Nearly £1 million funding awarded to new research project on the Peasants' Revolt

Four better or four worse. In the City AM, Dr Miriam Marra shares her thoughts on having four generations in the workplace and the four-day working week.

The ICMA Centre is very proud to congratulate PhD student Yingying Wu on her receipt of a Best Paper Award at the 19th Global Finance Conference, taking place at DePaul University in Chicago on May 23-25, 2012. The prize was awarded for the paper “Commodity Futures Prices: More Evidence on Forecast Power, Risk Premia and the Theory of Storage” (co-authored with Chris Brooks and Marcel Prokopczuk).

Infrastructure is the new buzzword in finance these days even though infrastructure has been important at least since the days when the Romans built their roads across Britain and Europe. The difference today is that increasingly the government says it cannot finance such infrastructure - roads, railways, power generation, telecoms, airports etc. The telecoms industry is already completely privately owned in most countries as are an increasing number of airports across the world. But governments everywhere are now looking ever more to public private partnerships (PPPs) to provide the annual funding (the annual revenues required to service bank loan and bond interest payments and capital repayments and equity dividends) as well as the actual financing (the arranging of bank loans, bond issues and equity share issues) to provide the cash up-front.