The global financial cost of Covid-19 could top $15 trillion. But governments could prevent future pandemics by investing as little as $22 billion a year in programs to curb wildlife trafficking and stem the destruction of tropical forests, according to an international team of scientists including Baker Institute Faculty Scholar Ted Loch-Temzelides.
Ted Loch-Temzelides, Andrew Dobson, Stuart Pimm, Lee Hannah, Les Kaufman, Jorge Ahumada, Amy Ando, Aaron Bernstein, Jonah Busch, Peter Daszak, Jens Engelmann, Margaret Kinnaird, Binbin Li, Thomas Lovejoy, Katarzyna Nowak, Patrick Roehrdanz, Mariana ValeJuly 24, 2020
The winner’s curse — overestimating the value of an asset and therefore overpaying — is often associated with acquisitions of publicly-traded firms but not with private acquisitions. Using an event study methodology for over 22,000 private acquisitions of U.S. firms between 1985 and 2015, the authors examine a possible winner’s curse for such acquisitions, testing variables to determine what characteristics make a private company more likely to overestimate the asset's value.
A relatively new set of financial services called “microfinance” provides what appears to be a sustainable way of supplying access to capital to the poor. This article provides a brief history of microfinance, discusses the ongoing integration of microfinance institutions into the global capital markets, and surveys the challenges that now confront these organizations in becoming sustainable enterprises with social as well as commercial objectives.
