Many of the benefits that are generated by the natural environment are external to normal market transactions and are consequently undervalued and under-provisioned even though they substantially contribute to human welfare. One approach to valuing certain environmental goods and services is through a regression technique known as the property hedonic model. This model considers a property as a bundle of attributes where the total price of the property is decomposed into marginal, implicit prices for property-specific attributes, the context or neighborhood in which a property resides and access to environmental amenities. The goal of this dissertation research is to estimate the value of proximity to the environmental amenities of parks and open spaces using a property hedonic model for the City of Baltimore and suburban areas of Baltimore County. While the property hedonic model has been commonly used to value environmental benefits, few of these studies have distinguished the spatial scales of neighborhood characteristics from the property-specific characteristics within a regression model. In this research, a multilevel modeling approach to the typical property hedonic model was used to model the effects of attributes at different spatial scales. This approach also allowed the effect of environmental attributes to vary across geographic space and interact with attributes across spatial scales. Such methods provide a more realistic accounting of the dynamic spatial variation of the value of environmental goods and services. For parks in the City of Baltimore, the results of valuing proximity to parks showed a spatial dynamic not often captured in property hedonics. The overall fixed effect for distance to park was negative but insignificant. When allowed to vary by block group, the random effect for this variable indicated that only two-thirds of the 401 neighborhoods positively valued increased proximity to parks. No interactions were found to be significant for the entire study. However, for the population of block groups whose properties did positively value proximity to parks, the results of interactions with neighborhood and park characteristics showed that smaller and more open parks were valued higher than larger and more wooded parks. A high population density also increased the value for a property in close proximity to a park. Finally, properties with smaller yards placed a higher value on proximity to parks than those properties with larger yards, indicating a substitution effect. For open space in Baltimore County, the results indicated that while higher proportions of privately-owned open space surrounding a property increased the value of that property, open space that was publicly-accessible was not significantly valued. Privately-owned open space that was potentially developable was less than half the value of the positive effect of private, open space under conservation easements or other development restrictions.

This thesis reviews the UK life insurance industry comprehensively in terms of performance and business behaviour. One major contribution of the thesis is to challenge the conventional view on evaluation of investment funds from a shareholders’ perspective. The accounting valuation techniques to evaluate investment from the policyholder’s perspective have not been advanced to the same extent as methods designed to evaluate investment from the shareholder’s perspective, due partly to the accounting complexity of the investment management. Against this context, the thesis develops a valuation method on the basis that policyholders’ basic expectation that their saved funds shall be invested with value growth higher than inflation in the real goods market, and the thesis takes this as the benchmark to assess the reported value of policyholders’ assets. The thesis employs this valuation to assess the performance of different life assurance products (conventional vs. modern) and examine whether the transformation (from conventional to modern) has any impact on insurer performance and behaviour. The thesis also examines whether product diversification impacts realised and unrealised investment income homogenously; the result suggests that the effect of product diversification on performance varies across different measurements of realised and unrealised gain. The second major contribution of the thesis is to test the validity of different output proxies and compare efficiency scores based ranking for competitive firms to the value creation based ranking. Overall, the thesis suggests that different output proxies give consistently similar ranking for competitive firms, and cost efficiency based on different proxies are closely related to conventional measurers of firm performance and value creation in terms of value and ranking.

v anglickém jazyce (summary overview) Diploma thesis Bankruptcy: the role of business valuation focuses on intersection of two disciplines - Business valuation and Bankruptcy law - the field still not widely discovered and depicted. The main aim is to reveal and organize main themes of business valuation connected to bankrupcy based on property overbudren with debt. As the case may be, solution propsal. Thesis describes, both in economical and legal point of view institute of insolvency , type of bankruptcy - overbudren with debt, methods of business and property valuation, reveal and organization of main themes of business valuation connected to bankrupcy based on property overbudren with debt - themes connected to the stage before the bankruptcy is declared and themes connected to the stage after bankruptcy declaration. Main themes are analyzed and solved. Part of the thesis is synthesis still. Analysed intersection is characterised by group of mainly heterogeneous problems, in common, described as problems solvable with similar instruments of solution. Both groups - insolvency law and business valuation are relatively young disciplines with wider, significant areas still unsettled and alive. Main themes of business valuation associated to bankruptcy based on property overbudren with debt -...

The diploma thesis' aim is to estimate the value of an engineering company in the eyes of a potential strategic investor. The thesis covers the key aspects of valuation including financinal analysis and strategic analysis of the underlying asset. The gained knowledge and projection results are used in preparation of a financial plan as well as the valuation itself. The results of the valuation are accompanied by several recommendations to the potential investor.

The goal of the master thesis is a valuation of Rodinny pivovar BERNARD a.s. company as of December 31, 2010. The valuation is done through DCF FCFF model. A theorethical part, strategic and financial analysis and a development of the financial plan precede the valuation itself.

Thesis (M.M. (Finance & Investment))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Graduate School of Business Administration, 2013. / Corporations often find it difficult to raise capital in illiquid markets such as most African markets and if they do they pay a premium which is not only costly to them but also propagates illiquidity in these markets. Convertible bonds provide a cheaper source of nancing for issuers with the optionality of maintaining targeted capital structures. However, these instruments are not popular in these markets as they are less understood compared to their conventional counterparts and if used are often mispriced. The main objective of this research is to provide a valua- tion framework for structured bonds, speci cally convertible bonds where market imperfections such as illiquidity are prevalent. This will entail customising the standard valuation framework so that these market imperfections are incorporated in the model. The valuation framework of the convertible bond is then applied to an illiquid market where several deviations from the perfect-market benchmarks exist and then observe what e ect these deviations have by comparing the theo- retical value to that of a convertible bond assuming the market is liquid.

Thesis (D.Sc.)--University of the Witwatersrand, 1963

A discussão acerca do impacto dos tributos sobre a renda na geração de valor ainda é pouco explorada na teoria de finanças. No entanto, a necessidade de investigação do tema é crescente, já que se trata de importante variável na composição do valor das empresas. O problema de estudo investiga se a estrutura dos tributos sobre a renda, determinada pela legislação específica de um país, pode ser responsável por um ganho de valor das empresas desse país se comparado a outro país com diferente legislação. O objetivo deste trabalho é determinar o impacto dos tributos sobre a renda no valor das empresas em diferentes países. Em um primeiro momento é analisada, por meio da técnica bibliográfica e documental, a legislação dos tributos sobre a renda das empresas dos países selecionados (Brasil, EUA, Espanha e Japão), a fim de demonstrar e comparar as formas de apuração desses tributos. Após essa evidenciação, são realizadas análises estatísticas, por meio de testes de diferença entre médias das alíquotas efetivas e das bases de tributos sobre a renda nas empresas de capital aberto dos países analisados, buscando comparar os resultados obtidos com as formas de tributação sobre a renda apresentadas. Para comprovação e análise final do trabalho foi elaborada uma simulação hipotética visando demonstrar os efeitos dos tributos sobre a renda na geração de valor das empresas. Os resultados apurados revelam diferenças significativas entre a alíquota efetiva dos países e a alíquota marginal definida pela legislação, além de demonstrarem que o LAIR é estatisticamente diferente do Lucro Tributável. / There have been few in-depth studies of the impact of income tax on the generation of value in the theory of finances. However, there is a growing need to investigate the issue, since taxation is a major variable affecting the value composition of companies. This study asks whether the income tax structure stipulated by the specific legislation of a certain country may account for gains in the value of companies in this country compared to other countries with different legislation. The aim of this study is to determine the impact of income tax on the value of the companies in different countries. It initially uses bibliographical and documentary techniques to analyze income tax legislation affecting companies in the selected countries (Brazil, the USA, Spain and Japan), in order to demonstrate and compare different ways of reflecting these taxes in accounting terms. Having shown this, it proceeds to perform statistical analysis of average actual tax rates and taxable income parameters for publicly traded companies in the countries analyzed, and compares the results obtained with forms of income taxation. In conclusion, and as the final analysis of the study, a practical simulation is devised to show the effects of income tax on value of companies. The findings point to significant differences between actual rates in these countries and marginal rates as defined by legislation, and further show that Pre-Tax Income is statistically different from Taxable Income.

U.S. multinational corporations are well known for shifting income to low tax foreign subsidiaries to avoid U.S. income tax. Yet little is known about how multinational corporations opportunistically use low tax foreign subsidiaries for financial reporting purpose. Understanding this question has implications for U.S. accounting regulators to set enforcement targets. Using worldwide consolidated financial statements, I examine the role of taxes for multinational corporations to manage earnings in foreign subsidiaries. I find that by managing earnings in low tax foreign countries, multinational corporations can reduce the effective tax rate on pretax accrual earnings by an average of 4.3%. To examine the implication of opportunistic foreign earnings management on investors' equity valuation, I find evidence that investors do not seem to overvalue foreign managed earnings compared to domestic managed earnings, though foreign earnings are on average valued higher than domestic earnings.

We consider several problems motivated by issues faced in the mining industry. In recent years, it has become clear that mines have substantial tail risk in the form of environmental disasters, and this tail risk is not incorporated into common pricing and risk models. However, data sets of the extremal climate behavior that drive this risk are very small, and generally inadequate for properly estimating the tail behavior. We propose a data-driven methodology that comes up with reasonable worst-case scenarios, given the data size constraints, and we incorporate this into a real options based model for the valuation of mines. We propose several different iterations of the model, to allow the end-user to choose the degree to which they wish to specify the financial consequences of the disaster scenario. Next, in order to perform a risk analysis on a portfolio of mines, we propose a method of estimating the correlation structure of high-dimensional max-stable processes. Using the techniques of (Liu Et al, 2017) to map the relationship between normal correlations and max-stable correlations, we can then use techniques inspired by (Bickel et al, 2008, Liu et al, 2014, Rothman et al, 2009) to estimate the underlying correlation matrix, while preserving a sparse, positive-definite structure. The correlation matrices are then used in the calculation of model-robust risk metrics (VaR, CVAR) using the the Sample-Out-of-Sample methodology (Blanchet and Kang, 2017). We conclude with several new techniques that were developed in the field of robust performance analysis, that while not directly applied to mining, were motivated by our studies into distributionally robust optimization in order to address these problems.