I. Introduction

Most start-ups in the software space are, naturally, founded by folks whose area of expertise is technical and not financial; they are more likely to be comfortable writing or debugging computer code than to think about income statements or balance sheets. In the early stages of a start-up it is not uncommon to not have a single person on the team who can understand a full set of financial statements let alone create them.

It is, however, important that the start-up ventures undertake some level of financial analysis to determine the financial viability of the venture or determine the need for funding (when and how much). Also, the financial analysis exercise requires a systematic way of organizing one’s thinking about the costs incurred by the venture, the staffing levels, the products and revenues, etc., …

I. Introduction

This article provides an introduction to the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act of 1998 (TIFIA) Program. This program is an important source of credit assistance for transportation infrastructure projects in the US and it helps the projects achieve their funding requirements by offering terms that are often “more advantageous terms than in the financial market” [1].

The program is managed by the US Department of Transportation’s Build America Bureau [2] and the TIFIA website [3] provides background information on the program such as the goals and objectives, eligibility requirements, documentation requirements, program fees, etc.

We sought out to analyze the projects and the credit assistance offered by the TIFIA program. The projects are listed on the TIFIA website and for each project, there is a lot of valuable information available on the website. However, this information is not downloadable in a dataset making it difficult to do any kind of analysis. This leaves the analyst with a couple of options (apart from not doing the…

In this brief note, we discuss some of the issues that insurance firms will face in the coming years as more and more vehicles adopt driverless features. Such features are being deployed at an increasing rate in regular vehicles to assist drivers in situations like parallel parking, getting out of a tight parking spot, etc. and some of the higher-end vehicles have options to use “driverless’’ mode. As the features evolve and get more widely distributed, there will be increased usage and instances where an insurance claim is linked to such features. …

This article provides an introduction to the various public data sources that exist at the Federal, State, County and local levels that can help enhance the typical data analysis assignment.

I. Introduction

The various agencies of the US government at different levels (Federal, State, County, and local) collect vast quantities of data and make these data available to the public. The challenge is to merge the data together to generate meaningful information. In this brief note, we discuss how publicly available data can be used to enhance typical data analytics project.

For the analysis shown below, we use the R software platform though the analysis could be done via a number of software platforms and/or programming language options. We recognize that there are a number of commercial and open-source tools that are much more powerful for specific analyses (especially when it comes to processing, manipulating, analyzing and displaying geographical data) but for the purposes of this article, we will only use one software platform. …

Introduction

The pursuit of happiness has been a common goal of the human society over thousands of years. It is even enshrined in our Declaration of Independence — most Americans will recognize “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’’ as one of our core human rights.

Now, there are a few among us who are happy most of the time either by nature or they are satisfied with their lot in life or for some other reason. This article is not for you. You are already blessed! …

This note provides an overview of the concession process for infrastructure assets. The concession process is an integral part of the public procurement process for the Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects . The use of PPPs as a delivery mechanism for large infrastructure projects is an increasingly popular trend observed in several countries. While there is always the desire to have the procurement completed as quickly as possible, we believe that Governments should not rush to concession the project and instead the necessary time to develop the details of the project that help make the financial case to the investment community. …

I. Introduction

This article provides an overview of contingent liability in the context of Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects. PPPs are an increasingly popular method of developing infrastructure projects (highways, rail and transit systems, water treatment plants, ports, airports, electricity production and distribution, etc.) and it is important for policy makers, project developers and stakeholders to understand clearly what kind of exposure different parties have on the project.

Simply defined, a contingent liability is a potential liability that may occur, depending on the outcome of an uncertain future event. This liability can either be implicit or explicit.

• Implicit liabilities are political or moral obligations that arise from expectations that government would intervene in the event of a crisis or a disaster. Examples of such liabilities are: bailouts like the auto and financial industry bailouts after the 2008 financial crises, natural disaster relief such as provided by FEMA after major hurricanes, environmental cleanup, assumption of debt, to outright nationalization of certain industries in times of crises. …

The regulatory regimes that govern the permitting and authorization processes that are required prior to initiation of major infrastructure projects in the United States are quite complex. It can take significant time and effort to obtain the necessary permits and authorizations. In this article, we look at time to complete some of the most common permitting actions for major projects using data available from the Federal Infrastructure Permitting Dashboard.

I. Introduction

Every major infrastructure project in the United States is subject to a complex set of environmental rules and regulations at the Federal, State and/or local level. These rules and regulations require the project developers to obtain necessary permits prior to initiation of project construction or operational activities. The time required to obtain the permits vary substantially depending on the project’s sector, scope, size, location and other factors. …