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on Project, Program and Portfolio Management |
| By: | Bennon, Michael; Sharma, Rajiv |
| Abstract: | The 2011 congressional ban on earmarks for infrastructure projects formally transferred responsibility for prioritizing federal infrastructure investments to the executive branch, and has redoubled the importance of how, exactly, the federal government evaluates and selects infrastructure projects that will receive federal funding. The Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) study is one such method of evaluating and prioritizing infrastructure projects or other policy alternatives which has been widely studied in literature and largely adopted by U.S. federal agencies. Despite their renewed and significant impact on the selection of infrastructure projects, however, the use and applications of BCAs in the U.S. varies significantly between sectors, agencies and levels of government. In this paper, we review the BCA and other project prioritization policies in U.S. federal agencies and compare them with other, international programs in the comparable economies of Australia and Canada. |
| Keywords: | Community/Rural/Urban Development |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:ffispa:277658&r=ppm |
| By: | Pender, John; Torero, Maximo |
| Abstract: | This paper reviews literature on the impacts, costs, and benefits of infrastructure in the United States and developing countries, focusing on studies published since the early 1990s. A review of 28 econometric studies of productivity impacts of public capital in the United States found a wide range of estimates of the output elasticity of public capital (a measure of the percent increase in the value of output associated with a one percent increase in the value of the public capital stock) – ranging from -0.49 to +0.56, with a mean value of 0.12. The range of estimates depends on the unit of analysis, the type of public capital, and the method of analysis. Generally larger productivity impacts were found in national than in state-level studies and for water and sewer capital than for highway capital. Smaller impacts were found in studies that controlled for state-level fixed factors that affect productivity. These estimates imply an even wider range of estimates of the marginal rate of return to public capital stocks, ranging from close to zero for highway stocks to nearly 90 percent for water and sewer capital. Similarly large ranges of rates of return were estimated by studies investigating impacts of public capital on the costs or profits of firms. A few studies estimated the benefits of public capital stocks in U.S. cities including amenity benefits, and found that such benefits can be larger than the productivity benefits. The benefit-to-cost ratio (BCR) of public capital stocks estimated in these studies ranged from about 0.3 to greater than 2.0, depending on the assumptions of the econometric framework. Many econometric studies have investigated impacts of particular types of infrastructure in the U.S. and in developing countries, though few have estimated rates of return implied by the estimates. Model-based estimates of BCRs of infrastructure investments by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Highway Administration suggest that BCRs greater than 1.0 are common for water and highway infrastructure projects, but no evidence was found in the literature reviewed that these have been validated using econometric approaches. Rigorous econometric impact evaluation methods to assess the causal impacts of infrastructure investments have been used by the Millennium Challenge Corporation and multilateral development banks to validate and improve the results of predictive models in some developing country contexts and have found some statistically significant impacts on railroads, roads, rural electrification, water and information and communication technologies (ICTs). Such an approach could be useful to apply in more contexts. |
| Keywords: | Community/Rural/Urban Development |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:ffispa:277662&r=ppm |
| By: | ITF |
| Abstract: | The ongoing development of Slovakia’s motorway network has prompted efforts to improve project selection and infrastructure governance more generally. This report reviews Slovakia’s approach to estimating motorway construction costs in the light of international practices. The accuracy of cost estimates at different project development stages affects the selection of projects, budget planning, or the bidding for the project. This report offers a broad range of measures that can advance the accuracy of estimates. |
| Date: | 2018–02–28 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oec:itfaac:45-en&r=ppm |
| By: | Tanner, David; Wolfe, Kent; Robert, Jeffrey; Tomlin, Victoria; O’Looney, John; Shepherd, Tommie |
| Keywords: | Community/Rural/Urban Development |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:ffispa:277663&r=ppm |
| By: | Vanessa, Mertins; Jeworrek, Sabrina; Vlassopoulos, Michael |
| Abstract: | Failure in organisations is a very common phenomenon. Little is known about whether past failure affects workers’ subsequent performance. We conduct a field experiment in which we follow up a failed mail campaign to attract new volunteers with a phone campaign pursuing the same goal. We recruit temporary workers to carry out the phone campaign and randomly assign them to either receive or not receive information about the previous failure and measure their performance. We find that informed workers perform better – in terms of both numbers dialed (about 14% improvement) and completed interviews (about 20% improvement) – regardless of whether they had previously worked on the failed mail campaign. Evidence from a second experiment with student volunteers asked to support a campaign to reduce food waste suggests that the mechanism behind our finding relates to contextual inference: Informing workers/volunteers that they are pursuing a goal that is hard to attain seems to add meaning to the work involved, leading them to exert more effort. |
| Keywords: | contextual inference,feedback,failure,field experiment,meaning of work |
| JEL: | C93 J22 M50 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:vfsc18:181644&r=ppm |
| By: | Donal Brown (SPRU, University of Sussex, UK; The University of Leeds, UK); Paula Kivimaa (SPRU, University of Sussex, UK; Finnish Environmental Institute, Finland); Steve Sorrell (The University of Leeds, UK) |
| Abstract: | Business model innovation is increasingly important for the diffusion of sustainable innovations - particularly those that are systemic in nature. In this paper we outline how systemic innovations, such as whole-house energy ‘retrofit’, may require new business models before they gain widespread adoption. Through a series of semi-structured interviews and document analysis, we undertake a case study of the ‘Energiesprong’ retrofit business model - contrasting this with the incumbent ‘atomised’ market model. We highlight the central role of an innovation intermediary - the Energiesprong ‘market development team’, in this business model innovation, and how Dutch policymakers sought to promote business model innovation through creation of this intermediary. In doing so we develop a novel framework - combining the components of business models with the functions of intermediaries to illustrate this case. Finally, the paper suggests this case and framework could provide lessons for how intermediaries and in turn policymakers might foster business model innovation in other sectors. |
| Keywords: | Business models, Energy efficiency retrofit, Systemic innovation, Business model innovation, Intermediaries, Innovation policy |
| Date: | 2018–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sru:ssewps:2018-19&r=ppm |
| By: | Takashi Shinzato |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we use replica analysis to determine the investment strategy that can maximize the net present value for portfolios containing multiple development projects. Replica analysis was developed in statistical mechanical informatics and econophysics to evaluate disordered systems, and here we use it to formulate the maximization of the net present value as an optimization problem under budget and investment concentration constraints. Furthermore, we confirm that a common approach from operations research underestimates the true maximal net present value as the maximal expected net present value by comparing our results with the maximal expected net present value as derived in operations research. Moreover, it is shown that the conventional method for estimating the net present value does not consider variance in the cash flow. |
| Date: | 2018–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1810.06366&r=ppm |