The purpose of this study was to examine how small-scale private forest owners make decisions regarding pre-commercial thinning. In 2015 it is ten years ago since the storm Gudrun hit the southern parts of Sweden and now large areas are in need of pre-commercial thinning. This study is built upon qualitative interviews with seven small-scale private forest owners with forest properties in the county Kronoberg. The respondents were chosen by the model SKOGSÄGARPROFILENTM (forest owner profile). The results of the interviews showed that five categories: ownership, the storm Gudrun´s impact, silviculture, forestry contacts and driving force was important. How will their purpose and aim affect the pre-commercial thinning? Personal interests, and expectations of the next generation to take over, are purposes this study has found. Furthermore, when pre-commercial thinning is not carried out or postponed, the silviculture has got lower priority, and other chores higher priority. Lack of knowledge might be one issue. If so, a contact with someone with this knowledge is important for starting up the pre-commercial thinning. Key words: Gudrun clearing, pre-commercial thinning, personal interest, net of contacts, private forest owners, change-of generation, “forest owner profile”.

Man's ability to change an agricultural landscape to suit his own needs is associated with the basic principles that govern all landscapes. This study incorporates several environmental and cultural variables to help explain the resultant woodlots patterns in rural Delaware County, Indiana. To a large degree, cultural variables are deemed most significant in describing the size and locations of agriculturally oriented woodlots in Delaware County.Agriculture in Delaware County ranks high in productivity when compared with the entire state. Most of the farming is now specialized, such as dairy farms and cash-grain farms, with small family farms decreasing in number. As a result, fields are being combined, enlarged, and intensified leaving woodlots in remote, distant locations. Agricultural land use, comprising about 85 percent of the total area in the county, is viewed as the primary culprit controlling the pattern of .woodlots existing today. This study attests to quantify the governing parameters of agriculturally oriented woodlots in order to describe their size and location in Delaware County, Indiana, in 1980.

ABSTRACT In this thesis, relationship between two most important transient stability indices, critical clearing time and generator rotor angle is examined for one machine-infinite bus system and then extended to the multimachine case and is observed to be linear. By using the linear relationship between critical clearing time and generator rotor angle and utilizing the daily load curve, a new preventive method is proposed. The aim of this method is to make all critical clearing times longer than the relay and circuit breaker combination operation time. In the proposed method, desired critical clearing times are obtained by using on line system data and daily load curves. Then desired values are adjusted by generators output rescheduling and terminals voltage control Visual computer language is used for graphical and numerical solutions. Comprehension of one machine infinite bus system and multimachine system transient stability become easier.

Habitat fragmentation involves the break-up of continuous native vegetation into remnant patches that are set in a matrix of altered habitat. The consequences of habitat fragmentation include the loss of original habitat which is followed by reductions in remnant size that increase edge effects and reduce habitat quality, and also increase the isolation of remnants from one another. Habitat fragmentation is an international environmental concern that also effects Australia. Over the last ten years Queensland has been responsible for some ninety percent of the clearing occurring in Australia, and as a result recorded some of the highest vegetation clearing rates in the world. / thesis (PhDEnvironmentalManagement)--University of South Australia, 2004.

Thesis (M. Env. St.)--University of Adelaide, Centre for Environmental Studies, 1983. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 154-160).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Waikato, 2004. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Feb. 7, 2006). Includes bibliographical references (p. [349]-374).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 149-159).

This thesis focuses on economic relations between the Third Reich and Yugoslavia before the German attack in April 1941. It questions the conventional wisdom, according to which economic relations served mainly as a tool of German foreign policy towards Yugoslavia. Instead, it aims to place mutual economic relations within both the broader context of the German economic and financial plans and policies in the 1930s, and within the already existing economic and trading ties between the two countries, as they had been developing since the 1920s. Before 1936, economic relations between Yugoslavia and Germany are observed from the context of the polycratic character of the Third Reich’s executive, which enabled various economic policies, pursued by different levels of authority such as the Foreign Ministry, Economic Ministry, Food and Agriculture Ministry, the Reichsbank, etc. to exist alongside each other. After 1936, Yugoslav-German economic relations increasingly functioned within the framework of the German Four-Year-Plan. Yugoslavia’s mineral riches were of importance for German rearmament and, particularly after the Anschluss and the creation of the Bohemian Protectorate, Yugoslavia found itself increasingly dependent on trade with Germany. At the same time, the German market and exports were necessary for the process of Yugoslavia’s industrialisation, which had gathered momentum since the mid-1930s. This was however in many aspects inconsistent with the German long-term imperialist ambitions in South-Eastern Europe. This dissertation concludes that German economic policy towards Yugoslavia failed. Also, that contrary to the traditional view in historiography and despite its economic dependency on Germany, Yugoslavia maintained its political agency. It was international political developments beyond Yugoslavia’s control which eventually decreased Belgrade’s political maneuverability and forced the government in Belgrade to become more receptive towards German demands, particularly after the fall of France in June 1940.

Reverse stress testing is a way of finding a combination of market risk factors, called a scenario, that leads to a specific loss for e.g. a portfolio. A market risk factor can for example be a stock return. In this project, we use reverse stress tests to find a scenario that would make a clearing house insolvent in case of a clearing house member default. When a member defaults, the clearing house must cover for the member's positions. If the clearing house's resource pool is not enough for this purpose, the clearing house defaults as well. To find out when this happens is of interest for regulatory purposes, as the default of a clearing house might lead to severe negative effects on the financial market. Cinnober's currently used method, SPS, uses a bisection-like iterative algorithm to find the scenario which makes the clearing house insolvent. The scenario found by SPS is restricted to be a multiple of a predefined scenario, which is clearly a limitation in the consideration of possible scenarios. To investigate the possibility of finding scenarios without this restriction, two other reverse stress tests were implemented and compared to SPS. The first test, PCA/G-S, assumes multivariate normal distribution of the profits and losses of the assets in the defaulting member's portfolio. PCA/G-S yields scenarios of asset profits and losses, for which the portfolio return is the specified loss - the clearing house resource pool. The second test, called RF, assumes multivariate normal distribution of the risk factors affecting the prices of the assets in the portfolio. RF outputs a scenario of market risk factors causing the portfolio loss to be the specified loss. The assets in the portfolio were restricted to stocks, European stock options and stock futures. PCA/G-S was shown to imply negative asset prices, as the assumption of multinormality does not consider that the loss can never be greater than the asset price itself. Negative prices appeared more frequently for options than for futures and stocks. Furthermore, the scenarios found by PCA/G-S were in terms of profits and losses, and were generally only convertible to risk factors if the portfolio only consisted of stocks. The advantage compared to SPS, however, was that PCA/G-S was numerically faster. As the results of the RF method are risk factor scenarios, no conversion problems appear. Moreover, it cannot yield negative asset prices, which is advantageous compared to PCA/G-S. However, the RF method was slower than SPS, and especially slow for options. All the multivariate normal distribution assumptions, for the profits and losses as well as the risk factors, were rejected by multinormality tests. Thus, the assumptions for PCA/G-S and RF were not consistent with reality. Nonetheless, the tests indeed provide scenarios where the resource pool is depleted.

Dans sa première partie, cette thèse étudie l’utilisation optimale des produits dérivés par les intermédiaires financiers dans leur gestion du risque, en prêtant spécifiquement attention au marché des dérivés de taux d’intérêt. En modélisant la structure de capital optimale d’une banque, le premier chapitre montre comment l’usage optimal des dérivés affecte certaines décisions souvent étudiées en finance d’entreprise : l’offre de crédit, la transformation de maturité, la politique de dividendes ou les probabilités de défaut. La seconde partie de la thèse étudie au contraire le marché des dérivés comme un système à part entière. Le second chapitre utilise une base de données nouvelle et unique d’expositions bilatérales sur des contrats CDS afin d’offrir une description détaillée de la structure du réseau des expositions. Le troisième chapitre a pour objet la régulation des marchés de produits dérivés. Il étudie la compensation centrale des produits dérivés standardisés, et la demande de collatéral induite par cette réforme à l’échelle mondiale, sous une variété d’hypothèses concernant la microstructure du marché. / In its first part, this thesis studies the optimal use of derivatives contracts for risk management by financial intermediaries, focusing especially on interest rate derivative contracts. It models the optimal capital structure policy of a bank and shows how the optimal use of derivatives affects a number of oft-studied decisions in corporate finance: bank lending, maturity mismatching, payout policy or default probabilities. The second part of the thesis, in contrast, studies derivatives market as a system on its own. The second chapter uses a new and unique dataset of bilateral exposures to CDS contracts in order to provide a detailed description of the network structure of exposures. The third chapter focuses on the regulation of derivatives markets. It studies central clearing of standardized derivatives contracts and the collateral demand induced by the reform at a global scale, under a variety of hypotheses regarding the market microstructure.