Business parks and town centre workplaces in England: a comparative analysis of commuting-related energy consumption

To fully appreciate the environmental impact of a workplace the transport-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions resulting from its location should be considered in addition to the emissions that result from the occupation of the building itself. Since the first one was built in the early 1980s, business parks have become a significant workplace location for service-sector workers; a sector of the economy that grew rapidly at that time as the UK manufacturing output declined and the employment base shifted to retail services and de-regulated financial services. This paper examines the transport-related CO2 emissions associated with these workplace locations in comparison to town and city centre locations. Using 2001 Census Special Workplace Statistics which record people’s residence, usual workplace and mode of transport between them, distance travelled and mode of travel were calculated for a sample of city centre and out-of-town office locations. The results reveal the extent of the difference between transport-related CO2 emitted by commuters to out-of-town and city centre locations. The implications that these findings have for monitoring the environmental performance of workplaces are discussed.

"Oft expectation fails": a time-series analysis of construction starts in the London office market

Expectations of future market conditions are generally acknowledged to be crucial for the development decision and hence for shaping the built environment. This empirical study of the Central London office market from 1987 to 2009 tests for evidence of adaptive and naive expectations. Applying VAR models and a recursive OLS regression with one-step forecasts, we find evidence of adaptive and naïve, rather than rational expectations of developers. Although the magnitude of the errors and the length of time lags vary over time and development cycles, the results confirm that developers’ decisions are explained to a large extent by contemporaneous and past conditions in both London submarkets. The corollary of this finding is that developers may be able to generate excess profits by exploiting market inefficiencies but this may be hindered in practice by the long periods necessary for planning and construction of the asset. More generally, the results of this study suggest that real estate cycles are largely generated endogenously rather than being the result of unexpected exogenous shocks.

Who benefits from reducing the cost of formality? Quantile regression discontinuity analysis

This paper studies the effects of increasing formality via tax reduction and simplification schemes on micro-firm performance. It uses the 1997 Brazilian SIMPLES program. We develop a simple theoretical model to show that SIMPLES has an impact only on a segment of the micro-firm population, for which the effect of formality on firm performance can be identified, and that can be analyzed along the single dimensional quantiles of the conditional firm revenues. To estimate the effect of formality, we use an econometric approach that compares eligible and non-eligible firms, born before and after SIMPLES in a local interval about the introduction of SIMPLES. We use an estimator that combines both quantile regression and the regression discontinuity identification strategy. The empirical results corroborate the positive effect of formality on microfirms' performance and produce a clear characterization of who benefits from these programs.

Style analysis in real estate markets: beyond the sectors and regions dichotomy

While style analysis has been studied extensively in equity markets, applications of this valuable tool for measuring and benchmarking performance and risk in a real estate context are still relatively new. Most previous real estate studies on this topic have identified three investment categories (rather than styles): sectors, administrative regions and economic regions. However, the low explanatory power reveals the need to extend this analysis to other investment styles. We identify four main real estate investment styles and apply a multivariate model to randomly generated portfolios to test the significance of each style in explaining portfolio returns. Results show that significant alpha performance is significantly reduced when we account for the new investment styles, with small vs. big properties being the dominant one. Secondly, we find that the probability of obtaining alpha performance is dependent upon the actual exposure of funds to style factors. Finally we obtain that both alpha and systematic risk levels are linked to the actual characteristics of portfolios. Our overall results suggest that it would be beneficial for real estate fund managers to use these style factors to set benchmarks and to analyze portfolio returns.

Office rent determinants: a hedonic panel analysis

It has been frequently observed that office markets are subject to particularly high fluctuations in rents and vacancy levels, thus exposing real estate investors to considerable risk regarding expected future income streams. This paper analyzes the determinants of office rents and their variability over time and across sub-markets to gain insight into the rent price formation and its stability across space and over time. No support is found for the single-market hypothesis which states that arbitrage opportunities effectively align real estate pricing schemes in various parts of city. Instead, the results suggest that the importance of hedonic pricing factors varies both over time and across submarkets.

A meta analysis of real estate fund performance

This paper provides evidence regarding the risk-adjusted performance of 19 UK real estate funds in the UK, over the period 1991-2001. Using Jensen’s alpha the results are generally favourable towards the hypothesis that real estate fund managers showed superior risk-adjusted performance over this period. However, using three widely known parametric statistical procedures to jointly test for timing and selection ability the results are less conclusive. The paper then utilises the meta-analysis technique to further examine the regression results in an attempt to estimate the proportion of variation in results attributable to sampling error. The meta-analysis results reveal strong evidence, across all models, that the variation in findings is real and may not be attributed to sampling error. Thus, the meta-analysis results provide strong evidence that on average the sample of real estate funds analysed in this study delivered significant risk-adjusted performance over this period. The meta-analysis for the three timing and selection models strongly indicating that this out performance of the benchmark resulted from superior selection ability, while the evidence for the ability of real estate fund managers to time the market is at best weak. Thus, we can say that although real estate fund managers are unable to outperform a passive buy and hold strategy through timing, they are able to improve their risk-adjusted performance through selection ability.

The location of executive suites and business centers in the United States: an exploratory analysis

Increasingly, corporate occupiers seek more flexible ways of meeting their accommodation needs. One consequence of this process has been the growth of the executive suite, serviced office or business centre market. This paper, the final report of a research project funded by the Real Estate Research Institute, focuses upon the geographical distribution of business centers offering executive suites within the US. After a brief review of the development of the market, the paper examines the availability of data, provides basic descriptive statistics of the distribution of executive suites by state and by metropolitan statistical area and then attempts to model the distribution using demographic and socio-economic data at MSA level. The distribution reflects employment in key growth sectors and the position of the MSA in the urban hierarchy. An appendix presents a preliminary view of the global distribution of suites.

Persistence of UK Real Estate returns: a Markov chain analysis

The persistence of investment performance is a topic of perennial interest to investors. Efficient Markets theory tells us that past performance can not be used to predict future performance yet investors appear to be influenced by the historical performance in making their investment allocation decisions. The problem has been of particular interest to investors in real estate; not least because reported returns from investment in real estate are serially correlated thus implying some persistence in investment performance. This paper applies the established approach of Markov Chain analysis to investigate the relationship between past and present performance of UK real estate over the period 1981 to 1996. The data are analysed by sector, region and size. Furthermore some variations in investment performance classification are reported and the results are shown to be robust.

Attribution analysis of property portfolios

This paper aims to clarify the potential confusion about the application of attribution analysis to real estate portfolios. Its three primary objectives are: · To review, and as far as possible reconcile, the varying approaches to attribution analysis evident in the literature. · To give a clear statement of the purposes of attribution analysis, and its meaning for real-world property managers. · To show, using real portfolio data from IPD's UK performance measurement service, the practical implications of applying different attribution methods.

Analysis of growth physiology and phytochemical content of Eruca and Diplotaxis Cultivars under different light and temperature regimes

Rocket is a leafy brassicaceous salad crop that encompasses two major genera (Diplotaxis and Eruca) and many different cultivars. Rocket is a rich source of antioxidants and glucosinolates, many of which are produced as secondary products by the plant in response to stress. In this paper we examined the impact of temperature and light stress on several different cultivars of wild and salad rocket. Growth habit of the plants varied in response to stress and with different genotypes, reflecting the wide geographical distribution of the plant and the different environments to which the genera have naturally adapted. Preharvest environmental stress and genotype also had an impact on how well the cultivar was able to resist postharvest senescence, indicating that breeding or selection of senescence-resistant genotypes will be possible in the future. The abundance of key phytonutrients such as carotenoids and glucosinolates are also under genetic control. As genetic resources improve for rocket it will therefore be possible to develop a molecular breeding programme specifically targeted at improving stress resistance and nutritional levels of plant secondary products. Concomitantly, it has been shown in this paper that controlled levels of abiotic stress can potentially improve the levels of chlorophyll, carotenoids and antioxidant activity in this leafy vegetable.

Automated categorisation of e-journals by synonym analysis of n-grams

Automatic keyword or keyphrase extraction is concerned with assigning keyphrases to documents based on words from within the document. Previous studies have shown that in a significant number of cases author-supplied keywords are not appropriate for the document to which they are attached. This can either be because they represent what the author believes a paper is about not what it actually is, or because they include keyphrases which are more classificatory than explanatory e.g., “University of Poppleton” instead of “Knowledge Discovery in Databases”. Thus, there is a need for a system that can generate an appropriate and diverse range of keyphrases that reflect the document. This paper proposes two possible solutions that examine the synonyms of words and phrases in the document to find the underlying themes, and presents these as appropriate keyphrases. Using three different freely available thesauri, the work undertaken examines two different methods of producing keywords and compares the outcomes across multiple strands in the timeline. The primary method explores taking n-grams of the source document phrases, and examining the synonyms of these, while the secondary considers grouping outputs by their synonyms. The experiments undertaken show the primary method produces good results and that the secondary method produces both good results and potential for future work. In addition, the different qualities of the thesauri are examined and it is concluded that the more entries in a thesaurus, the better it is likely to perform. The age of the thesaurus or the size of each entry does not correlate to performance.

Plane wave discontinuous Galerkin methods for the 2D Helmholtz equation: analysis of the $p$-version

Plane wave discontinuous Galerkin (PWDG) methods are a class of Trefftz-type methods for the spatial discretization of boundary value problems for the Helmholtz operator $-\Delta-\omega^2$, $\omega>0$. They include the so-called ultra weak variational formulation from [O. Cessenat and B. Després, SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 35 (1998), pp. 255–299]. This paper is concerned with the a priori convergence analysis of PWDG in the case of $p$-refinement, that is, the study of the asymptotic behavior of relevant error norms as the number of plane wave directions in the local trial spaces is increased. For convex domains in two space dimensions, we derive convergence rates, employing mesh skeleton-based norms, duality techniques from [P. Monk and D. Wang, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., 175 (1999), pp. 121–136], and plane wave approximation theory.

Error analysis of Trefftz-discontinuous Galerkin methods for the time-harmonic Maxwell equations

In this paper, we extend to the time-harmonic Maxwell equations the p-version analysis technique developed in [R. Hiptmair, A. Moiola and I. Perugia, Plane wave discontinuous Galerkin methods for the 2D Helmholtz equation: analysis of the p-version, SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 49 (2011), 264-284] for Trefftz-discontinuous Galerkin approximations of the Helmholtz problem. While error estimates in a mesh-skeleton norm are derived parallel to the Helmholtz case, the derivation of estimates in a mesh-independent norm requires new twists in the duality argument. The particular case where the local Trefftz approximation spaces are built of vector-valued plane wave functions is considered, and convergence rates are derived.

Survival analysis of cereal crop variety innovations in the UK

This paper explores the changing survival patterns of cereal crop variety innovations in the UK since the introduction of plant breeders’ rights in the mid-1960s. Using non-parametric, semi-parametric and parametric approaches, we examine the determinants of the survival of wheat variety innovations, focusing on the impacts of changes to Plant Variety Protection (PVP) regime over the last four decades. We find that the period since the introduction of the PVP regime has been characterised by the accelerated development of new varieties and increased private sector participation in the breeding of cereal crop varieties. However, the increased flow of varieties has been accompanied by a sharp decline in the longevity of innovations. These trends may have contributed to a reduction in the returns appropriated by plant breeders from protected variety innovations and may explain the decline of conventional plant breeding in the UK. It may also explain the persistent demand from the seed industry for stronger protection. The strengthening of the PVP regime in conformity with the UPOV Convention of 1991, the introduction of EU-wide protection through the Community Plant Variety Office and the introduction of royalties on farm-saved seed have had a positive effect on the longevity of protected variety innovations, but have not been adequate to offset the long term decline in survival durations.

Analysis of physiological data from the International Clonal Trial (CFC)

A range of physiological parameters (canopy light transmission, canopy shape, leaf size, flowering and flushing intensity) were measured from the International Clone Trial, typically over the course of two years. Data were collected from six locations, these being: Brazil, Ecuador, Trinidad, Venezuela, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Canopy shape varied significantly between clones, although it showed little variation between locations. Genotypic variation in leaf size was differentially affected by the growth location; such differences appeared to underlie a genotype by environment interaction in relation to canopy light transmission. Flushing data were recorded at monthly intervals over the course of a year. Within each location, a significant interaction was observed between genotype and time of year, suggesting that some genotypes respond to a greater extent than others to environmental stimuli. A similar interaction was observed for flowering data, where significant correlations were found between flowering intensity and temperature in Brazil and flowering intensity and rainfall in Côte d’Ivoire. The results demonstrate the need for local evaluation of cocoa clones and also suggest that the management practices for particular planting material may need to be fine-tuned to the location in which they are cultivated.