Project Appraisal equips students with the understanding and analytical tools to carry out effective appraisals of alternative development schemes, using both economic and non-economic criteria. The building blocks of economic appraisal …

A Utility Based Approach To Energy Hedging, Jim Hanly, John Cotter

Articles

A key issue in the estimation of energy hedges is the hedgers’ attitude towards risk which is encapsulated in the form of the hedgers’ utility function. However, the literature typically uses only one form of utility function such as the quadratic when estimating hedges. This paper addresses this issue by estimating and applying energy market based risk aversion to commonly applied utility functions including log, exponential and quadratic, and we incorporate these in our hedging frameworks. We find significant differences in the optimal hedge strategies based on the utility function chosen.

Venture Capital In Ireland In Comparative Perspective, Frank Barry, Clare O'Mahony, Beata Sax

Articles

This paper assembles the most comprehensive set of data available to offer a comparative perspective on venture capital in Ireland. The paper charts the emergence of the sector and the co-evolution of the demand and supply sides of the market. On the demand side, a flow of investment opportunities emerged – particularly from the indigenous software sector – for which venture capital represented an appropriate financing vehicle. Concurrently, on the supply side, publicly provided funding and other elements of public policy dramatically enhanced its availability. State support to the demand-side has been a multiple of state support to the supply …

Hedging Effectiveness Under Conditions Of Asymmetry, Jim Hanly, John Cotter

Articles

We examine whether hedging effectiveness is affected by asymmetry in the return distribution by applying tail specific metrics, for example, Value at Risk, to compare the hedging effectiveness of short and long hedgers. Comparisons are applied to a number of hedging strategies including OLS, and both symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models. We apply our analysis to a dataset consisting of S&P500 index cash and futures containing symmetric and asymmetric return distributions chosen ex-post. Our findings show that asymmetry reduces out-of-sample hedging performance and that significant differences occur in hedging performance between short and long hedgers.