Business Commons^™

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.