Risk, returns, and biases of listed private equity portfolios

This is the first empirical paper investigating a comprehensive sample of listed (i.e. publicly traded) private equity companies, covering 287 companies in the time period 1986 to 2003. After imposing liquidity constraints, and after correcting for non-surviving vehicles, we get a sample of 114 instruments. The risk and return characteristics of three portfolio strategies, two partially rebalanced and one fully rebalanced, are compared. We moreover address potential biases resulting from thin trading, the bid-ask spread, and sample selection. We show that the adjusted performance figures differ substantially from standard estimates. But even after correcting for these biases, we find a high risk-adjusted performance of this asset class before 2000, and dramatic different results between the three indices if we extend the time period to 2003.Listed private equity, Private equity, Performance biasesListed private equity, Private equity, Performance biases

Risk, returns, and biases of listed private equity portfolios

This is the first empirical paper investigating a comprehensive sample of listed NEWLINE (i.e. publicly traded) private equity companies, covering 287 companies in the NEWLINE time period 1986 to 2003. After imposing liquidity constraints, and after NEWLINE correcting for non-surviving vehicles, we get a sample of 114 instruments. The NEWLINE risk and return characteristics of three portfolio strategies, two partially NEWLINE rebalanced and one fully rebalanced, are compared. We moreover address NEWLINE potential biases resulting from thin trading, the bid-ask spread, and sample NEWLINE selection. We show that the adjusted performance figures differ substantially NEWLINE from standard estimates. But even after correcting for these biases, we find a NEWLINE high risk-adjusted performance of this asset class before 2000, and dramatic NEWLINE different results between the three indices if we extend the time period to 2003.Listed private equity, Private equity, Performance biase

Dengue disease, basic reproduction number and control

Dengue is one of the major international public health concerns. Although progress is underway, developing a vaccine against the disease is challenging. Thus, the main approach to fight the disease is vector control. A model for the transmission of Dengue disease is presented. It consists of eight mutually exclusive compartments representing the human and vector dynamics. It also includes a control parameter (insecticide) in order to fight the mosquito. The model presents three possible equilibria: two disease-free equilibria (DFE) and another endemic equilibrium. It has been proved that a DFE is locally asymptotically stable, whenever a certain epidemiological threshold, known as the basic reproduction number, is less than one. We show that if we apply a minimum level of insecticide, it is possible to maintain the basic reproduction number below unity. A case study, using data of the outbreak that occurred in 2009 in Cape Verde, is presented.Comment: This is a preprint of a paper whose final and definitive form has appeared in International Journal of Computer Mathematics (2011), DOI: 10.1080/00207160.2011.55454

The relation between content providers and distributors: Lessons from the regulation of television distribution in the United Kingdom

Using the United Kingdom (UK) as a case study, this article analyses the growing commercial and regulatory significance of broadcaster-distributor relations within the contemporary television industry. The first part of the article argues that despite important changes in broadcast delivery technology, more recently shaped by the growth of the Internet, and the associated growth of options of receiving television content, the traditional delivery platforms (digital terrestrial, satellite and cable) remain by far the preferred choice for viewers in Britain. At the same time, public service broadcasters continue to be the biggest investors in domestic original non-sport content and account for over half of all television viewing. The strength of PSBs in content and their growing reliance on commercial proprietary subscription platforms (cable and satellite) and gradually on the Internet presents challenges in the nexus between broadcasters and distributors. The article focuses on the debate over retransmission fees between PSBs and Sky, and on the question of whether Sky should be required to offer some of its premium content to rival pay-TV platforms. These two examples highlight the impact regulatory intervention can have on the balance of power between broadcasters and distributors. The article concludes that such debates concerning the commercial relations between content providers and distributors will remain pivotal and become more heated given that similar issues are raised in the Internet environment

State, community and the negotiated construction of energy markets: Community energy policy in England

This article provides fresh insight on the political construction of markets through empirical analysis of community energy in the UK. It considers the diverse actors, understandings, processes and technologies enrolled in market creation, stabilisation and correction, while emphasising how negotiation, mediation and translation are pervasive throughout. Our starting point is an exploration of the role of the state in managing processes of socially embedding and disembedding markets, and how tensions between ideological commitments to deregulation and the social necessity of intervention are addressed by governing at a distance, in this example through the conveniently malleable notion of ‘community’. We draw attention in particular to the variegated manifestations of these processes and the plurality of actors and logics operating within the ‘black box’ of the state, as well as within and between markets and civil society. We reveal how negotiation between competing logics – the impulse to marketise and its diverse others – can be observed across different forms of organisation and action. We argue that such deliberations can be seen as fractal patterns throughout contemporary socioeconomic arrangements, emphasising how the Polanyian concept of the ‘double movement’ can be deepened through analysis of the heterogeneous associations and logics at work in ‘actually existing’ instituted action, understanding political processes as ontologically performative. Empirical material is drawn from across four research projects, each focusing on different aspects of the UK government's Community Energy Strategy, exploring the varying ways marketisation plays out through different governmental programmes

Absent Regions: Spaces of Financialisation in the Arab World

This paper examines processes of financialisation in the Arab world, a region that has been almost completely absent from the wider financial literature. The paper shows that financialisation is much more than simply the expansion of financial markets within neatly bounded sets of social relations operating at the national scale. In the Arab world, financialisation has been marked by the growing weight of regional finance capital—most specifically, those capital groups based in the Gulf Cooperation Council—in circuits of capital operating at all scales. This has important implications for processes of class and state formation. Approaching financialisation in this manner—moving away from methodologically nationalist assumptions and the literature's largely singular focus on the advanced capitalist core—brings into focus the significance of cross-scalar accumulation patterns, their spatial hierarchies, and geographic unevenness. The paper thus reaffirms the need for a more spatially sensitive approach to financialisation

Reviews in brief: Media, modernity and technology: the geography of the new. By David Morley. New York: Routledge. 2007. x + 346 pp. £18.99 paper. ISBN 0415333423

International audienc

Banking and Competition in Exceptional Times

This Article has two main aims: to provide a critical consideration of this contemporary antitrust “revival” from an explicitly political–economic perspective and to point toward some theoretical resources that might facilitate such an assessment.Part II looks backward at the evolution and application of competition law in the banking sector over the relatively longue durée. In this Part, I invoke the concept of “exception” to understand how antitrust policy has developed, and my chief interlocutors are the perhaps unlikely figures of Giorgio Agamben and Karl Marx. Part III looks forward and considers the central question around which the recent resurgence of interest in antitrust ultimately revolves: can (and should) antitrust law help in tackling the TBTF problem? The tentative conclusion is that unless we are prepared to fundamentally rethink the purpose of competition law—and in relation to this, the nature of capitalist competition itself— then the answer must be no. This is not because (as some commentators have argued) TBTF is not an antitrust issue. Rather, it is because antitrust theory and practice are today thoroughly economized, whereas the competition between large banks appears to be largely non-economic. In making this argument, I appeal not to Agamben and Marx, but to Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, and most directly of all to the theorist whose name this symposium bears, Adolf Berle

The James Keller Award by The Christophers

In 2014, Fr. David Link, was awarded the James Keller Award in recognition of putting his faith into action to change the world for better by serving in prison ministry. The Christophers were founded in 1945 by Maryknoll priest Father James Keller who saw there was a need for people of all faiths to engage in constructive action based on gospel values