Borrow cheap, buy high? The determinants of leverage and pricing in buyouts

Private equity funds pay particular attention to capital structure when executing leveraged buyouts, creating an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. Using a large, detailed, international sample of buyouts from 1980-2008, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to the cross-sectional factors – suggested by traditional capital structure theories – that drive public firm leverage. Instead, variation in economy-wide credit conditions is the main determinant of leverage in buyouts, while having little impact on public firms. Higher deal leverage is associated with higher transaction prices and lower buyout fund returns, suggesting that acquirers overpay when access to credit is easier

Surgical management of posterior fossa metastases

The diagnosis of brain metastases is associated with a poor prognosis reflecting uncontrolled primary disease that has spread to the relative sanctuary of the central nervous system. 20 % of brain metastases occur in the posterior fossa and are associated with significant morbidity. The risk of acute hydrocephalus and potential for sudden death means these metastases are often dealt with as emergency cases. This approach means a full pre-operative assessment and staging of underlying disease may be neglected and a proportion of patients undergo comparatively high risk surgery with little or no survival benefit. This study aimed to assess outcomes in patients to identify factors that may assist in case selection. We report a retrospective case series of 92 consecutive patients operated for posterior fossa metastases between 2007 and 2012. Routine demographic data was collected plus data on performance status, primary cancer site, details of surgery, adjuvant treatment and survival. The only independent positive prognostic factors identified on multivariate analysis were good performance status (if Karnofsky performance score >70, hazard ratio (HR) for death 0.36, 95 % confidence interval (CI) 0.18–0.69), adjuvant whole brain radiotherapy (HR 0.37, 95 % CI 0.21–0.65) and adjuvant chemotherapy where there was extracranial disease and non-synchronous presentation (HR 0.51, 95 % CI 0.31–0.82). Patients presenting with posterior fossa metastases may not be investigated as thoroughly as those with supratentorial tumours. Staging and assessment is essential however, and in the meantime emergencies related to tumour mass effect should be managed with steroids and cerebrospinal fluid diversion as required

Heterogeneity in brain metastases – advanced MRI at the brain-tumour interface predicts aggressive growth patterns.

Background Brain metastases are increasingly common tumours treated as a homogenous group with SRS, surgery and whole brain radiotherapy. However, there are significant rates of local recurrence. We prospectively investigated intra- and inter-tumour heterogeneity in a series of brain metastases undergoing advanced MRI followed by image guided neurosurgical sampling from the leading edge in the course of resection. Method Pre-surgery 3T-MRI was obtained using 32 direction DTI and T1 with gadolinium. Image guided sampling was performed at the leading edge of the tumour as it was removed with reference samples from the core. Histogram analysis of regions of interest were matched to tissue locations. Growth pattern was assessed by a pathologist using a previously described classification and CD34, Ki67, necrosis and cellularity were scored semi-automatically using NIH ImageJ software. Survival and brain recurrence were recorded. Results Twenty-six cases were included. The mean diffusivity (MD) values recorded at the edge of metastases were significantly different in distribution, median and mean from those at the core (Wilcoxon matched pairs, p=.001). There was significantly higher necrosis (p=.026) and a trend to higher CD34 density at the leading edge versus the core. MD and the change in MD across the leading edge correlated with cellularity (r=-.41, p=.047) but did not predict clinical outcomes nor pathological growth pattern. Metastases which appeared more diffusely invasive pathologically had a significantly lower peritumoral fractional anisotropy (FA) (p=.039) suggesting more tract white matter disruption. These tumours also had more dense CD34 staining (r=-.55, p=.041) at their leading edge and a trend to lower survival and more rapid intracranial recurrence. Conclusion There is significant intra-tumoral heterogeneity among brain metastases and assessment of the brain-tumour interface radiologically and biologically may yield more useful information about behaviour and prognosis than assessing the whole metastasis

Diffusion-weighted MRI characteristics of the cerebral metastasis to brain boundary predicts patient outcomes.

DWI demonstrates changes in the tumor, across the tumor edge and in the peritumoral region which may not be visible on conventional MRI and this may be useful in predicting patient outcomes for operated cerebral metastases

Chapter 2: The Financial Crisis

The financial turmoil that originated in 2007 and developed into an unprecedented crisis battering financial and real markets is the latest manifestation, on a grand scale and with new attributes, of a welldefined pathology in the process of market liberalization and integration in the post-Bretton Woods era. At the root of the crisis lies a fundamental inconsistency between financial globalisation – the process of liberalization and deregulation driving the impressive growth of world financial markets – and existing public rules and policies at both domestic and international levels. This pathology underlies virtually all the episodes of instability that have affected the developing and the emerging economies since the constraints on capital mobility started to be removed during the 1970s: from the debt crisis in the early 1980s to the financial and currency crisis in South-East Asia in 1997–98. Globalisation of financial markets has systematically and vastly outpaced the development of their governance: governments have lagged behind in reshaping domestic and international institutions as well as in changing and adapting policy behaviour.

Chapter 1: The European Economy: Macroeconomic Outlook and Policy

The financial crisis triggered by the bursting of the US real-estate bubble has spread over the entire world to different degrees and markedly slowed down world economic growth in 2008. This year, all major regions in the world will be in recession.

On the zero-temperature limit of Gibbs states

We exhibit Lipschitz (and hence H\"older) potentials on the full shift $\{0,1\}^{\mathbb{N}}$ such that the associated Gibbs measures fail to converge as the temperature goes to zero. Thus there are "exponentially decaying" interactions on the configuration space $\{0,1\}^{\mathbb Z}$ for which the zero-temperature limit of the associated Gibbs measures does not exist. In higher dimension, namely on the configuration space $\{0,1\}^{\mathbb{Z}^{d}}$, $d\geq3$, we show that this non-convergence behavior can occur for finite-range interactions, that is, for locally constant potentials.Comment: The statement of Theorem 1.2 is more accurate and some new comment follow i