I address the interaction between accounting conservatism and real options in both a staged investment and abandonment model. An accounting policy biased towards classifying a Good (Bad) project as Bad (Good) is conservative (aggressive). The accounting signal is optimally conservative when the ex ante unconditional expected terminal value is less than the second investment (staged investment) ...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) in emerging markets has grown rapidly throughout the 1990s. Driven both by investment in newly privatized state-owned enterprises and new, Greenfield projects, infrastructure investment has grown even faster than overall FDI. Using a database of telecommunications projects in emerging markets, we compare key characteristics of private infrastructure projects in L...

Recent literature (McNulty, Yeh, Schulze, & Lubatkin, 2002) states that the assumptions behind the capital asset pricing model, in particular the irrelevance of time horizon, do not correspond to the characteristics of firms that prefer long-term investment horizons. I show that family firms display a longer time horizon than most of their nonfamily counterparts, since (1) family firms display ...

As competition for market space continues to increase worldwide and the information technology (IT) budget of many organizations these days comprises hundreds of projects running concurrently across different business functions, decision making units and geographical locations, selecting IT projects for investment has become a challenge in itself, not to mention the need to maximize the benefit...

This work presents some issues concerning the utilization of the AGAP system (Aid to Groups of Analysis and evaluation of Projects). The AGAP is a group decision support system (GDSS) that was developed (at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra) as a distributed system allowing multiple decision makers to cooperate in order to evaluate and select investment projects. This work r...

In recent years a series of high-profile flagship plant closures and short-lived investment projects across peripheral regions in the United Kingdom provided a stark reminder of the potential fallibility of peripheral region development strategies based upon inward investment. Nevertheless, inward investment promotion remains a common component within the economic development strategies of UK p...