PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION

This chapter discusses methods and techniques for measuring and evaluating performance for the purpose of controlling the investment process. However, many of the methods discussed in this chapter are also used in communicating investment performance between the investment management company and it’s (potential) customers. Therefore, performance measurements also play an important role in the competition between investments management companies. Substantial evidence from the net sales of mutual funds shows that investors buy mutual funds with good past performance records although they fail to sell funds with bad past performance.Performance measurement; risk-adjusted performance

Analysts' earnings forecasts and international asset allocation

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether financial analysts’ earnings forecasts are informative from the viewpoint of allocating investments across different stock markets. Therefore we develop a country forecast indicator reflecting the analysts’ prospects for specific stock markets. The country forecast indicator is defined as the number of companies within one and the same stock market for which analysts revise their current year earnings forecast upward divided by the total number of companies for which analysts revise their current year earnings forecasts anyway. Based on the available analysts’ earnings forecasts in the Institutional Brokers Estimate System (I/E/B/S), we calculate a monthly country forecast indicator for the stock markets in Germany, France, Italy, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Switzerland over the period 1990 to 1994. The time-series correlations between the monthly value of the indicator and the stock market returns around the date of calculating the indicator show that stock returns rather precede than follow revisions in earnings forecasts. An investment strategy which is based on a monthly asset allocation to that stock market with the highest value of the country forecast indicator in the preceding month, gives a slight outperformance (around 3 percent excess return) compared to an equal allocation of funds to the stock markets involved.

Determinants of Land-Use Change In the United States 1982-1997

Changes in the use of land in the United States produce significant economic and environmental effects with important implications for a wide variety of policy issues, including protection of wildlife habitat, management of urban growth, and mitigation of global climate change. In contrast to previous descriptive and qualitative analyses of the trends in national land use, this paper uses an econometric approach to isolate the importance of historical changes in land-use profits and key government policies in determining national land-use changes from 1982 to 1997. The policies we examine are the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and total government payments to crop producers. We estimate a national-level discrete choice model of changes among the major land-use categories (crops, pasture, forest, urban, range, and CRP) with parcel-level observations of land use and land quality from the U.S.D.A. National Resources Inventory NRI) and measures of countylevel land-use net returns from a variety of sources. We then use fitted values from the econometric model to simulate land-use change from 1982 to 1997 under a series of factual and counterfactual scenarios that isolate the effects of different economic and policy factors. The simulations suggest how changes in economic returns and government policies have driven land-use changes in the past and will continue to affect nationwide land-use changes in the future. For example, we find that the introduction of the CRP and the decline in crop profits were the most significant explanatory factors driving the decline in cropland. Our results highlight some “unintended consequences” of government policies and the importance of net returns to a range of alternative land uses as determinants of land area change for each particular use.land use; econometric model; counterfactual simulation; Conservation Reserve Program (CRP)

POLICIES TO REDUCE FOREST FRAGMENTATION: COMBINING ECONOMETRIC MODELS WITH GIS-BASED LANDSCAPE SIMULATIONS

Forest fragmentation is a primary threat to terrestrial biodiversity. We combine a parcel-level econometric model of land-use transitions with spatially-explicit landscape simulations to predict the empirical distribution of fragmentation outcomes under given market conditions and policy scenarios. Our model explains transitions between forest, agricultural, and urban uses, allowing us to model land use change in both rural and urban areas. A Monte Carlo simulation approach links econometrically-derived transition probabilities to GIS maps for the prediction of the spatial properties of habitat change.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

AGRICULTURAL LAND VALUES AND FUTURE LAND DEVELOPMENT

We develop a theoretical model of land prices and urban expansion and derive a reduced-form expression for agricultural land values. This result dictates the specification of our econometric model in terms of variable choice and functional form. We find strong support for the model in an application to New York.Land Economics/Use,

Do possible worlds compromise God’s beauty? A reply to Mark Ian Thomas Robson

In a recent article Mark Ian Thomas Robson argues that there is a clear contradiction between the view that possible worlds are a part of God's nature and the theologically pivotal, but philosophically neglected, claim that God is perfectly beautiful. In this article I show that Robson's argument depends on several key assumptions that he fails to justify and as such that there is reason to doubt the soundness of his argument. I also demonstrate that if Robson's argument were sound then this would be a problem for all classical theists and not just those who hold the possible worlds view