Agency And Transaction Costs In Infrastructure Projects

Assessment Brief

This term paper is conceived to facilitate your preparation for selecting a dissertation topic by giving you experience with selecting and writing a case study. The difference is that this assignment should be done without primary research, using secondary material (including research articles written by others) or material in the public domain such as reports by the National Audit Office. Your assignment is to select a case study (i.e., an infrastructure project) that can be used to illustrate the material learned in this module, especially:

1. Agency Theory, including but not limited to principal-agent problems
2. Transaction Cost Economics, including both internal and external transaction costs
3. Contract Theory, including but not limited to hold-up problems associated with incomplete contracts and misalignment of incentives
4. Disaster footprint analysis, including but not limited to clear costs of project failures
5. Environmental and Climate Change economics, including but not limited to ways of adapting to and mitigate climate risk
6. Islamic Finance, including but not limited to Sharia-compliant investment management

You are not constrained to the United Kingdom for examples and are welcome to choose from any country and/or legal regime as these issues invariably arise in all contexts.

Expectations:

• Nice Story, high quality academic paper with analysis backed up by literature.
• Case study is not a compulsory, but can be used.
• Minimum number of references 20.
• Methodology Recommendations with Solutions
• Identify problem and explain the way forward and/or solution
• Analysis conclusion

Link to module learning outcomes

The term paper is used to assess students’ understanding of input-output tables. Students need to be able to apply knowledge learnt in this module to analyse real world examples.

Format structure

The assessment is a 3000-word limit paper, which needs to include the following parts.

1. Introduction explaining the problem.
2. Description of the case you choose.
3. Identify the issue occurred in the case.
4. Extended discussion.
5. Conclusions.
6. References.