ii Executive summary In order to achieve a transition to sustainable development, economies will need to be radically transformed. Businesses and households will be responsible for the bulk of the investment needed. Such a radical transformational change will require the blending of public and private, domestic and international, capital and technical assistance finance. Global capital markets ...

Risk assessment is a topical subject in the investment trust sector. Several fund management groups have started issuing risk gradings for their investment trusts. Money Management and Micropal now publish volatility figures and in March 1995, the Association of Investment Trust Companies issued a factsheet on risk for private investors which proposed the use of volatility in the risk assessmen...

We theoretically and experimentally study an investment game with fundamental state uncertainty and input complementarities—i.e., a global game environment. Our particular focus is on how a sentiment index, closely modeled after consumer confidence surveys, aggregates private information and influences investment. We find that a sentiment index produces very similar results to a highly informat...

This paper proposes a possible framework for identifying excessive investment. Based on this method, it finds evidence that some types of investment are becoming excessive in China, particularly in inland provinces. In these regions, private consumption has on average become more dependent on investment (rather than vice versa) and the impact is relatively short-lived, necessitating ever higher...

We report on a set of 40 semi-structured interviews with information security executives and managers at a variety of firms and government agencies. The purpose of the interviews was to learn more about how organizations make cybersecurity investment decisions: how much support they receive to execute their mission, how they prioritize which threats to defend against, and how they choose betwee...

When a group of investors with dispersed private information jointly invest in a risky project, how should they divide up the project payoff? A typical common stock contract rewards investors in proportion to their initial investment, but is it really optimal for harnessing all investors’ “wisdom of the crowd”? By showing that a simple profit-sharing contract with decentralized decision making ...

This paper shows that coordination failure and contractual incompleteness can lead to socially excessive investment. Firms and workers choose investment levels, then enter a stochastic matching process. If investment levels are discrete, and match frictions are low, high-investing workers (firms) impose a negative pecuniary externality on any worker (firm) who cuts investment. Specifically, an ...

This series is published by ODI, an independent non-profit policy research institute, with financial support from the Department for International Development (formerly the Overseas Development Administration). Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of either ODI or DFID. Privatisation is an increasingly prominent feature of the policy advice directed at agricultural research i...

This paper studies the returns to venture capital and private equity investment based on a sample of 221 private equity funds that are managed by 72 private equity management firms, in 5040 entrepreneurial investee firms, and spanning 33 years (1971 – 2003) and 39 countries from North and South America to Europe and Asia. We make use of four main categories of proxy variables for value-added ac...