Vlerick Repository

• Is destiny worth the distance? On private equity in emerging markets

  Darolles, Serge; Ain Tommar, Sara; Jurczenko, Emmanuel (2018)

  We study the performance determinants of private equity investing in emerging markets (EM) compared to developed markets (DM) using a novel dataset. Using a multilevel linear model specification, our results suggest that performance in emerging markets in highly dependent on geographical and cultural proximity. The effect is significantly higher for GPs investing in both markets compared to pure DM- and EM-players respectively. Cross-cultural and geographical effects are enhanced when the GP investment teams are also culturally close using different measures. Our results also show that the realized returns are highly dependent on the investment period, the investment style and the GP’s experience on each market.
• On the performance of listed private equity

  Ain Tommar, Sara (2018)

  Listed private equity (LPE) refers to publicly-traded investment companies whose activity is to invest in privately-held companies or in traditional private equity funds. The recent years have witnessed a slew of such listings and many investors were offered exposure to traditional private equity investments (TPE) through LPE. While listed private equity and traditional private equity have the same investment universe, we argue that the performance of the latter does not pertain to LPE. We build a representative dataset of the LPE universe and compare their performance to TPE. We examine whether belonging to indices and having minimum liquidity requirements is linked to performance. Our results suggest that listing significantly deteriorates absolute performance measures but is positively and significantly related to better investment multiples.
• Energy Storage. Our take on business model and regulation

  Broeckx, Saskia; Ramos, Ariana; Fernandez, Luisa; Meeus, Leonardo (2019)

  The electricity landscape is in a state of flux, not least due to the increasing integration of renewable energy sources and distributed generation. This has sparked growing interest in energy storage, arguably an important part of the renewable energy mix. How can energy storage be used and integrated into existing power systems, in both residential and industrial environments? This is the key question the STORY project aims to address. Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, STORY is a five-year research project analysing new energy storage technologies and their benefits. It features six demonstration case studies and involves 18 partner institutions in seven European countries. One of these partner institutions is Vlerick Business School. In a context where several different actors can use storage assets, it is essential to identify business models and regulation that will make energy storage sustainable, which is exactly where our expertise lies. We have taken the lead on the business cases supporting the rollout of electricity storage at the distribution level of the grid; more specifically, on those business cases revolving around the challenges of storage deployment and the interaction between the business models and the enabling market and regulatory context.
• Risk and peformance: Embedding risk management

  Ashby, Simon; Bryce, Cormac; Ring, Patrick (ACCA, 2019)

  A new report from ACCA (the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) uncovers how board-level risk management activities vary in organisations as a result of internal and external factors. The report, Risk and performance: Embedding risk management, highlights common challenges and good practices to overcome risk management difficulties. The research was conducted by Professor Simon Ashby (Vlerick Business School), Professor Cormac Bryce (Cass Business School) and Professor Patrick Ring (Glasgow Caledonian University). The study combines findings from four in-depth case studies including interviews as well as a review of current academic literature. The insights were consolidated to create the ‘risk gearbox’, a conceptual model for embedding risk management in organisations. It shows how formal and informal risk management mechanisms combine to create ‘strategic thrust’ to support the board decisions on strategic risk taking and control. There are also a number of recommendations for organisations looking to improve the effectiveness of their risk management arrangements.
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  Resource-constrained project scheduling with activity splitting and setup times

  Vanhoucke, Mario; Coelho, José; Vanhoucke, Mario; Coelho, José (Elsevier, 2019)

  This paper presents a new solution algorithm to solve the resource-constrained project scheduling problem with activity splitting and setup times. The option of splitting activities, known as activity preemption, has been studied in literature from various angles, and an overview of the main contributions will be given. The solution algorithm makes use of a meta-heuristic search for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) using network transformations to split activities in subparts. More precisely, the project network is split up such that all possible preemptive parts are incorporated into an extended network as so-called activity segments, and setup times are incorporated between the different activity segments. Due to the inherent complexity to solve the problem for such huge project networks, a solution approach is proposed that selects the appropriate activity segments and ignores the remaining segments using a boolean satisfiability problem solver, and afterwards schedules these projects to near-optimality with the renewable resource constraints. The algorithm has been tested using a large computational experiment with five types of setup times. Moreover, an extension to the problem with overlaps between preemptive parts of activities has been proposed and it is shown that our algorithm can easily cope with this extension without changing it. Computational experiments show that activity preemption sometimes leads to makespan reductions without requiring a lot of splits in the activities. Moreover, is shown that the degree of these makespan reductions depends on the network and resource indicators of the project instance.

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