Holding and opportunity cost theory in a property development context

This paper focuses on the varying approaches and methodologies adopted when the calculation of holding costs is undertaken, focusing on greenfield development. Whilst acknowledging there may be some consistency in embracing first principles relating to holding cost theory, a review of the literature reveals considerable lack of uniformity in this regard. There is even less clarity in quantitative determination, especially in Australia where there has been only limited empirical analysis undertaken. Despite a growing quantum of research undertaken in relation to various elements connected with housing affordability, the matter of holding costs has not been well addressed regardless of its part in the highly prioritised Australian Government’s housing research agenda. The end result has been a modicum of qualitative commentary relating to holding costs. There have been few attempts at finer-tuned analysis that exposes a quantified level of holding cost calculated with underlying rigour. Holding costs can take many forms, but they inevitably involve the computation of “carrying costs” of an initial outlay that has yet to fully realise its ultimate yield. Although sometimes considered a “hidden” cost, it is submitted that holding costs prospectively represent a major determinate of value. If this is the case, then considered in the context of housing affordability, it is therefore potentially pervasive.

Do strategy choices matter for nascent firms? A study on effectuation and causation impacts on new ventures outcomes

Principal Topic : Nascent entrepreneurship has drawn the attention of scholars in the last few years (Davidsson, 2006, Wagner, 2004). However, most studies have asked why firms are created focussing on questions such as what are the characteristics (Delmar and Davidsson, 2000) and motivations (Carter, Gartner, Shaver & Reynolds, 2004) of nascent entrepreneurs, or what are the success factors in venture creation (Davidsson & Honig; 2003; Delmar and Shane, 2004). In contrast, the question of how companies emerge is still in its infancy. On a theoretical side, effectuation, developed by Sarasvathy (2001) offers one view of the strategies that may be at work during the venture creation process. Causation, the theorized inverse to effectuation, may be described as a rational reasoning method to create a company. After a comprehensive market analysis to discover opportunities, the entrepreneur will select the alternative with the higher expected return and implement it through the use of a business plan. In contrast, effectuation suggests that the future entrepreneur will develop her new venture in a more iterative way by selecting possibilities through flexibility and interaction with the market, affordability of loss of resources and time invested, development of pre-commitments and alliances from stakeholders. Another contrasting point is that causation is ''goal driven'' while an effectual approach is ''mean driven'' (Sarasvathy, 2001) One of the predictions of effectuation theory is effectuation is more likely to be used by entrepreneurs early in the venture creation process (Sarasvathy, 2001). However, this temporal aspect and the impact of the effectuation strategy on the venture outcomes has so far not been systematically and empirically tested on large samples. The reason behind this research gap is twofold. Firstly, few studies collect longitudinal data on emerging ventures at an early enough stage of development to avoid severe survivor bias. Second, the studies that collect such data have not included validated measures of effectuation. The research we are conducting attempts to partially fill this gap by combining an empirical investigation on a large sample of nascent and young firms with the effectuation/causation continuum as a basis (Sarasvathy, 2001). The objectives are to understand the strategies used by the firms during the creation process and measure their impacts on the firm outcomes. Methodology/Key Propositions : This study draws its data from the first wave of the CAUSEE project where 28,383 Australian households were randomly contacted by phone using a specific methodology to capture emerging firms (Davidsson, Steffens, Gordon, Reynolds, 2008). This screening led to the identification of 594 nascent ventures (i.e., firms that are not operating yet) and 514 young firms (i.e., firms that have started operating from 2004) that were willing to participate in the study. Comprehensive phone interviews were conducted with these 1108 ventures. In a likewise comprehensive follow-up 12 months later, 80% of the eligible cases completed the interview. The questionnaire contains specific sections designed to distinguish effectual and causal processes, innovation, gestation activities, business idea changes and ventures outcomes. The effectuation questions are based on the components of effectuation strategy as described by Sarasvathy (2001) namely: flexibility, affordable loss and pre-commitment from stakeholders. Results from two rounds of pre-testing informed the design of the instrument included in the main survey. The first two waves of data have will be used to test and compare the use of effectuation in the venture creation process. To increase the robustness of the results, temporal use of effectuation will be tested both directly and indirectly. 1. By comparing the use of effectuation in nascent and young firms from wave 1 to 2, we will be able to find out how effectuation is affected by time over a 12-month duration and if the stage of venture development has an impact on its use. 2. By comparing nascent ventures early in the creation process versus nascent ventures late in the creation process. Early versus late can be determined with the help of time-stamped gestation activity questions included in the survey. This will help us to determine the change on a small time scale during the creation phase of the venture. 3. By comparing nascent firms to young (already operational) firms. 4. By comparing young firms becoming operational in 2006 with those first becoming operational in 2004. Results and Implications : Wave 1 and 2 data have been completed and wave 2 is currently being checked and 'cleaned'. Analysis work will commence in September, 2009. This paper is expected to contribute to the body of knowledge on effectuation by measuring quantitatively its use and impact on nascent and young firms activities at different stages of their development. In addition, this study will also increase the understanding of the venture creation process by comparing over time nascent and young firms from a large sample of randomly selected ventures. We acknowledge the results from this study will be preliminary and will have to be interpreted with caution as the changes identified may be due to several factors and may not only be attributed to the use/not use of effectuation. Meanwhile, we believe that this study is important to the field of entrepreneurship as it provides some much needed insights on the processes used by nascent and young firms during their creation and early operating stages.

Characteristics of sustainable entrepreneurship : some early explorations from the CAUSEE study

Principal Topic: For forward thinking companies, the environment may represent the ''biggest opportunity for enterprise and invention the industrial world has ever seen'' (Cairncross 1990). Increasing awareness of environmental and sustainability issues through media including the promotion of Al Gore's ''An Inconvenient Truth'' has seen increased awareness of environmental and sustainability issues and increased demand for business processes that reduce detrimental environmental impacts of global development (Dean & McMullen 2007). The increased demand for more environmentally sensitive products and services represents an opportunity for the development of ventures that seek to satisfy this demand through entrepreneurial action. As a consequence, increasing recent market developments in renewable energy, carbon emissions, fuel cells, green building, and other sectors suggest an increasing importance of opportunities for environmental entrepreneurship (Dean and McMullen 2007) and increasingly important area of business activity (Schaper 2005). In the last decade in particular, big business has sought to develop a more ''sustainability/ green friendly'' orientation as a response to public pressure and increased government legislation and policy to improve environmental performance (Cohen and Winn 2007). Whilst much of the literature and media is littered with examples of sustainability practices of large firms, nascent and young sustainability firms have only recently begun generating strong research and policy interest (Shepherd, Kuskova and Patzelt 2009): not only for their potential to generate above average financial performance and returns owing to a greater popularity and demand towards sustainability products and services offerings, but also for their intent to lessen environmental impacts, and to provide a more accurate reflection of the ''true cost'' of market offerings taking into account carbon and environmental impacts. More specifically, researchers have suggested that although the previous focus has been on large firms and their impact on the environment, the estimated collective impact of entries and exits of nascent and young firms in development is substantial and could outweigh the combined environmental impact of large companies (Hillary, 2000). Therefore, it may be argued that greater attention should be paid to nascent and young firms and researching sustainability practices, for both their impact in reducing environmental impacts and potential higher financial performance. Whilst acknowledging this research only uses the first wave of a four year longitudinal study of nascent and young firms, it can still begin to provide initial analysis on which to continue further research. The aim of this paper therefore is to provide an overview of the emerging literature in sustainable entrepreneurship and to present some selected preliminary results from the first wave of the data collection, with comparison, where appropriate, of sustainable and firms that do not fulfil this criteria. ''One of the key challenges in evaluating sustainability entrepreneurship is the lack of agreement in how it is defined'' (Schaper, 2005: 10). Some evaluate sustainable entrepreneurs simply as one category of entrepreneurs with little difference between them and traditional entrepreneurs (Dees, 1998). Other research recognises values-based sustainable enterprises requiring a unique perspective (Parrish, 2005). Some see the environmental or sustainable entrepreneurship is a subset of social entrepreneurship (Cohen & Winn, 2007; Dean & McMullen, 2007) whilst others see it as a separate, distinct theory (Archer 2009). Following one of the first definitions of sustainability developed by the Brundtland Commission (1987) we define sustainable entrepreneurship as firms which ''seek to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future''. ---------- Methodology/Key Propositions: In this exploratory paper we investigate sustainable entrepreneurship using Cohen et al.'s (2008) framework to identify strategies of nascent and young entrepreneurial firms. We use data from The Comprehensive Australian Study of Entrepreneurial Emergence (CAUSEE). This study shares the general empirical approach with PSED studies in the US (Reynolds et al 1994; Reynolds & Curtin 2008). The overall study uses samples of 727 nascent (not yet operational) firms and another 674 young firms, the latter being in an operational stage but less than four years old. To generate the sub sample of sustainability firms, we used content analysis techniques on firm titles, descriptions and product descriptions provided by respondents. Two independent coders used a predefined codebook developed from our review of the sustainability entrepreneurship literature (Cohen et al. 2009) to evaluate the content based on terms such as ''sustainable'' ''eco-friendly'' ''renewable energy'' ''environment'' amongst others. The inter-rater reliability was checked and the Kappa's co-efficient was found to be within the acceptable range (0.746). 85 firms fulfilled the criteria given for inclusion in the sustainability cohort. ---------- Results and Implications: The results for this paper are based on Wave one of the CAUSEE survey which has been completed and the data is available for analysis. It is expected that the findings will assist in beginning to develop an understanding of nascent and young firms that are driven to contribute to a society which is sustainable, not just from an economic perspective (Cohen et al 2008), but from an environmental and social perspective as well. The CAUSEE study provides an opportunity to compare the characteristics of sustainability entrepreneurs with entrepreneurial firms without a stated environmental purpose, which constitutes the majority of the new firms created each year, using a large scale novel longitudinal dataset. The results have implications for Government in the design of better conditions for the creation of new business, firms who assist sustainability in developing better advice programs in line with a better understanding of their needs and requirements, individuals who may be considering becoming entrepreneurs in high potential arenas and existing entrepreneurs make better decisions.

Bootstrap approaches for estimation and confidence intervals of long term memory processes

In this work, we investigate an alternative bootstrap approach based on a result of Ramsey [F.L. Ramsey, Characterization of the partial autocorrelation function, Ann. Statist. 2 (1974), pp. 1296-1301] and on the Durbin-Levinson algorithm to obtain a surrogate series from linear Gaussian processes with long range dependence. We compare this bootstrap method with other existing procedures in a wide Monte Carlo experiment by estimating, parametrically and semi-parametrically, the memory parameter d. We consider Gaussian and non-Gaussian processes to prove the robustness of the method to deviations from normality. The approach is also useful to estimate confidence intervals for the memory parameter d by improving the coverage level of the interval.

Faith's knowledge : papers exploring the theory and application of theological epistemology

This thesis locates the origins of modern secular knowledge in late medieval theology. Problems with modern and postmodern knowledge which arise from these theological origins are then tackled theologically, and the manner in which secular ways of understanding knowledge are embedded in specific university, political and hospital contexts are then described and evaluated from a post-secular theological standpoint. The theoretical component of this thesis looks at knowledge itself and finds that without faith there can be no knowledge. The applied component of this thesis does two things. Firstly it explores how our conception of knowledge shapes the assumptions, operational norms, belief frames and tacit values of some characteristically modern and secular institutions. Secondly the applied component evaluates those contexts from the theologically premised conception of knowledge which was argued for in the theoretical component of this thesis.

Southern theory : the global dynamics of knowledge in the social sciences

Up front I am impelled to acknowledge an intellectual debt to Raewyn Connell as one of my PhD supervisors about 20 years ago and as having a lasting influence on my own sociological approach to research. One of key themes of this book is that southern theorists are rarely read in the northern hemisphere. This is not the case for Connell, however, one of Australia’s most internationally renowned scholars. The tome reads as the creative outpouring of her lifelong thirst for social science. Its main claim is that southern theory ‘has as much intellectual power as metropolitan social thought, and more political relevance’ (p. xii). A big but compelling claim, as I will explain.

Political theory and theoretical physics

This paper explains, somewhat along a Simmelian line, that political theory may produce practical and universal theories like those developed in theoretical physics. The reasoning behind this paper is to show that the Element of Democracy Theory may be true by way of comparing it to Einstein’s Special Relativity – specifically concerning the parameters of symmetry, unification, simplicity, and utility. These parameters are what make a theory in physics as meeting them not only fits with current knowledge, but also produces paths towards testing (application). As the Element of Democracy Theory meets these same parameters, it could settle the debate concerning the definition of democracy. This will be shown firstly by discussing why no one has yet achieved a universal definition of democracy; secondly by explaining the parameters chosen (as in why these and not others confirm or scuttle theories); and thirdly by comparing how Special Relativity and the Element of Democracy match the parameters.

Policing the rural crisis

There is a growing sense of crisis in rural ways of life, which manifests itself in economic decline, depopulation, depleted environments, and a crisis of rural identities. Crime is one potent marker of crisis, the more so as it spoils the image of healthy, cohesive community. The social reaction it elicits, the policing of this ‘other rural’, is also a guide to the dimensions of crisis. The social sciences have witnessed a renewed international interest in the study of ‘other rurals’: the neglected, invisible or excluded aspects of country life. This book brings a fresh approach to the study of crime that challenges the urban-centric assumptions of much western criminology and sociology. It explores rural crime and social reactions to it, in relation to processes and patterns of community formation and change in rural Australia, including the social, economic, cultural and political forces shaping the history, structure and everyday life of rural communities. Policing the Rural Crisis is based on five years of extensive original empirical research in rural and regional Australia. It draws on ideas and debates in contemporary social theory across several disciplines, making the analysis relevant to the study of crime and social change elsewhere.

Literacy and religion : the textual politics and practice of Seventh-day Adventism

This book explores the interrelation of literacy and religion as practiced by Western Christians in, first, historical contexts and, second, in one contemporary church setting. Using both a case study and a Foucauldian theoretical framework, the book provides a sustained analysis of the reciprocal discursive construction of literacy, religiosity and identity in one Seventh-day Adventist Church community of Northern Australia. Critical linguistic and discourse analytic theory is used to disclose processes of theological (church), familial (home) and educational (school) normalisation of community members into regulated ways of hearing and speaking, reading and writing, being and believing. Detailed analyses of spoken and written texts taken from institutional and local community settings show how textual religion is an exemplary technology of the self, a politics constituted by canonical texts, interpretive norms, textual practices, ritualised events and sociopolitical protocols that, ultimately, are turned in upon the self. The purpose of these analyses is to show how, across denominational difference in belief (tradition) and practice, particular versions of self and society are constructed through economies of truth from text, enabling and constraining what can and cannot be spoken and enacted by believers.

Are organ donation communication decisions reasoned or reactive? A test of the utility of an augmented Theory of Planned Behaviour with the Prototype/Willingness Model

Objectives: To explore whether people's organ donation consent decisions occur via a reasoned and/or social reaction pathway. --------- Design: We examined prospectively students' and community members' decisions to register consent on a donor register and discuss organ donation wishes with family. --------- Method: Participants completed items assessing theory of planned behaviour (TPB; attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control (PBC)), prototype/willingness model (PWM; donor prototype favourability/similarity, past behaviour), and proposed additional influences (moral norm, self-identity, recipient prototypes) for registering (N=339) and discussing (N=315) intentions/willingness. Participants self-reported their registering (N=177) and discussing (N=166) behaviour 1 month later. The utility of the (1) TPB, (2) PWM, (3) augmented TPB with PWM, and (4) augmented TPB with PWM and extensions was tested using structural equation modelling for registering and discussing intentions/willingness, and logistic regression for behaviour. --------- Results: While the TPB proved a more parsimonious model, fit indices suggested that the other proposed models offered viable options, explaining greater variance in communication intentions/willingness. The TPB, augmented TPB with PWM, and extended augmented TPB with PWM best explained registering and discussing decisions. The proposed and revised PWM also proved an adequate fit for discussing decisions. Respondents with stronger intentions (and PBC for registering) had a higher likelihood of registering and discussing. --------- Conclusions: People's decisions to communicate donation wishes may be better explained via a reasoned pathway (especially for registering); however, discussing involves more reactive elements. The role of moral norm, self-identity, and prototypes as influences predicting communication decisions were highlighted also.

Making a match: Combining theory and evidence in policy-oriented macroeconomic modeling

A persistent question in the development of models for macroeconomic policy analysis has been the relative role of economic theory and evidence in their construction. This paper looks at some popular strategies that involve setting up a theoretical or conceptual model (CM) which is transformed to match the data and then made operational for policy analysis. A dynamic general equilibrium model is constructed that is similar to standard CMs. After calibration to UK data it is used to examine the utility of formal econometric methods in assessing the match of the CM to the data and also to evaluate some standard model-building strategies. Keywords: Policy oriented economic modeling; Model evaluation; VAR models

A model for engaging and evaluating innovative cross-sectoral education reform : case studies from Queensland, Australia

This paper will explore how a general education can contribute successfully to vocational outcomes using both Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Program Theory methodology. The paper will focus on the development aspects of ‘marrying’ vocational and general education including engagement processes, student, teacher, institute and employer preparation and the pathway possibilities that emerge. Successful cases presented include the: Healthy Futures program (pathways into the Health and Allied industries); Accounting Pathways program (simultaneously studying a general Accounting subject and a Certificate III vocational qualification); and Sustainable Sciences initiative (development of a vocational qualification that focuses on the emerging renewable energy industry and is linked to school science programs). The case studies have been selected because they are unique in character and application and can be used as a basis for future program development in other settings or curriculum areas.

Axial shortening in reinforced concrete members using vibration characteristics - Part 1 - Theory

Differential axial shortening in vertical members of reinforced concrete high-rise buildings occurs due to shrinkage, creep and elastic shortening, which are time dependent effects of concrete. This has to be quantified in order to make adequate provisions and mitigate its adverse effects. This paper presents a novel procedure for quantifying the axial shortening of vertical members using the variations in vibration characteristics of the structure, in lieu of using gauges which can pose problems in use during and after the construction. This procedure is based on the changes in the modal flexiblity matrix which is expressed as a function of the mode shapes and the reciprocal of the natural frequencies. This paper will present the development of this novel procedure.

Political theory and theoretical physics [Revised]

This paper explains, somewhat along a Simmelian line, that political theory may produce practical and universal theories like those developed in theoretical physics. The reasoning behind this paper is to show that the Element of Democracy Theory may be true by way of comparing it to Einstein’s Special Relativity – specifically concerning the parameters of symmetry, unification, simplicity, and utility. These parameters are what make a theory in physics as meeting them not only fits with current knowledge, but also produces paths towards testing (application). As the Element of Democracy Theory meets these same parameters, it could settle the debate concerning the definition of democracy. This will be shown firstly by discussing why no one has yet achieved a universal definition of democracy; secondly by explaining the parameters chosen (as in why these and not others confirm or scuttle theories); and thirdly by comparing how Special Relativity and the Element of Democracy match the parameters.

Curriculum evaluation : approaches and methodologies

Curriculum evaluation, as a field of study, is dynamic. For over the years it has been responsive to the developments in the conceptualization of curriculum and the associated processes of curriculum change. The concept of curriculum is integral to curriculum evaluation and can be defined in terms of what can and shall be taught to whom, when, where, how, and why. Much of the decision making relates to what knowledge is to be selected for inclusion in the curriculum.