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Although some parameters are uncertain in pavement Maintenance and Rehabilitation (M&R) planning, most of the literature has considered these parameters deterministic. Likewise, minimizing risk has been an immense concern as a significant amount of money should be spent on the M&R of pavement networks. To this end, this study aims to propose a new approach to consider risk and uncertainty in a pavement M&R optimization problem. A Multistage Stochastic Integer Programming including risk constraints is applied for the problem modeling. Conditional Value at Risk index is applied to minimize the mentioned variables and avoid unacceptable risks. Subsequently, a case study is used to analyze the proposed technique's effectiveness. The results indicate that the total pavement M&R agency cost equals 6.33 billion Tomans considering a confidence level of 95%. Furthermore, the proposed approach can detect the optimal value of the annual budget for pavement network M&R, which is 1.96 billion Tomans for the case study. Applying preventive maintenance can compensate for the negative effects of risk on projects. Therefore, the proposed approach can help decision-makers, policymakers, and transport agencies to analyze and control risk in the pavement M&R optimization problems and determine the optimal M&R budget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sustainability of pavement, especially in Maintenance and Rehabilitation (M&R) scheduling, has become an immense concern and has received limited attention in previous studies. Therefore, this study aimed to develop the M&R scheduling optimization based on sustainability. To this end, a novel sustainability index was introduced, in which all the sustainable development aspects were considered, including highway agency cost, environmental impacts, and social effects. A conventional model was used to assess the sustainable model's effectiveness. Two new constraints are introduced to reduce the budget fluctuation and not to apply the M&R treatments for two consecutive years to make the model practical. On the other hand, highway agencies face large-scale networks, in which the optimization of M&R scheduling has computational complexities. Thus, the novel and powerful metaheuristic algorithm, named Marine Predator Algorithm (MPA), was applied to solve the pavement M&R scheduling problem. A large-scale pavement network, including 110 sections, was analyzed over a 5-year plan as the case study. The results indicated that using the sustainable model rather than the conventional one leads to a 6.5% reduction in CO2 emission. Besides, utilizing the sustainable approach enhances the equity and safety indices by 40.7% and 2.5% compared to the conventional treatment. However, the highway agency cost is increased by 1.1% using the sustainable model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper performs a case study analysis of a deal (snowball swap) conducted by a state-owned transportation firm in Portugal. This deal lowered immediately the financing costs by 3 percentage points in the first 2 years and then it would cost an additive spread (snowball) if the Euribor interest rate crossed the barrier of 2% to 6%. The Euribor interest rate dropped to levels well below 2% and these contracts, which had a notional value of 80 million euros, had a cost of around 700 million euros. From the analysis of the contours of this business, it is possible to conclude that the corporate governance model of state-owned companies does not prevent situations of lack of independence of managers from the political power and this leads to a very short-term vision of these managers and creates adverse incentives for these managers. The paper concludes with a discussion of this case study implications for public policy on state-owned firms' governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the impact of stringent environmental regulation on the investment behavior of firms. Using panel data for Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2018, we take the implementation of the new environmental protection law (NEPL) in 2015 as a quasi-natural experiment and identify its impact on reducing overinvestment of high polluting firms. Further, for the potential mechanism, we find that the reduction in agency costs and the decrease in the financing caused by NEPL can help to alleviate overinvestment problems. Considering the heterogeneity of firms, NEPL has a greater effect on state-owned firms and large-scale firms, which have serious overinvestment problems. Our empirical evidence strongly supports that NEPL can realize a win-win situation for the environment and the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate governance theories suggest that concentrated ownership can be a mechanism for addressing the agency problem in a firm, and large shareholders matter for managerial decisions. Theoretically, the effect of large shareholders on innovation proxied by R&D is not determined yet, since their risk averseness and long-term time horizon affect R&D investment in opposite direction. It is quite unclear which effect is dominant. Thus, this issue should be explored by empirical evidence. The effect of ownership concentration on R&D investment is empirically examined by using firm-level panel data of Korea between 1980 and 2018. The empirical findings are: i) the effect of ownership on R&D is negative; ii) a bell-shaped relationship between ownership and R&D is observed; iii) the negative effect of ownership on R&D is found in old firms only; iv) the effect of ownership on R&D is positive for large firms and negative for small firms; and v) the effect of ownership on R&D is positive before the financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the key objectives of a pavement management system (PMS) is to find the optimal maintenance strategy, which minimises the sum of a road agency and user costs by maximising the net benefit to society. The PMS helps road agencies to better apply a selection of the right pavement treatments. The objective of the present paper is to show how the HDM-4 (Highway Development and Management 4) approach allows to develop a policy road leading to the optimal and robust selection of maintenance strategies under budgetary constraints, which minimises the sum of agency costs and road user costs in present value or maximises the net benefit to society over an analysis period. The findings could help road agencies to better apply the right pavement treatments. The present study is based on the exploitation of road network data, obtained from pavement structural condition survey and performed by the National Studies and Road Research Center. The study applies a long-term simulation (20 years) of maintenance budget needs under different budget scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a novel system reliability-based framework for multi-objective optimisation of preventive maintenance (PM) management of in-service asphalt pavement. To accurately predict the international roughness index (IRI) sequence of pavement sections, a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network that considers the spatiotemporal correlations between IRI sequences is trained with data retrieved from the long-term pavement performance (LTPP) program. Based on time-dependent limit-state functions (LSFs) incorporating the uncertainty associated with LSTM neural network prediction and the observational error involved in IRI measurement, Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) with importance sampling (IS) is adopted to calculate the reliability of pavement sections. Pavement sections located in New Mexico and Montana are selected as illustrative examples. Tri-objective optimisation processes are investigated by maximising user benefits (i.e. improved system reliability) and agency benefits (i.e. extended service life) while minimising the associated life-cycle cost (LCC) (i.e. user and agency costs) with multi-objective genetic algorithms (GAs). The obtained Pareto solution sets may assist decision-makers in the selection of well-balanced solutions to identify the optimal timing for applying PM treatments to in-service asphalt pavement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure delivery has rekindled the public versus private cost-of-capital debate. Early debate concluded that the social cost of public-sector capital is below that of private capital because risk can be spread across numerous taxpayers. Intervening research focused on the agency costs that arise due to increased separation between equity holders and managers and the various mechanisms to control those agency costs. We analyze differences in public versus private residual claims and their associated agency costs. We conclude that earlier discussions that omitted agency-cost analysis should be revisited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing bridge performance metrics are limited in their ability to objectively reflect the safety and serviceability of bridges and identify effective Maintenance, Repair and Replacement (MR&R) actions for a large number of bridges in the face of budget constraints. This study presents a comprehensive optimal budget allocation framework with an integer linear programing formulation for a portfolio of bridges based on element-level inspection data. Considering budget constraints, this method determines optimal MR&R actions at element-level such that agency and user costs of repair actions required to have bridges in their like-new state at the next budget allocation year are minimized. The framework incorporates structural safety risks via the probability that the designated structural functionality of a bridge is or deemed to be compromised. The approach is applied to 484 National Highway Systems bridges in district 3 of Ohio. Results indicate that the proposed method can identify work plans comprising the optimal set of MR&R actions that maximize the network-level performance of bridge portfolios, while satisfying budgetary constraints. It is observed that this method consistently assigns higher priority to work plans that reduce structural safety risks of bridges, and to bridges with high traffic demands and long detour lengths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Road agencies employ different criteria and methods to compare treatment alternatives and develop maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) programmes for their networks. The maximisation of benefits has been integrated in several leading pavement management systems and used for network-level programming since the 1980s. The approach defines benefit as the area between the performance curves with and without M&R actions based on an aggregated index, representing the overall pavement condition. Further simplifications like the screening of solutions using an efficiency frontier and the incremental benefit–cost technique have made it possible to apply the method with the available computing power at the time. Based on a case study of 1000 road sections, this paper analyses the effect of benefit maximisation on annual budget, network condition, treatment selection, trigger values and remaining life. M&R programmes minimising costs and maximising benefits are compared at the project and network level for various budget scenarios. The results show that the maximisation of benefits based on an aggregated condition index leads to substantially higher agency costs and favours the selection of expensive treatments with earlier timing, irrespective of actual failure causes. The conclusions of this work may be useful to road agencies in developing more efficient budget-allocation polices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Photovoltaic industry promotes the transformation of China's energy structure to green and low-carbon, which is of great significance to achieve the goal of "Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality." At present, the industry is mainly faced with problems such as the drastic reduction of government subsidies and the difficulty of financing. From the perspective of independent auditing, our paper takes 54 A-share listed photovoltaic companies in China from 2011 to 2020 as the research object to study the impact of audit quality on financing efficiency, and the role of agency costs in the relationship between audit quality and financing efficiency.The results show that audit quality is positively related to financing efficiency. For every 1% increase in audit quality, the financing efficiency will increase by 13%. In addition, agency cost plays an intermediary role between audit quality and financing efficiency. For every 1% increase in audit quality, agency cost can be reduced by 34% and financing efficiency can be increased by 25%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Road network requires timely maintenance to keep pavement surface in good condition for reduction of fuel consumption with the limited budget. This study focused on development of pavement preservation strategies in the road network considering multi-objective optimization of agency cost and environmental impact (in terms of CO2 emission). Field data from long-term pavment performance (LTPP) database were used to quantify the impact of pavement preservation treatments (crack seal, chip seal, and thin overlay) on the changes of surface roughness. The emission rate functions of vehicles with respect to speed and pavement surface condition were developed using Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) with the updated tire rolling resistance coefficients. The multi-objective optimization problem was solved using the Simulated Constraint Boundary Model (SCBM) method. The final solution was recommended based on the minimized distance from the utopia point to the Pareto front. The results show that the optimization solutions are affected by the available budget, existing pavement condition, truck traffic, and unacceptable level of pavement roughness. For multi-objective optimization of minimizing both agency cost and CO2 emission, the recommended preservation treatments among different segments is a combination of crack seal and thin overlay in most cases. These findings can be used by highway agencies to make road maintenance decisions considering the tradeoff between agency cost and environmental impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern enterprises often operate as interconnected groups of companies. This is facilitated by various cross-entity liability arrangements, which aim at risk mitigation and control, and may contribute to the reduced agency cost of debt. However, they pierce limited liability (cross-guarantees) or impose correlation between the fates of separate entities (intercompany cross-defaults and ipso facto clauses). They can promote group exposure and disincentivise debtors from taking early actions to avoid insolvency. This paper explores the tools that are embraced to address these problems to achieve group restructuring. They include restrictions of cross-entity ipso facto clauses and extension of enforcement stays to group entities. I examine the ex ante and ex post effects of group liability arrangements, make a comparative overview of national law responses and suggest recommendations to find a balanced approach to cross-entity liability arrangements, enhance the existing legal regimes and form the basis for future reforms of insolvency laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate factors have not become a typical metric to consider for pavement life cycle cost analysis (LCCA). Changes in climate may affect pavement rutting, roughness, and cracking and lead to consequent changes in maintenance decision-making and life cycle costs. This study develops a methodology to incorporate the effects of climate variability into flexible pavement LCCA and to derive the additional life cycle costs incurred due to changes in climate. Case studies were performed for three road sections in Virginia (US) to demonstrate the methodology, using approximate mean climate change trends predicted for the investigated regions. It is estimated that climate change will incur additional vehicle operating costs ranging between US$2.30 and $4.40 on average per vehicle/annum if roads are used under a 2050 high greenhouse gas emission scenario and without being maintained. Assuming responsive maintenance, the budget demand for maintenance will arrive much earlier in the pavements' life cycles (7–11 years earlier under the 2050 high-emission scenario). This is found to add up to 64% of agency costs (net present value) to repair each kilometre of the investigated roads in a 40-year design life. Agencies need to be aware of earlier or more frequent demands on their maintenance budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]