Discussions with software developers from a number of business organisations were targeted at the effect of estimation practices on the success or failure of some of the software development projects with which they had been involved. Several important estimation topics were also covered in a questionnaire. Our results show that for only one-third of the projects were the project managers invol...

There is an increasing interest in acquiring commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) functionality for safety-critical applications. However, the selection of COTS products for such applications is still carried out in an ad hoc manner. This creates great difficulties for realistic cost and effort estimation, integration of the selected COTS product, and the certification of final COTS-based safetycrit...

In the software development process, effort distribution based on phase is an important but often a neglected aspect of software cost estimation. Insufficient phase effort distribution study is the primary reason of poor software effort estimation. This paper provides the results of an empirical study on phase effort distribution based on 2956 projects. The software development process is divid...

This paper analyses the effects of the recent Finnish income tax reform on the behaviour of a closely held corporation (CHC) and its owners. The main elements of the reform are cuts in corporate and capital income tax rates and the replacement of the current full imputation system by a partial double taxation of distributed profits. Considerable exemptions are applied to relieve the taxation of...

Article history: Received 9 May 2011 Received in revised form 24 October 2011 Accepted 1 November 2011 Available online 9 November 2011 We survey 290 LATAM firms on capital budgeting, cost of capital and capital structure issues. We analyze the results and compare them to those of other studies. We interpret differences according to special features characterizing both emerging markets and SME....

This paper studies the cost of capital for alternative investments. We document that the risk profile of the aggregate hedge fund universe can be accurately matched by a simple index put option writing strategy that offers monthly liquidity and complete transparency over its state-contingent payoffs. The contractual nature of the put options in the benchmark portfolio allows us to evaluate appr...

This paper measures the welfare cost of bank capital requirements and finds that it is surprisingly large. I present a simple framework which embeds the role of liquidity creating banks in an otherwise standard general equilibrium growth model. A capital requirement plays a role, as it limits the moral hazard on the part of banks that arises due to the presence of a deposit insurance scheme. Ho...

Recently, there has been considerable interest among accounting researchers in the relation between asymmetric information and cost of capital. A number of empirical studies document associations between proxies for asymmetric information such as earnings quality and risk premiums. However, the theoretical foundation for these studies has yet to be fully established. In this study, we consider ...

Development effort is an undeniable part of the project management which considerably influences the success of project. Inaccurate and unreliable estimation of effort can easily lead to the failure of project. Due to the special specifications, accurate estimation of effort in the software projects is a vital management activity that must be carefully done to avoid from the unforeseen results....

The paper aims to provide for the improvement of software estimation research through a new regression model. The study design of the paper is organized as follows. Evaluation of estimation methods based on historical data sets requires that these data sets be representative for current or future projects. For that reason the data set for software cost estimation model the International Softwar...