California dreaming: Venture Capital Performance reviewed

A recently published research paper by ICMA Centre Professor Adrian Bell, Professor Chris Brooks and PhD researcher Tom Markham is gaining national attention in both the finance sector and the football industry. The paper titled "The performance of football club managers: skill or luck?" is now available online and freely downloadable in an open access Journal.

Blocking those high potential goals isn’t easy during the best of times! But does being shorter make it even harder and create an unfair disadvantage? Well, University researchers are taking a look into it and the results could change football forever.

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.