The book primarily is about financial management and, as its title implies, real options are an integral, subsidiary theme. Real options are opportunities available to management permitting them to adapt the enterprise to changing needs. Understanding the value of real options is essential to corporate financial management. Examples in several chapters demonstrate why failure to assess the va…
Forecasts are usually made to help and guide decision making. Good fore- casts are preconditions for good, informed decisions. These decisions may vary from a financial market bet on interest rate changes to the policy decision on how to structure a country’s pension system. Ideally, decision-makers should be as well prepared as possible for the future, which would allow them to act appropria…
This essay is concerned with the development of professional ethics in service institutions. The discussion deals with the transition from simple acceptance of definite responsibilities in functional relationships to the primal teleological problem of selecting among competing groups with their own semi-independent value systems and conflicting ends in view (objectives). In the process, a profe…
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Anyone who has read a newspaper or watched the evening news in recent years is well aware that fraudulent financial reporting by big businesses has reached alarming levels. Equally startling is the frequency of fraudulent financial reporting by small businesses—as many bankers and government agencies will confirm—and even by non–business entities such as not-for- profit organizations.
Architects and other designers inhabit a curious borderland between the virtual and the physical. They have always been concerned with conjuring up things that don’t exist but might, imagining them in detail, and eventually finding ways to translate these visions into physical reality. Over the last half-century, computer-generated virtual worlds have played an increasingly crucial role i…
R is a language and environment for data analysis and graphics. It may be considered an implementation of S, an award-winning language initially developed at Bell Laboratories since the late 1970s. The R project was initiated by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in the early 1990s, and has been developed by an international team since mid-1997. Histori…
Over the last five decades, significant advances in the estimation and inference of various econometric models have taken place. This includes the classical linear model where the explanatory variables are nonstochastic (fixed) and the error is normally distributed, and the non-classical models, where these classical assumptions are violated. These models are frequently used in applied work, su…
Firms that meet certain criteria can register debt or equity securities for issuance any time during the subsequent two years. This process is known as shelf registration. Key shelf registration qualification criteria include $75 million market capitalization held by outsiders, timely SEC filings, investment-grade ratings of debt, no defaults on debt payments, and listing on national stock ex…
The principal purpose of this book is to analyse where the West Europeans have succeeded or failed in their attempts at cooperation in defence procurement, and why. This chapter aims to give some political background to this analysis by looking, very selectively, at a few of the pressures which exist for West European collaboration in defence and security policy in general. Logically, the …
This paper examines the economic substance of a broad range of securities by investigating their association with systematic risk and prices. The analysis is motivated by continuing security innovation and its impact on hybrid security reporting. Based on a sample of 2,617 firms that reported minority interests or preferred stock during 1993–1997, the results indicate that redeemable prefer…
The overall objectives of this review and synthesis are to study the basics of information-theoretic methods in econometrics, to examine the connecting theme among these methods, and to provide a more detailed summary and synthesis of the sub-class of methods that treat the observed sample moments as stochastic. Within the above objectives, this review focuses on studying the inter-connection…
When comparing the penetration of e-procurement in large and medium Companies were found significant discrepancies. So have great Company e.Procurement almost invariably a successful, while only each fifth midsize businesses eProcurement uses. Nevertheless, in medium-sized Company savings potential available, the use of e-procurement by the can be realized. It follows a recognizable need f…
This book presents the proceedings of the European Symposium on Management, Quality and Economics in Housing and other Building Sectors held in Lisbon, from 30 September to 4 October, 1991. The Symposium was organized by the Civil Engineering Department of the Technical University of Lisbon (Instituto Superior Técnico), Portugal and the University of Salford, Surveying Department, United King…