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'Investing with Confidence: Understanding Political Risk Management in the 21st Century' is the latest book in a series based on the MIGA–Georgetown University Symposium on International Political Risk Management. The most recent symposium brought together almost 200 senior practitioners from the political risk insurance (PRI) industry, including investors, insurers, brokers, lenders, academics, and members of the legal community. This volume addresses the key issues relevant for investors today, including arbitration, understanding and pricing for risk, and new developments in investments through timely assessments from 15 experts in the fields of international investment, finance, insurance, law, and academia. Contributors to this volume examine key political risk issues including claims and arbitration, perspectives on pricing from private, public and multilateral providers, and explore new frontiers in sovereign wealth funds and Islamic finance. The volume begins with a look back to the founding of International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and MIGA and the respective visions for both of these important institutions. It continues with a review of new developments in global finance and risk management, including Islamic finance and sovereign wealth funds, and provides an investor perspective of what drives the decision making process on procuring political risk insurance. The volume then turns to consider methodologies of pricing from the private, public, and multilateral perspectives, and examines the expropriation and the pledge of shares. This section focuses on key legal questions such as understanding expropriation and the outcome of arbitration hearings, the latter being particularly relevant given the number of cases currently before arbitral panels. The volume concludes with an overview of the key thoughts raised by the authors and the implications for investors going forward. 'Investing with Confidence' offers valuable insights for practitioners and investors alike and is particularly relevant in today's uncertain markets.

In this study, we examine the prediction accuracy of machine learning methods to estimate commercial real estate transaction prices. Using machine learning methods, including Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Deep Neural Networks (DNN), we estimate the commercial real estate transaction price by comparing relative prediction accuracy. Data consist of 19,640 transaction-based office properties provided by Costar corresponding to the 2004–2017 period for 10 major U.S. CMSA (Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area). We conduct each machine learning method and compare the performance to identify a critical determinant model for each office market. Furthermore, we depict a partial dependence plot (PD) to verify the impact of research variables on predicted commercial office property value. In general, we expect that results from machine learning will provide a set of critical determinants to commercial office price with more predictive power overcoming the limitation of the traditional valuation model. The result for 10 CMSA will provide critical implications for the out-of-state investors to understand regional commercial real estate market.

Infrastructure plays a key role in fostering growth and productivity and has been linked to improved earnings, health, and education levels for the poor. Yet Latin America and the Caribbean are currently faced with a dangerous combination of relatively low public and private infrastructure investment. Those investment levels must increase, and it can be done. If Latin American and Caribbean governments are to increase infrastructure investment in politically feasible ways, it is critical that they learn from experience and have an accurate idea of future impacts. This book contributes to this aim by producing what is arguably the most comprehensive privatization impact analysis in the region to date, drawing on an extremely comprehensive dataset.

By focusing on market institutions, the quality of implementation of economic policies and the credibility of reforms from the private sector perspective, this report offers a new angle to the growth and employment challenge of the Middle East and North Africa region.

Recent research suggests that investors actively skew their portfolios toward local stocks. This study investigates whether fund managers increasingly shift their holdings toward local stocks when underperforming external benchmarks. Using a unique dataset consisting of detailed securities transactions and complete daily portfolio holdings of four large state retirement plans, I find evidence that past fund performance is negatively associated with changes in local bias. This finding is consistent with fund managers foregoing geographic diversification in favor of local stocks during periods of underperformance. I also find limited evidence consistent with fund managers possessing an information advantage in local stocks relative to non-local stocks; however this advantage varies with contractual incentives.

A vigorous economic rebound is under way in East Asia since the second quarter of 2009, following the sharp impact from the financial crisis and the global recession that began in late 2008. As much as the reduction in exports and industrial production across the region in the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 was unexpectedly swift and deep, so is the strength of the rebound, with doubts about green shoots dispelled in a matter of months and replaced by near-consensus views of a synchronized global rebound led by emerging East Asia. The robust rebound is due to a combination of timely and large fiscal and monetary stimulus in most countries in East Asia, notably in China, and a powerful process of inventory restocking that began after mid-2009. Globally, the advanced economies joined the rebound trend in the third quarter of 2009, and their contributions to global industrial production notably driven by inventory accumulation have begun to outpace the contribution from the East Asia region. These developments are set against a background of solid macroeconomic fundamentals, including high foreign exchange reserves, large private and corporate savings, and low corporate and government debt. The region's well-capitalized banks and much improved banking supervision since the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis have also helped limit financial contagion and the transmission of the forces of global recession.

This report aims to provide an objective assessment of the condition of Rwanda's infrastructure sectors and of the institutional and policy frameworks that are associated with them. It also provides a clear route map for infrastructure sector reform, as well as highlighting both the opportunities that exist for the private sector and the role that the donor community can play in assisting the Government with establishing priorities in infrastructure.

We examine the impact of distance on internet search, and the effect of the \"local bias\" in search on the stock market response around earnings announcements. We find significant local bias in search behavior. Motivated by theories explaining local bias, local information advantage, and familiarity bias, we predict and find that firms with higher local bias in search experience higher bid-ask spreads, lower trading volumes, and lower earnings response coefficients at the time of earnings announcements, consistent with non-local investors relying more than locals on public information announcements. Consistent with local information advantage, we find that in the week prior to the announcement, firms with higher local bias have higher bid-ask spreads, higher trading volumes, and returns that are more predictive of the coming earnings surprise. Consistent with familiarity bias, firms with higher local bias in search experience stronger post-earnings announcement drift. We use unique predictions, propensity score matching, and two-stage least squares to identify the effects of local bias separately from the effects of overall visibility. Overall, we show there is significant local bias in search, and that this local bias has a significant impact on the market response around earnings announcements.

This study shows that the propensity to gamble and investment decisions are correlated. At the aggregate level, individual investors prefer stocks with lottery features, and like lottery demand, the demand for lottery-type stocks increases during economic downturns. In the cross-section, socioeconomic factors that induce greater expenditure in lotteries are associated with greater investment in lottery-type stocks. Further, lottery investment levels are higher in regions with favorable lottery environments. Because lottery-type stocks underperform, gambling-related underperformance is greater among low-income investors who excessively overweight lottery-type stocks. These results indicate that state lotteries and lottery-type stocks attract very similar socioeconomic clienteles.

The 2008 global financial meltdown has redirected attention to the entwinement of financial markets and the urban built environment. Against that background, recent works in urban political economy have focused on how city governments support the rent-maximisation strategies of landowners, thereby reinforcing 'the increasing tendency to treat land as a financial asset' (Harvey, [1982]2006). However, this perspective paradoxically understates the importance of market finance actors, neglecting to demonstrate how, in practice, such financial investors, who have been shown to adopt selective investment practices, shape urban redevelopment projects. In this article, the role of financial investors is analysed through a case study of a large-scale redevelopment project on the outskirts of the Paris city-region (city of Saint-Ouen). The analysis of negotiations over urban design and economic development issues – raised by property developers seeking to fashion commercial properties as investment assets – reveals the unevenness of a local authority's ability to implement an agenda that potentially diverges from the expectations of financial investors. Accordingly, given the growing importance of investors in the ownership of the built environment, the article considers urban redevelopment as the outcome of power relations that originate in the circulation of investors' expectations. These expectations are met through translating market finance categories (risk, return and liquidity) into elements of the urban fabric. This bears substantial consequences for policy-making, given the current context of austerity, as municipal authorities are increasingly constrained to rely on property markets. Urban redevelopment projects are thereby increasingly shaped to provide investment assets for financial investors.