calculated inequality portfolio benchmarking and regional office property investment in the uk the paper explores the reasons for the persistence in the uk of significant relative interregional variations in office property investment in the face of economic theory and empirical evidence that would support its more even spatial distribution the argument is made from a cultural economy perspective and involves the application to property of a concept drawn from the accountancy literature calculative practice uk investment decision making is distinguished by the primacy attributed to portfolio benchmarking as an influence on investment strategy the wider logic underpinning property benchmarking is subjected to critical appraisal then evidence is presented that suggests that benchmarking is a self referential practice which results in convergence and rigidity in fund structures and in the concentration of performance around a bounded range of sub optimal returns it is a barrier to the greater geographical diversification of office property investment

the nature of option interactions and the valuation of investments with multiple real options this paper deals with the nature of option interactions and the valuation of capital budgeting projects possessing flexibility in the form of multiple real options it identifies situations where option interactions can be small or large negative or positive interactions generally depend on the type separation degree of being in the money and the order ofthe options involved the paper illustrates through a generic example the importance of properly accounting for interactions among the options to defer abandon contract or expand in vestment and switch use it is shown that the incremental value of an additional option in the presence of other options is generally less than its value in isolation and declines as more options are present therefore valuation errors from ignoring a particular option may be small however configurations of real options exhibiting precisely the opposite behavior are identified comparative statics results confirm that the value of flexibility despite interactions manifests familiar option properties

the regional financial sector a scottish case study dow s c 1992 the regional financial sector a scottish case study reg studies 26 619 631 the regional finance literature suggests that financial market segmentation may affect regional economic activity but that the uk financial sector is sufficiently integrated to rule out this effect this paper attempts to broaden the scope of the debate by considering the credit creating behaviour of the banking sector together with the interdependent financial behaviour of all other sectors in a region it is concluded that financial behaviour in this broad sense affects regional activity even in an integrated national financial market in particular financial integration may adversely affect the allocation of new credit to a peripheral region the argument is assessed by considering the scottish case dow s c 1992 le secteur financier regional cas d etude de l ecosse reg studies 26 619 631 la documentation relative au secteur financier regional laisse supposer que la segmentation du marche finan

stochastic convenience yield and the pricing of oil contingent claims this paper develops and empirically tests a two factor model for pricing financial and real assets contingent on the price of oil the factors are the spot price of oil and the instantaneous convenience yield the parameters of the model are estimated using weekly oil futures contract prices from january 1984 to november 1988 and the model s performance is assessed out of sample by valuing futures contracts over the period november 1988 to may 1989 finally the model is applied to determine the present values of one barrel of oil deliverable in one to ten years time

evaluating natural resource investments notwithstanding impressive advances in the theory of finance over the past 2 decades practical procedures for capital budgeting have evolved only slowly the standard technique which has remained unchanged in essentials since it was originally proposed see dean 1951 bierman and smidt 1960 derives from a simple adaptation of the fisher 1907 model of valuation under certainty under this technique expected cash flows from an investment project are discounted at a rate deemed appropriate to their risk and the resulting present value is compared with the cost of the project this standard textbook technique reflects modern theoretical developments only insofar as estimates of the discount rate may be obtained from crude application of single period asset pricing theory but see brennan 1973 bogue and roll 1974 turnbull 1977 constantinides 1978 the inadequacy of this approach to capital budgeting is widely acknowledged although not widely discussed its obvious deficiency is its the evaluation of mining and other natural resource projects is made particularly difficult by the high degree of uncertainty attaching to output prices it is shown that the techniques of continuous time arbitrage and stochastic control theory may be used not only to value such projects but also to determine the optimal policies for developing managing and abandoning them the approach may be adapted to a wide variety of contexts outside the natural resource sector where uncertainty about future project revenues is a paramount concern

irregular staggered contracts and monetary policy taylor s 1980 notion of staggered contracts has been widely recognized as an elegant and useful tool to modelize wage setting procedures and to generate persistence in output and employment levels in this paper we present an extension of taylor s suggestion in which staggered contracts are irregular this implies that the wage equation varies period after period recurrently and raises the issues of the non convergence and the non unicity of the corresponding reduced form then we show that a specific feedback monetary policy may resolve this difficulty and induce a unique solution when explosive solutions are a priori forbidden such a monetary policy is formed by a system of rules varying period after period recurrently

remaking the monopoly board urban economic change and property investment the paper discusses the long term relationship between property investment and urban economic change which is in turn the consequence of changing transport and industrial technologies this is exemplified by the decentralisation of economic activities and population suburbanisation that has transformed the spatial structure of cities in the uk over the past 30 years as part of this process new property forms have evolved including retail parks and office parks the paper examines the consequences for the property market and the responses of the planning system and institutional property investors that have traditionally viewed property as a long term investment medium the analysis begins by considering the context of urban economic change the heart of the research examines the changing structure of property portfolios and the development of investment markets for these new property forms the pace of urban change is shown to be slowed by property investment responses

options in the real world lessons learned in evaluating oil and gas investments many firms in the oil and gas business have long used decision analysis techniques to evaluate exploration and development opportunities and have looked at recent development in option pricing theory as potentially offering improvements over the decision analysis approach unfortunately it is difficult to discern the benefits of the options approach from the literature on the topic most of the published examples greatly oversimplify the kinds of projects encountered in practice and comparisons are typically made to traditional discounted cash flow analysis which unlike the option pricing and decision analytic approaches does not explicitly consider the uncertainty in project cash flows in this paper we provide a tutorial introduction to option pricing methods focusing on how they relate to and can be integrated with decision analysis methods and describe some lessons learned in using these methods to evaluate some real oil and gas investments

real option analysis in a replicating portfolio perspective in the last decades a vast body of literature has arisen on real option analysis roa the use of di erent approaches and the often implicit adoption of major assumptions may cause confusion on what roa precisely entails or in which situations it may be applied we assess the eld of real option analysis by explicitly linking roa to the basic principles of option pricing theory and the replicating portfolio concept from this perspective we explain how real options adjust to the varying risk pro les of a project a feature not available in other valuation methods we also clarify how non market risks can be dealt with in roa we show that a combination of option pricing and decision tree analysis enables us to treat a broad range of investment problems in a manner that is consistent with pricing theory

convergence and difference in regional office development cycles in this paper data and analytical techniques not hitherto employed for the purpose have been used to explore the particularities of the role played by finance capital in influencing the spatio tem

an intertemporal general equilibrium model of asset prices this paper develops a continuous time general equilibrium model of a simple but complete economy and uses it to examine the behavior of asset prices in this model asset prices and their stochastic properties are determined endogenously one principal result is a partial differential equation which asset prices must satisfy the solution of this equation gives the equilibrium price of any asset in terms of the underlying real variables in the economy in this paper we develop a general equilibrium asset pricing model for use in applied research an important feature of the model is its integration of real and financial markets among other things the model endogenously determines the stochastic process followed by the equilibrium price of any financial asset and shows how this process depends on the underlying real variables the model is fully consistent with rational expectations and maximizing behavior on the part of all agents our framework is general enough to include many of the fundamental forces affecting asset markets yet it is tractable enough to be specialized easily to produce specific testable results furthermore the model can be extended in a number of straightforward ways consequently it is well suited to a wide variety of applications for example in a companion paper cox ingersoll and ross 7 we use the model to develop a theory of the term structure of interest rates many studies have been concerned with various aspects of asset pricing under uncertainty the most relevant to our work are the important papers on intertemporal asset pricing by merton 19 and lucas 16 working in a continuous time framework merton derives a relationship among the equilibrium expected rates of return on assets he shows that when investment opportunities are changing randomly over time this relationship will include effects which have no analogue in a static one period model lucas considers an economy with homogeneous individuals and a single consumption good which is produced by a number of processes the random output of these processes is exogenously determined and perishable assets are defined as claims to all or a part of the output of a process and the equilibrium determines the asset prices our theory draws on some elements of both of these papers like merton we formulate our model in continuous time and make full use of the analytical tractability that this affords the economic structure of our model is somewhat similar to that of lucas however we include both endogenous production and

familiarity and the determination of yields for regional office property investments in the uk henneberry j and mouzakis f familiarity and the determination of yields for regional office property investments in the uk regional studies this paper examines how effectively investment yields incorporate spatial variations in risks and returns into property prices it is hypothesized that the pricing of property investments in non core uk regions is affected by a pure familiarity heuristic adopted by investors based in london consequently the determination of office yields is based not on the intrinsic investment characteristics of regional markets but on a core market benchmark combined with a regional premium this results in very long term mispricing patterns with implications not just for the office property investment market but also for the regions especially those outside the core

the growth and geographical anatomy of venture capitalism in the united kingdom martin r l 1989 the growth and geographical anatomy of venture capitalism in the united kingdom reg studies 23 389 403 the 1980s have seen the emergence and rapid growth of venture capitalism in the uk this paper examines this growth both in terms of the spatial organization of the venture capital industry and the regional distribution of venture capital investment the picture that emerges is of an industry which is over centralized in the london area and which in the course of its recent development has tended to concentrate investment in the already more prosperous southeastern and adjacent parts of the country while local venture capital markets are beginning to become established in northern britain it will be some time before the existing regional imbalance is likely to be redressed martin r l 1989 la croissance et la distribution geographique du capital risque au royaume uni reg studies 23 389 403 les annees 1980 ont temoigne de la naissance et de l essor du capital risque au

transaction costs and the pricing of assets the existence of transaction costs explains why investors do not fully diversify their portfolios this paper examines the implications of such limited diversification oi equilibrium asset prices in the framework of the capital asset pricing model in the pricing equation obtained here an asset s risk premium depends on a weighted average of its covariance with the market and its own variance the absence of transaction costs in the sharpe lintner capital asset pricing model capm is often claimed to be only a minor idealization which hardly affects the substantive implications of the model this paper aims to demonstrate that this is not the case incorporating transaction costs into the capm leads to a major reformulation of its basic asset pricing equation in contrast with the capm formula

rational expectations and the effectiveness of monetary policy with special reference to the barro fischer model abstract monetary policy is sometimes alleged to be ineffective when the rational expectations hypothesis is imposed on macroeconomic models barro and fischer 1976 once presented in this journal a simple macroeconomic model in order to explain such a claim however their conclusion depends on a specific rule employed for the future course of money supply it is shown that their model embodies an important factor which generally renders monetary policies effective rational expectations notwithstanding it is suggested that this property also holds in more general macroeconomic frameworks

technical change and the urban development cycle the paper describes the pronounced long swings or urban development cycles of 20 30 years duration which have created successive waves of urbanisation in the british economy since the industrial revolution and which can be related to successive long waves of technological development within the economy as a whole a more detailed examination of the post war period shows that in each sector of building two types of shorter cycles causing pronounced building booms and slumps are superimposed on the dominant long swing of post war urban development the discussion concludes by examining the prospects for the next urban development cycle in britain related to the new wave of micro electronic and information technologies and then draws out the main policy implications of the analysis

valuing risky projects option pricing theory and decision analysis in the academic literature and professional practice there are a number of alternative and apparently competing methods for valuing risky projects in this paper we compare and contrast three different approaches risk adjusted discount rate analysis option pricing analysis and decision analysis focusing on the last two we show that in contrast to some of the claims made in the real options literature when both option pricing and decision analysis methods are correctly applied they must give consistent results we also explore ways in which option pricing and decision analysis methods can be profitably integrated in particular we show how option pricing techniques can be used to simplify decision analysis when some risks can be hedged by trading and conversely how decision analysis techniques can be used to extend option pricing techniques to problems with incomplete securities markets

undermining the financial basis of regions the spatial structure and implications of the uk pension fund system martin r and minns r 1995 undermining the financial basis of regions the spatial structure and implications of the uk pension fund system reg studies 29 125 144 regional growth theory and regional policy traditionally focus on the process of industrial development relatively little is known about the flows of money and financial capital that shape that development this paper examines the spatial organization and implications of the uk pension fund system one of the principal circuits of financial capital in the national economy it is shown how the great bulk of pension fund contributions that originate right across the various regions of the uk are channelled into and controlled by financial institutions in the south east of the country moreover those funds are then invested primarily back into companies and organizations located or headquartered in the south east this spatially centralized system pursues liquidity rather than productive investment and little of the money trickles down to

the neutrality and optimality of counter cyclical monetary policy in equilibrium models with a wealth effect a condition is offered which is both necessary and sufficient for the counter cyclical neutrality of all linear monetary feedback rules with respect to deviations in real market output in that class of stochastic macro economic models with rational expectations additive disturbances multiple markets and a wealth effect on excess commodity demand studied by barro 1976 barro and fischer 1976 king 1982 asako 1982 waldo 1982 and marini 1985 the condition has the form of a constraint on the values of the control parameters of a general monetary feedback rule that includes all other linear feedback rules in this class of models as special cases when the selection of parameters violates this constraint prospective monetary feedback can completely stabilize deviations in real market output around its natural rate without sustained inflation la neutralite et loptimalite de la politique monetaire dans des modcles d equilibre quand un effet de richesse existe on propose une condition necessaire et suffisante pour assurer la neutralite contre cyclique de toutes les regles de retroaction mon6taires lin6aires pour ce qui est des deviations dans le niveau de produit r6el dans cette classe de modeles macro economiques stochastiques avec anticipations rationnelles chocs additifs marches multiples et un effet de richesse sur la demande exc6dentaire de biens tels qu etudies par barro 1976 barro fischer 1976 king 1982 asako 1982 waldo 1982 et marini 1985 cette condition prend la forme d une contrainte sur les valeurs des parametres de controle d une regle mon6taire generale de retroaction dont toutes les autres regles mon6taires lineaires dans cette classe de modele ne sont que des cas particuliers quand la s6lection des parametres ne satisfait pas cette contrainte la retroaction mon6taire prospective peut stabiliser completement les deviations du produit reel autour de son taux naturel sans engendrer une inflation soutenue i would like to thank jim brander ed burmeister john b carlson marsha courchane mike devereux ian domowitz jim glassman craig hakkio stephen r g jones woo sik jung doug mctaggart keizo nagatani doug pearce steve poloz neil raymon stan reynolds john seater shinichi watanabe de mmn wu two anonymous referees and seminar participants at the 1986 canadian economic association meetings the 1986 north american summer meetings of the econometric society the system committee on financial canadian journal of economics revue canadienne d economique xx no 3 august aouit 1987 printed in canada imprime au canada 0008 4085 87 612 624 1 50 canadian economics association this content downloaded from 207 46 13 52 on fri 21 oct 2016 05 54 00 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms neutrality and optimality 613

regulatory change corporate restructuring and the spatial development of the british financial sector marshall j n gentle c j s raybould s and coombes m 1992 regulatory change corporate restructuring and the spatial development of the british financial sector reg studies 26 453 467 the paper explores the dynamics of employment growth and change in the financial sector in the regions of britain during the 1980s complementing other work which has focused on international and corporate finance it focuses on personal financial markets the paper demonstrates the way in which regulatory change has initiated corporate diversification into new markets this reorganization has also included a round of innovation in new financial services and intensified competition in established personal sector markets restructuring has both intensified the concentration of the industry in the south and east of the country and promoted decentralization from london professional and managerial staff associated with the development of new services have been concentrated in the greater south east the rationaliza

1992 and its impact on local and regional banking markets molyneux p 1989 1992 and its impact on local and regional banking markets reg studies 23 523 533 the aim of this paper is to examine how the structure performance and ownership characteristics of ec banking markets will influence the expansion strategies of large ec banks up to 1992 we will also examine the implied effect this will have on local and regional banking markets within the ec the emphasis focuses on large bank acquisition opportunities available up to 1992 we find that the majority of potential big banks acquisition targets are based in the uk germany france spain italy and luxembourg the limited big bank takeover opportunities available to banks will probably encourage them to establish niche business branch networks overseas it will also accelerate the current move of large banks to acquire small and medium sized regional banks across borders as well as to form joint ventures with institutions in other ec countries molyneux p 1989 1992 et son impact sur les marches banc