Lawrence Haar

University of Brighton · Brighton Business School

The purpose of the Bank for International Settlements regulatory agenda, as implemented by financial regulators globally, has been to make banks safer and reduce the likelihood of systemic events. Using an original model of bank profit maximisation under a regulatory constraint, we statistically examine how market risk exposure has interacted with...

Purpose International Accounting Standards Rule 37 (IAS 37) for Contingent Liabilities and Assets were designed to make analysis of exposures facing a corporate entity easier to understand, but the rules may be insufficiently prescriptive making provisions inadequate predictors of potential outlays. The purpose of this research is to redress this p...

We examine the liquidity impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic upon equity markets in the USA, UK, Brazil, China, Germany and Spain. We establish that the pandemic causes a short-term loss in liquidity, confirmed by the significant increases in bid-ask spreads. Further, analysing long-term financial stability using price impact ratios, shows that for Chi...

Using Commitments of Traders reports from commodity futures markets exchanges, hedging by commercial/merchants/producers' users are econometrically analysed to understand their relation to both commodity prices and commodity market volatility. Qualifying the body of literature which seeks to explain hedging activity as departures from Modigliani-Mi...

IS ENERGY SECURITY TOO IMPORTANT TO LEAVE TO MARKETS? Dr Lawrence Haar Involvement by government in the energy sector has historically been one of the most extensive and continuous areas of policy making. Security of supply alongside aspirations with regard to affordability and reliability figure strongly as explanations for government involvement...

From the outset of deregulation and privatisation of UK electricity markets, the desired extent of vertical inte�gration has been debated. Concerns over the dominance of the “Big Six” majors and whether consumers were receiving a fair deal, led the new Government of 2010 to promote the entry of new retail supply firms without generation assets. Inc...

From the outset of deregulation and privatisation of UK electricity markets, the desired extent of vertical integration has been debated. Concerns over the dominance of the “Big Six” majors and whether consumers were receiving a fair deal, led the new Government of 2010 to promote the entry of new retail supply firms without generation assets. Incr...

Soon after the UK’s Feed-in Tariff (FiT) Scheme providing incentive prices for renewable energy was introduced in 2010, adjustments and modifications were made to eligibility criteria and incentive prices. Prices paid for renewable energy (RE) under the scheme were cut, deployment caps were introduced, and preliminary accreditation and efficiency s...

Presentation entitled: "An Empirical Analysis of the Fiscal Incidence of Renewable Energy Support in the European Union"

In liberalised electricity markets, electricity from Renewable Energy (RE) using Solar PV and Wind Turbines requires financial support because the expected number of generation hours is not sufficient to induce private investment. Such support has a direct cost from the additional expenditure over what would have been incurred had fossil fuel gener...

Involvement by government in the energy sector has historically been extensive. Generally, however, regulation and direct ownership have involved secondary sectors such as electricity generation and transport on the grounds that these are natural monopolies exhibiting increasing returns to scale. With some exceptions, primary energy production has...

Discussions and historical debate upon the necessity of maintaining a strategic petroleum reserve as countries of the OECD maintain, have focused upon the exposure to potential loss, the scope for mitigation or loss absorption but not the probability of such events occurring. With the world's largest reserve the Strategic Petroleum Reserve coming t...

Keywords: Energy security Strategic inventories Financial options and risk neutral density functions A B S T R A C T On the whole, research into energy security falls into one of three perspectives: The political perspective, the engineering and geologic perspective, or the economic perspective emphasising market resilience. Common to these perspec...

Although OPEC has a made a long-standing commitment to market transparency, stability and security of supply, as a means of protecting revenue and ensuring market share, the strategy is counter-productive. By operating a buffer stock to stabilize oil markets, the organisation is in effect providing free risk management to the world's consumers and...

The article examines the use of discretionary production by key OPEC members to protect the long-term value of their reserves. Although interpretations vary on its behaviour and market power, the organisation sees its role as promoting the security of supply through stabilising markets while protecting market share and ensuring a fair return to cap...

ABSTRACT There are many approaches to measuring energy security: some researchers use geologic and technical factors while others focus upon supply and demand. Common to these approaches is the emphasis upon exposure to supply disruption but not to the probability of its occurrence. As petroleum markets have shown themselves resilient to secular ev...

We examine the economic efficiency of incentive mechanisms used to promote Renewable Energy (RE) across the European Union (EU) by looking at returns to investors along with any negative externalities or social costs. Using electricity price data from 2009 to 2013, we evaluate the RE support mechanisms adopted by some of the largest EU economies. W...

We examine the economic efficiency of incentive mechanisms used to promote renewable energy as a policy in the European Union (EU). We evaluate the financial performance of renewable investments and employ real option theory to model and analyze their impact in the EU's liberalized electricity markets. Our analysis covers key European countries and...

Best Paper Award. January, 2016. Built Environment Conference, the British University in Dubai.

EDF's long-awaited acquisition of the British Energy was completed, making way for the company to enter the nuclear energy market. EDF's cash offer of 774 pence for each British Energy share had been accepted by the BE Board. The transaction would result in increased output from BE's existing nuclear power stations, higher output resulting from pla...

those of previous generations because of the role to be played by the private sector capital. Historically, nuclear power plants were state-owned enterprises , but concern over public finances has led to a business model in which new power stations would be financed and built through private initiatives. Once viewed as a business in a twilight sect...

This paper reviews the logic underlying the fashionable stakeholding literature and finds it at variance with received economic theory. It concludes that many stakeholding views are flawed, particularly in regard to the rôle of profit which is seen as a constraint rather than an objective.

The authors undertake a critical assessment of the intellectual foundations supporting the new European Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS, or the Scheme), the cornerstone of polices designed to achieve the targets of the Kyoto Agreement of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). Despite its considerable scope, the authors found that of...

This short monograph written for the Institute of Chartered Accountants concerns mergers and acquisitions, management buy-outs and all phenomena related to how organisations are controlled. The work covers the financial theory framework, how and when value is created, required information, financing and impact upon corporate structure.

The authors examine the literature with respect to the pricing of initial public offerings and focus upon the relationship of pricing to the structure and conduct of the investment banking industry. Using a data base of all share offerings undertaken in the United States over a two and a half year period, the authors find that there is considerable...

This article presents a critique of the recent contribution to Energy Policy (November 2001) by Wiser, Fowlie and Holt, entitled, “Public goods and private interests: understanding non-residential demand for green power”. In their article, the aforementioned authors explore the proposition that business and other organisations adopt green power, an...

The impact of employee lay-offs on business performance is of great concern to human resource managers as well as to the wider community. In a recent article by De Meuse, Vanderheiden, and Bergmann, published data are analyzed to determine whether announced lay-offs lead to improved financial performance. Their results support the view that from th...

The last two decades have witnessed a sharp growth in the scope and size of financial derivative markets. To express a variety of complex views on underlying securities, including the management of exposures, many new derivative products have been introduced. The proliferation of such products begs the question of whether, at times, they may compet...

This paper aims to shed some light on the use of financial instruments for hedging purposes by reporting the results of a survey of fund managers to see how they regard risk management activity in public companies. The literature on risk management is reviewed to understand why from a theoretical perspective, its use is problematic.