Finite Lives Research Articles

Tax Shields, the Weighted Average Cost of Capital, and the Appropriate Discount Rate for a Project with a Finite Useful Life

The standard formulas for calculating the value of a firm’s tax shield and its weighted average cost of capital (WACC) use the assumption that the underlying cash flows are perpetuities. Yet, most projects will have a finite useful life. Because the perpetuity approach will overstate the value of a finite-life project’s tax shield, this factor will pressure the perpetuity-formula WACC to be less than the finite-life WACC. However, a large portion of the value of a perpetual tax shield can be attributed to interest payments during the next 5, 10, or 25 years, making it possible for the perpetuity-formula WACC to be greater than the finite-life WACC. Using a series of numerical examples, this paper shows that the finite-life WACC can be either higher or lower than the perpetuity-formula WACC depending on the project’s useful life, the required return on the unlevered project, the firm’s capital structure, the cost of debt, the marginal tax rate, and the debt repayment pattern (e.g., coupon bonds or amortizing loans). The analysis in this article helps managers better understand the potential biases introduced into the capital budgeting process when using the perpetuity-formula WACC to evaluate projects with finite useful lives.

Death Cafes: An Exploration of the Setting, the Players, and the Conversation.

The overarching mission of Death Cafes is to raise people's consciousness about life's temporality so that they make the most of their finite lives. Death Cafés create a space for people to gather and have an open dialogue about death and dying. The current qualitative research study explores the experience of nine participants who engage in Death Cafes as facilitators or attendees. Findings including themes of "The Setting", "The Players", and "The Conversation" explore the experiences of Death Cafe participation. Discussion of findings and implications include death rituals, commercialization of death experiences, and the supportive community of the Death Cafe.

A World with Many Ends: Eschatology and Perspectivism

In this article, the relation between crisis, dying, and apocalypse is examined from the vantage point of Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophy of revelation. Following Rosenzweig’s suggestion that truth—for finite and temporal beings like us—can only be found in time, the article suggests that there exists an intrinsic relation between truth and death. Truth is not only or even primarily logical or mathematical truth according to Rosenzweig. Truth is the reality of our finite lives and implies an eschatological understanding of death as that which gives life unity by eternalising it as that which it forever was in the past. Life, Rosenzweig argues, is polytheistic by entailing manifold perspectives and possibilities, while death is monotheistic by endowing living beings with the unity and completion they lack in life. All death, even the most horrid death, is, if not a completion, at least an end, which gives the living the possibility to judge and verify the meaning of the past once and for all. Yet, if we believe Rosenzweig, the dead are not gone in the past but rather the eternal ground that makes present and future time possible. The dead, by literally being the past, reveal that all time exists after itself, as something that already was, and that the world is nothing but a world with many ends by dying away into the “life outside life” that Rosenzweig called God.

William James, Radical Empiricism, and the Affective Ground of Religious Life

William James, Radical Empiricism, and the Affective Ground of Religious Life

Finite freedom: Hegel on the existential function of the state

AbstractThe article argues that Hegel's glorification of self‐sacrifice in war is grounded in a commitment to individual freedom. Anticipating the existentialists, Hegel believes that being a human individual—a subject who strives to self‐determination and “infinite uniqueness”—involves a contradiction with one's externally determined finitude, which evokes shame and fear of death. In modern civil society, many individuals experience their finite lives as secure and adequately expressive of their self‐determined uniqueness and are thereby relatively shielded from fear of death. For Hegel, I argue, this experience loses touch with a basic existential condition and coincides with a rigid and “spiritually dead” mindset he calls “self‐will.” Patriotism—including the willingness to self‐sacrifice—constitutes Hegel's remedy to this problematic. The state summons its citizens to face their finitude and thereby injects their lives with renewed vitality and sensitivity.

Comparing the Meaningfulness of Finite and Infinite Lives: Can We Reap What We Sow if We Are Immortal?

AbstractOn the rise over the past 20 years has been ‘moderate supernaturalism’, the view that while a meaningful life is possible in a world without God or a soul, a much greater meaning would be possible only in a world with them. William Lane Craig can be read as providing an important argument for a version of this view, according to which only with God and a soul could our lives have an eternal, as opposed to temporally limited, significance since we would then be held accountable for our decisions affecting others’ lives. I present two major objections to this position. On the one hand, I contend that if God existed and we had souls that lived forever, then, in fact, all our lives would turn out the same. On the other hand, I maintain that, if this objection is wrong, so that our moral choices would indeed make an ultimate difference and thereby confer an eternal significance on our lives (only) in a supernatural realm, then Craig could not capture the view, aptly held by moderate supernaturalists, that a meaningful life is possible in a purely natural world.

Death cafe in the Welsh valleys-an appraisal.

A death cafe is an event where people drink, eat and discuss death. Death cafes do not follow a set structure and the events are held for free. The mission of death cafes is 'to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives'. Death cafes have a proven track record in providing a safe place for people to have conversations about dying, death and grief. This study aims to contribute to the literature by providing a simple synthesis of comments made on the day of a death cafe in Wales by the attendees, and to allow the identification of further research questions. A death cafe event was organised in the South Wales valleys, to encourage discussions about death during Dying Matters Awareness week in the UK, 10 May to 16 May 2019. The event was well attended, and attendees recorded their thoughts about the event. Emerging themes were categorised into the following themes: communication, digital legacy, stigma, humour and a request for future events. Feedback showed that the death cafe had encouraged a greater dialogue about death and dying and facilitated conversations.

Berlin’s Zvizdal (Chernobyl—So far So Close) by Berlin, Cathy Blisson

Reviewed by: Berlin’s Zvizdal (Chernobyl—So far So Close) by Berlin, Cathy Blisson Inga Meier BERLIN’S ZVIZDAL (CHERNOBYL—SO FAR SO CLOSE). By BERLIN and Cathy Blisson. DiverseWorks at MATCH, Matchbox 2, Wortham Foundation Theatre, Houston, Texas. February 15–16, 2019. First opened in 2015, the Midtown Arts and Theatre Center Houston (MATCH) was conceived as an alternative to the city’s largest and most well-funded arts organizations. With venues for dance, theatre, film, visual art, music, or any multidisciplinary combination thereof, MATCH is a performative multiplex. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that such a space elected to produce Zvizdal (Chernobyl—So Far So Close), the second-to-last show in BERLIN’s Holocene (the geographical era) Cycle. Billed as an “immersive hybrid of documentary film and theatrical installation,” Zvizdal stakes out a position somewhere between the two forms. That position is more cinematic than theatrical to be sure, but it also one that offers a fresh vantage point from which to approach the relationships between film and theatre, and between liveness and the mediated image. From that perspective, Zvizdal reveals that the membrane separating these modalities is far more permeable than it often appears from either side of the disciplinary divide, suggesting that an analogous hybridity may be formulated when theatre serves as the point of access. Click for larger view View full resolution BERLIN’s Zvizdal (Chernobyl—So Far So Close), 2016. (Photo: Frederik Buyckx, courtesy of the artists and DiverseWorks.) Like the other parts of the Holocene Cycle, Zvizdal maps out its geography through personal narrative. In this instance, the story is that of Pétro and Nadia, an elderly couple residing in Zvizdal, one of roughly ninety towns and villages evacuated in the aftermath of the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl. In their sixties at the time of the disaster, the couple refused to evacuate and were still living in their home between 2006 and 2011, the period documented in Zvizdal. When my fellow audience members and I were collectively ushered into the Wortham Foundation Theatre (Matchbox 2), we were instructed not to sit in the space’s regular proscenium seating. Instead, we were guided to the area that would, under different circumstances, have been the stage. Within this new configuration, there was an enormous screen running along the middle (from upstage to downstage), with tiered seating facing both sides of the screen. In this regard, the screen served as a focal point for both sides of the audience, who each saw the film projected on their respective side. This configuration provided a reasonable approximation of the intimacy of a shared theatrical experience, but because the screen itself constituted (or was staged as?) a physical barrier between one side of the audience and the other (albeit one that was raised a few feet off the ground—just enough to see the audience’s legs on the other side), that intimacy was never fully achieved. Whether I position that lack of connection as intentional or as a failure however, is less important than the effect of being “so far so close” (as suggested by the title) that that lack of connection evoked. In fact, “so far so close” not only fittingly describes the distance between one side of the audience and the other, but also between Pétro [End Page 88] and Nadia (equal parts Grey Gardens and Waiting for Godot, often talking at, but not to, each other), between the couple and the world, and between their finite lives and their mediated representation. Click for larger view View full resolution BERLIN’s Zvizdal (Chernobyl—So Far So Close), 2016. (Photo: Frederik Buyckx, courtesy of the artists and DiverseWorks.) Directly underneath the screen but raised above the ground were three models of Pétro and Nadia’s farm, each situated within transparent, oversized petri dishes. Because BERLIN’s and dramaturg Cathy Billson’s visits to the couple often occurred months apart, each petri dish marked a time of year: spring/summer, winter, and fall. Running above the models but below the screen was a camera gliding between them, at times transmitting and superimposing images of the models onto the documentary footage being projected...

Private Equity Net Asset Values and Future Cash Flows

ABSTRACTThis study analyzes whether fair value estimates of fund net asset values (NAVs) produced by private equity managers are accurate and unbiased predictors of future discounted cash flows (DCFs). We exploit the fact that private equity funds have finite lives to compare reported NAVs to DCFs based on realized cash flows for 384 Venture Capital (VC) funds and 195 Buyout funds spanning 1988–2016. Findings reveal that Buyout funds' NAVs display little systematic bias, but VC funds' NAVs are relatively aggressively biased compared to Buyout funds, especially since 2000. Accuracy is worse in the first half of the sample period even though NAV estimates generally are more conservative. Overall, the results reveal significant differences in the association between NAVs and DCFs for Buyout versus VC funds, which is particularly important for private equity fund investors in their consideration of the relevance and reliability of NAV estimates provided by fund managers.

Prediction of contaminant transport in fractured carbonate aquifer types: a case study of the Permian Magnesian Limestone Group (NE England, UK)

Viruses and bacteria which are characterized by finite lives in the subsurface are rapidly transported via fractures and cavities in fractured and karst aquifers. Here, we demonstrate how the coupling of a robust outcrop characterization and hydrogeophysical borehole testing is essential for prediction of contaminant velocities and hence wellhead protection areas. To show this, we use the dolostones of the Permian Magnesian Limestone aquifer in NE England, where we incorporated such information in a groundwater flow and particle tracking model. Within this aquifer, flow in relatively narrow (mechanical aperture of ~ 10−1–1 mm) fractures is coupled with that in pipe cavities (~ 0.20-m diameter) following normal faults. Karstic cavities and narrow fractures are hydraulically very different. Thus, the solutional features are represented within the model by a pipe network (which accounts for turbulence) embedded within an equivalent porous medium representing Darcian flowing fractures. Incorporation of fault conduits in a groundwater model shows that they strongly influence particle tracking results. Despite this, away from faulted areas, the effective flow porosity of the equivalent porous medium remains a crucial parameter. Here, we recommend as most appropriate a relatively low value of effective porosity (of 2.8 × 10−4) based on borehole hydrogeophysical testing. This contrasts with earlier studies using particle tracking analyses on analogous carbonate aquifers, which used much higher values of effective porosity, typically ~ 102 times higher than our value, resulting in highly non-conservative estimates of aquifer vulnerability. Low values of effective flow porosities yield modelled flow velocities ranging from ~ 100 up to ~ 500 m/day in un-faulted areas. However, the high fracturing density and presence of karstic cavities yield modelled flow velocities up to ~ 9000 m/day in fault zones. The combination of such flow velocities along particle traces results in 400-day particle traces up to 8-km length, implying the need for large well protection areas and high aquifer vulnerability to slowly degrading contaminants.

Knausgaard’s Secular Confession

This article presents a reading of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle as a whole, pursuing the existential stakes, philosophical implications, and transformative quality of the six-volume novel. My Struggle is read as a “secular confession,” which can be seen as a contemporary response to Augustine. Like Augustine, Knausgaard explores the care that binds us to others and how the experience of time cuts through every moment. But while Augustine seeks to turn us toward eternity, Knausgaard turns us back toward our finite lives as the heart of everything that matters. The animating principle of his writing is one of attachment to finite life, which is all the more profound because it remains faithful to the ambivalence of any attachment. The task is to “own” that this is the only life we have—for better and for worse—rather than seeking to leave this life behind.

Macro policy responses to natural resource windfalls and the crash in commodity prices

Policy prescriptions for managing natural resource windfalls are based on the permanent income hypothesis: none of the windfall is invested at home and saving in an intergenerational SWF is dictated by smoothing consumption across different generations. Furthermore, with Dutch disease effects the optimal response is to intertemporally smooth the real exchange rate, smooth public and private consumption, and limit sharp fluctuations in the intersectoral allocation of production factors. We show that these prescriptions need to be modified for the following reasons. First, to cope with volatile commodity prices precautionary buffers should be put in a stabilisation fund. Second, with imperfect access to capital markets the windfall must be used to curb capital scarcity, invest domestically and bring consumption forward. Third, with real wage rigidity consumption must also be brought forward to mitigate transient unemployment. Fourth, the real exchange rate has to temporarily appreciate to signal the need to invest in the domestic economy to gradually improve the ability to absorb the extra spending from the windfall. Fifth, with finite lives the timing of handing back the windfall to the private sector matters and consumption and the real exchange rate will be volatile. Finally, with nominal wage rigidity we show that a Taylor rule is a better short-run response to a crash in commodity prices than a nominal exchange rate peg.

Human aging, finite lives and the idealization of clocks.

Aging and time are interconnected because aging is basically living seen in a temporal perspective. This makes 'time' an important concept in trying to explain aging. However, throughout modernity time has increasingly been identified as clock time: perfectly fit to measure 'age' as time since birth but failing to explain 'age' as an indicator of aging processes and even less adequate to grasp the lived time of human beings. Moreover, the clock as a cultural idol of instrumentalist perfection has led to approaching human aging in terms of maintenance and repair, inspiring a neglect and depreciation of human vulnerability. The instrumentalist culture of late modern society, including its health cure system, has difficulties to relate to the elusive but inevitable limitations of finite life. This tendency is supported by outspoken approaches in biogerontology indulging in perspectives of infinite human lives; a message that is eagerly consumed by the mass media. Moreover, as most people can be expected to survive into old age, thinking about finitude is easily postponed and reserved for those who are 'really old'. Instead of reducing aging to the opposite or mere continuation of vital adulthood, it should be seen as something with a potentially broad and deep significance: a process of learning to live a finite life.

Fatigue methodology for life predictions for the wheel-rail contact area in large offshore turret bearings

The present report presents a fatigue life prediction method for large roller bearings applied in the turret turn table for large loading buoy units. The contact points between wheel and rail in these bearings are subjected to a multi-axial fluctuating stress situation and both surface wear and fatigue cracking may occur. A methodology based on the Dang Van fatigue criterion is adopted. The criterion is based on an equivalent stress defined as a combination of the fluctuation of the shear stress from its mean value at a critical plane and the associated hydrostatic stress at the given time. The present work is supporting the theoretical model by extensive laboratory testing. Both full scale testing of wheel on rail and small scale testing for characterizing the steel material are carried out. An experimental program was carried out with the high strength stainless steel S165M. The Dang Van stress concept is applied in combination with the Random Fatigue Limit Method (RFLM) for life data analyses. This approach gives the opportunity to include both finite lives and the run-outs in a rational manner without any presumption of the existence of a fatigue limit in advance of the data. This gives a non-linear S-N curve for a log-log scale in the very high cycle regime close to the fatigue limit. It is demonstrated how the scatter in fatigue limit decreases when the Dang Van stress concept is applied and that the fatigue limit is occurring beyond 107 cycles. KEYWORDS. Dang Van criterion; Random Fatigue Limit Method; Rolling Contact Fatigue.

Aging: Learning to Live a Finite Life.

Although biodemographic research informs us that life expectancies have risen impressively during the last century, this has not led to much interest in these new horizons of aging. The instrumentalist culture of late modern societies, including its health cure system, has clearly difficulties to relate to the elusive but inevitable limitations of finite life. Moreover, as most people can be expected to survive into old age, thinking about finitude is easily postponed and reserved for those who are "really old." Indeed, a meaningful and realistic understanding of aging needs to include a confrontation with the finitude of life. Instead of reducing aging to the opposite or continuation of vital adulthood, it should be seen as something with a potentially broad and deep significance: a process of learning to live a finite life. As a contribution to this cultural repositioning of aging, the article presents a philosophical exploration of finitude and finite life. Among the discussed topics are the Stoic and Epicurean ways of living with death but also the necessity to expand the meaning of "finitude" beyond mortality. Aging is foremost a process of living through changes that are largely beyond our control although they require active responding. Next, individualistic or existentialist interpretations are criticized because finite lives presuppose a social world in which they emerge and on which they depend. Unfortunately, aging, the most important experiential source of knowledge about what it is to live a finite life, is neglected by the same culture that needs its wisdom.

Influence of Dynamic Strain Aging on High Cycle Fatigue Behavior of Alloy 617M

Effect of dynamic strain aging (DSA) on the high cycle fatigue (HCF) behavior of alloy 617M was evaluated at ambient temperature and 923 K. The material showed finite cyclic lives at stresses below the yield stress (YS) at ambient temperature. However, tests conducted at 923 K which distinctly falls under the DSA regime, led to run-out (107 cycles) at stresses below and at YS. Experimental results also indicated that fatigue limit (based on run-out at 107 cycles) exceeded the YS at 923 K. This indicates that under HCF loading, fatigue failure is suppressed under the influence of DSA which in turn shifts the window of finite lives to higher stresses even above YS.

Young, Old, Conservative, and Bold: The Implications of Heterogeneity and Finite Lives for Asset Pricing

We study the implications of preference heterogeneity for asset pricing. We use recursive preferences in order to separate heterogeneity in risk aversion from heterogeneity in the intertemporal elasticity of substitution, and an overlapping-generations framework to obtain a non-degenerate stationary equilibrium. We solve the model explicitly up to the solutions of ordinary differential equations, and highlight the effects of overlapping generations and each dimension of preference heterogeneity on the market price of risk, interest rates, and the volatility of stock returns. We find that separating IES and risk aversion heterogeneity can have a substantive impact on the model's (qualitative and quantitative) ability to address some key asset pricing issues.

Young, Old, Conservative, and Bold: The Implications of Heterogeneity and Finite Lives for Asset Pricing

We study the implications of preference heterogeneity for asset pricing. We use recursive preferences in order to separate heterogeneity in risk aversion from heterogeneity in the intertemporal elasticity of substitution and an overlapping-generations framework to obtain a nondegenerate stationary equilibrium. We solve the model explicitly up to the solutions of ordinary differential equations and highlight the effects of overlapping generations and each dimension of preference heterogeneity on the market price of risk, interest rates, and the volatility of stock returns. We find that separating intertemporal elasticity of substitution and risk aversion heterogeneity can have a substantive impact on the model’s (qualitative and quantitative) ability to address some key asset-pricing issues.

Optimal consumption under uncertainty, liquidity constraints, and bounded rationality

I study how boundedly rational agents can learn a “good” solution to an infinite horizon optimal consumption problem under uncertainty and liquidity constraints. Using an empirically plausible theory of learning I propose a class of adaptive learning algorithms that agents might use to choose a consumption rule. I show that the algorithm always has a globally asymptotically stable consumption rule, which is optimal. Additionally, I present extensions of the model to finite horizon settings, where agents have finite lives and life-cycle income patterns. This provides a simple and parsimonious model of consumption for large agent based models.

Optimal Consumption Under Uncertainty, Liquidity Constraints, and Bounded Rationality

I study how boundedly rational agents can learn a good solution to an infinite horizon optimal consumption problem under uncertainty and liquidity constraints. Using an empirically plausible theory of learning I propose a class of adaptive learning algorithms that agents might use to choose a consumption rule. I show that the algorithm always has a globally asymptotically stable consumption rule, which is optimal. Additionally, I present extensions of the model to finite horizon settings, where agents have finite lives and life-cycle income patterns. This provides a simple and parsimonious model of consumption for large agent based models.