This paper estimates the probability of a “lost decade” where equity investments lose value over a ten year period. The findings are a reminder that equity investments are risky even over longer time periods, and investors should take this into consideration when making portfolio choices. It also introduces a simple method to allow the reader to combine beliefs about long run stock returns alon...

It is known that for an insurer who invests in the financial market, the financial investments may affect its solvency as severely as do insurance claims. This conclusion is usually reached under an assumption of independence or asymptotic independence between insurance risk and financial risk. Such an assumption seems reasonable if the insurer focuses on the traditional insurance business that...

The business value of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and in general large software implementations has been extensively debated in both popular press and academic literature for over three decades. Despite the positive motives for adoption, various organizations have reported negative impacts from these large investments. This ‘disconnect’ between large IS investments and firms’ org...

The infrastructure of the electricity grid and super grid system in the hitherto industrialized world was to a large extent built up in the decades following World War II with a peak in investments around 1960-1980. This means that the flotilla of power transformers is now starting to reach projected lifetime of around 40 years. During the last couple of decades there has also been an ongoin...

Although risk management has been a well-plowed field in financial modeling for more than two decades, traditional risk management tools such as mean–variance analysis, beta, and Value-at-Risk do not capture many of the risk exposures of hedge-fund investments. In this article, I review several unique aspects of risk management for hedge funds—survivorship bias, dynamic risk analytics, liquidit...

Performing a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is an important initial step in planning and implementing IT investments. However, creating an accurate and useful CBA for complex IT investments (such as enterprise systems implementations) is difficult due to uncertainty in the expected benefits, costs, risks, timing, and deliverables of these frequently changing projects. This paper reports on a Q-met...

In today’s competitive business environment, Intellectual Capital (IC) management is ever more recognized as a fundamental factor in gaining competitive advantage. Actually, most firms have only a vague idea of how to manage investments in IC and what they should obtain from these investments. As a result, many companies overlook to balance IC investments, overinvesting in some IC components an...

This paper shows how job design in‡uences investments and bargaining power during production and examines its implications for the distribution of earnings between management and workers. Without bargaining, the decision to assign each worker to narrowly or broadly de…ned jobs depends on which mode elicits more investments from workers. However, job design makes workers’ investments either subs...

College of Business Administration University of Houston, Houston, Texas, 77204-6283 Phone: 713-743-4691 Fax: 713-743-4693 E-mail: [email protected] Executive Summary Organizations have invested in IT to improve their business processes and adapt to rapidly changing conditions in the competitive environment. However, identifying the value obtained from these investments has not been easy. Lack of con...