Social impact bond feasibility study: Children and youth at risk: the Projecto Família program

Social impact bonds are an increasingly popular method of unlocking typical social investment barriers and fuelling social innovation. This feasibility study aims to understand whether a social impact bond is a suitable tool for decreasing unnecessary foster care placements in Portugal, which have been proven to cause significant social and financial damage to societies. This research question is answered through a financial model which combines the costs of this social problem with Projecto Família’s intervention model, a leading intensive family preservation service. Main findings suggest using SIB funding for a 5-year project with the goal of generating the proper impact measurement metrics lacking in the field.

Cross sectional default probabilities in european corporate bonds

This study attempts to identify basis-trading opportunities in the European banking sector by comparing two different measures for the market’s assessment of risk: market-observed CDS spreads and model-implied Z-spreads. Using a sample of 10 banks, over a period of 3 years following the European banking crisis, it can be concluded that there were arbitrage opportunities in the sector, as evidenced by the derived negative bases.

Ser lean project- Internship at Millennium BCP

Financial institutions are turning their attentions to lean methodology. Strong competitive financial markets demand that organizations search for new ways to achieve competitive advantage. Lean thinking proposes a new method to reach high efficiency: the kaizen approach, which advocates a change in the mind set of all stakeholders towards continuous improvement. In this work project is represented the lean methodology applied at the bank, from a bottom-up spirit, as well as the evaluation of the benefits and the achievement of the proposed goals.

Consulting project for the marketing oil department of Galp Energia evaluation of marketing campaigns

Field lab: Consulting lab

NSP work project investment styles

This paper analyzes the Nova Student Portfolio (NSP) with the objective to understand performances of the fund. Each investment style has been analyzed (growth, value and momentum) in order to highlight what style allocation contributed positively and which had a negative impact. The results show that the team mainly invested in value stocks, which contributed positively but that its growth investments had a negative impact on the stock picking performance. The stock selection shows a major influence of the value investment style. A statistical approach shows that the market factor was the one explaining the most the NSP returns.

Economics consulting project for the Iberian Marketing Oil department of Galp Energia: Strategy and Marketing guidelines for Galp Energia’sconvenience business in the Iberian market

Field lab: Consulting lab

Consulting project for the Iberian marketing Oil department of Galp Energia: Strategy and marketing guidelines for Galp Energia's convenience business in the Iberian market

Field lab: Consulting lab

Consulting project for Câmara Municipal de Cascais street vending in Portugal- creation and development of a new sales channel

Field lab: Consulting lab

An essay on agile project management practices

The main goals for the current dissertation is to research on how practices and concepts from Agile Project Management can be applied in a non-IT context and to discover which aspects should be considered when deciding if whether an Agile approach should be implemented or not. Previous studies reflect on the adoption for the identified context. However, the recognition of these practices and concepts by the Project Management field of studies still remains unresolved. The adoption of Agile Project Management emerges as a manifestation against traditional approaches, mainly due to their inability of accepting requirements’ changes. Therefore, these practices and concepts can be considered in order to reduce the risks concerning the increase of competition and innovation – which does not apply to the IT sector solely. The current study reviews the literature on Agile Project Management and its adoption across different sectors in order to assess which practices and concepts can be applied on a non-IT context. Nine different methods are reviewed, where two of these show a higher relevance – Scrum and Extreme Programming. The identified practices and concepts can be separated into four different groups: Cultural and Organizational Structures, Process, Practices, and Artefacts. A framework based on the work by Boehm & Turner in 2004 is developed in order to support the decision of adopting agile methods. A survey intended for project managers was carried in order to assess the implementation of the identified practices and concepts and to evaluate which variables have the highest importance on the developed decision support framework. It is concluded that New Product Development is the project type with the highest potential to implement an agile approach and that the Project Final Product’s Innovativeness, Competitiveness, and the Project Member’s Experience and Autonomy are the most important aspects to consider an implementation of an Agile approach.

On project finance and the first road concession in Portugal

In broad sense, Project Financing1 as a mean of financing large scale infrastructural projects worldwide has had a steady growth in popularity for the last 20 years. This growth has been relatively unscathed from most economic cycles. However in the wake of the 2007 systemic Financial Crisis, Project Financing was also in trouble. The liquidity freeze and credit crunch that ensued affected all parties involved. Traditional Lenders, of this type of financial instrument, locked-in long-term contractual obligations, were severely hit with scarcity of funding compounded by rapidly increasing cost of funding. All the while, Banks were “rescued” by the concerted actions of Central Banks and other Multi-Lateral Agencies around the world but at the same time “stressed” by upcoming regulatory effort (Basel Committee). This impact resulted in specific changes to this type of long-term financing. Changes such as Commercial Banks’ increased risk aversion; pricing increase and maturities decrease of credit facilities; enforcement of Market Disruption Event clauses; partial responsibility for project risk by Multilateral Agencies; and adoption of utility-like availability payments in other industrial sectors such as transportation and even social infrastructure. To the extent possible, this report is then divided in three parts. First, it begins with a more instructional part, touching academic literature (theory) and giving the Banks perspective (practice), but mostly as an overview of Project Finance for awareness’ sake. The renowned Harvard Business School professor – Benjamin Esty, states2 that Project Finance is a “relatively unexplored territory for both empirical and theoretical research” which means that academic research efforts are lagging the practice of Project Finance. Second, the report presents a practical case regarding the first Road Concession in Portugal in 1998 ending with the lessons learned 10 years after Financial Close. Lastly, the report concludes with the analysis of the current trends and changes to the industry post Financial Crisis of the late 2000’s. To achieve this I’ll reference relevant papers, books on the subject, online articles and my own experience in the Project Finance Department at a major Portuguese Investment Bank. Regarding the latter, with the signing of a confidentiality agreement, I’m duly omitting sensitive and proprietary bank information.

Valuing an offshore exploration project through real options analysis

This thesis applied real options analysis to the valuation of an offshore oil exploration project, taking into consideration the several options typically faced by the management team of these projects. The real options process is developed under technical and price uncertainties, where it is considered that the mean reversion stochastic process is more adequate to describe the movement of oil price throught time. The valuation is realized to two case scenarios, being the first a simplified approach to develop the intuition of the used concepts, and the later a more complete cases that is resolved using both the binomial and trinomial processes to describe oil price movement. Real options methodology demonstrated to be capable of assessing and valuing the projects options, and of overcoming common capital budgeting methodologies flexibility limitation. The added value of the application of real options is evident, but so is the method's increased complexity, which adversely influence its widespread implementation.