Yes / The key questions to be addressed in this study are: with the benefit of hindsight, what conflict prevention 'packages' could the international community have designed in order to minimise the probability of the conflicts that actually took place? How much would have been saved if these packages had been implemented, given reasonable estimates about their costs, compared with the actual cost of conflict and post-conflict intervention. The first section provides a background to the conflicts. This is followed by an assessment of the levels of resources that the international community has committed to the Western Balkans since 1991. The third part of the study provides two hypothetical scenarios for CP interventions that might have restrained conflict from breaking out. These CP packages are then costed and an assessment of their probability of success is made.

This dissertation describes two essays in empirical international trade, focusing on trade costs and the pattern of trade along the intensive and extensive margins. In the first essay, I study the barriers that impede international trade. In the second paper, I examine the growth of U.S. agricultural trade in detail describing how U.S. agriculture and food trade has expanded along the margins. The first chapter introduces a relatively straightforward, yet empirically powerful, manipulation of the gravity equation. The gravity model has been dubbed the work horse model of empirical trade, and thus is a suitable foundation from which to derive an indirect measure of largely unobservable 'iceberg' trade costs. In this paper, I solve a sector level version of the gravity equation and study the pattern of agricultural trade costs and factors that impede world agricultural trade growth over a long time series, 1986-2011. In addition, I estimate sector-specific elasticity of substitution which is a key parameter in the computation of trade cost. In the second essay, I examine the growth of world and U.S. agricultural exports along the intensive and extensive margins of international trade over the period 1986 to 2010. The purpose of this essay is to decompose the growth of world and U.S. agricultural trade using qualitative methods from the marketing literature (i.e., market expansion grids) but modified to fit bilateral trade relationships and a theoretical index to measure the margins of trade at a single point in time. In addition, we examine often overlooked channels by which U.S. agricultural exports have expanded using very detailed agricultural product lines. Using information related to the pattern of a trade rather than trade volume itself, I estimate how much starting a trade relationship with a new partner or in a new product variety matters to agricultural trade growth and then conclude with a set of stylized facts to inform current theory. / Ph. D.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education (SNAP-Ed) is an extension of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that aims to promote living healthier lifestyles for low-income participants of SNAP with limited resources. This thesis aims to investigate the effectiveness of Virginia's adult SNAP-Ed program through a cost-effective analysis (CEA) for fiscal year 2013 which requires the separation of the into the costs and the effects of the program. The costs for the program are categories as the labor, capital, material, and utility costs that are required to implement the adult SNAP-Ed program. The effects are measured as the number of participants who start, graduate, and improve from the start to the end of the program. The effects were measured on a retrospective self-assessment that measured both if a participant graduated and their magnitude of improvement. The analysis showed that as the state of Virginia the adult SNAP-Ed program incurred a cost of $2,488,170.07 with 6,759 participants starting the program and 3,704 of those that graduated in fiscal year 2013. Participants that improved on at least one of the questions by a score of one were 3,609 of the 3,704 that graduated. For the state of Virginia the cost effective ratio (CER) for starting a participant was $368 and CER of $672 for each graduated participant. An improvement on at least one question saw a CER value of $689. These findings show patterns that can be used for future policy implementation and the focus of the program. / Master of Science

This dissertation explores the role of science and technology in democracy and the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) through an illustrative case on a uranium mining controversy in the US state of Virginia. Arguably, traditional STS scholarship has primarily served what we might call an unmasking function by working to expose political, cultural, gender, corporate, and other factors that get masked by the cultural authority of scientific expertise. Following the lead of other STS scholars seeking to move beyond an unmasking-only mode of scholarship, this dissertation offers a novel take on the relationship between expertise and public controversy over technoscience by suggesting that cost-benefit analysis might serve a beneficial pro-democratic ritual role. To explore this question of the role played by expertise and what we might learn and recommend from approaching CBA as a democratic ritual, I consider the case of a uranium mining and milling controversy in Virginia. This controversy surfaced in two distinct historical moments and prominently featured technical studies utilizing expert predictive methods. I analyze these texts from the perspective of the sociopolitical ritual theory developed in the dissertation and then suggest a set of recommendations regarding how we might humanize and deploy CBA within the context of enhancing rituals that serve to maintain liberal democratic political imaginaries. / Ph. D.

The logging industry of the Amazon is a topic that has received little attention in the literature, beyond specific single firm case studies. This has not allowed estimation of cost and production functions that can be used to predict changes in the industry in response to external market factors or government policies. Cost functions and rents are very important to characterize the dynamics of industry behavior, as well as providing important information for future policies. This study relies on a survey of 527 firms to estimate harvest, transportation, and milling cost functions for the logging industry in the Brazilian Amazon, finding variables such as labor cost, distance from the forest to the sawmill, equipment and frontier type to significantly affect the total and marginal cost of each activity. Rents are also estimated for different sampled milling centers, and a cost minimizing mathematical programming model is presented that explains the advance of the logging frontier in Brazil. / Master of Science

This research presents a framework system dynamics (simulation) model that evaluates the effect of maintenance policies on system performance and life-cycle cost. The model highlights factors such as learning, aging and the technological upgrades that occur during the life-cycle of a system. The metrics used to measure the effectiveness of maintenance policies are the system life-cycle cost and cumulative breakdowns. In this research, a varying maintenance policy has been modeled using system dynamics methodology to determine the future performance of the system that is dependent upon its past performance when breakdowns occur randomly. The main objective of this modeling approach is to balance the cost of preventive maintenance actions with the opportunity losses due to system breakdowns. The approach used in this research primarily involves forecasting future breakdowns using an average of accumulated opportunity losses. This research effort was mainly aimed at developing a (framework) model to determine effective maintenance policy for a system and evaluating the effect on the life-cycle cost for various scenarios. This model could further form the basis of a decision support system for maintenance modeling. / Master of Science

The focus of this dissertation is on tax and agency costs rationales for the use of long term leases. While much attention has been given to the valuation effects of debt and equity financing, the literature is surprisingly scant on the valuation effects of lease financing. This research develops a model that demonstrates that lease contracts can create wealth in two ways: one, by partially alleviating the Myers' underinvestment problem created by the issuance of risky debt and the other, by effectively transferring tax shields from low income lessees to high income lessors. The implications of the model are formulated into testable hypotheses which are empirically tested in both financial leases and sale and leaseback transactions. Several new empirical findings are reported in the study. Evidence presented indicates that the market reacts favorably to lease announcements by lessees involved in either sale and leaseback transactions or financial leases. No general conclusions could be drawn for the valuation impact for lessors. In addition, the results suggest that tax motives are of primary importance in explaining the use of lease financing. However, the agency cost rationale is not confirmed by the data. / Ph. D.

Yes / Low cost carriers (budget airlines) have a significant share of the air travel market, but little research has been done to understand the distributional effect of their operation on key tourism indicators such as length of stay and expenditure. Using data on European visitors to the United Kingdom we demonstrate how counterfactual decompositions can inform us of the true impact of mode of travel. Passengers on low cost carriers tend to spend less, particularly at the upper end of the distribution. Budget airline users typically stay longer, though differences in characteristics of observed groups are important to this result. Counterfactual techniques provide additional valuable insights not obtained from conventional econometric models used in the literature. Illustrating an application of the methodology to policy we demonstrate that enabling respondents to extend their stay generates the greatest additional expenditure at the lower end of the distribution. We also show nationality is a significant characteristic, with important impacts across the expenditure distribution.

Yes / Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to help in providing a better understanding of the application of blockchain technology in the context of the banking and finance sectors. The aim is to outline blockchain’s benefits, opportunities, costs, risks as well as challenges of the technology in the context of banking and finance services Design/methodology/approach – Careful examination of the extant literature, including utilising relevant academic-based research databases has been carried out. It covered reviewing various research contributions published in peer-reviewed journals, academic reports, as well as technical reports to help in identifying related benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks. Findings – The findings reveal that there are limited contributions in utilising blockchain in the banking and finance sectors when compared with other sectors. As such, the study highlighted the relevant perspective of benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks within such sectors. Practical implications – This study helps in offering a focal point to banking and financial sector managers and decision-makers for realising the benefits of blockchain technology as well as developing strategies and programmes to overcome the identified challenges. Originality/value – This study highlights the need for a holistic understanding of the various aspects of cost, benefits, risk and opportunities to create blockchain applications that work for banking and finance sectors / NPRP grant # [11S-0117–180325] from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation).

No / The marginal cost approach for the analysis of repair/replacement models was introduced by Berg in 1980 and has since been applied to many maintenance policies of various complexity. All models hitherto analysed in the literature by the marginal cost approach have one single decision variable only, this being, typically, the age of the current item at the time of ordering or replacement. This paper is concerned with the extension of the marginal cost technique to maintenance policies with several decision variables. After addressing the general framework appropriate for the multi-parameter case, we exemplify the workings of the technique by analysing a two-variable maintenance model involving replacement and minimal repair. We demonstrate that the marginal cost approach is an attractive and intuitively appealing technique also for models with several decision variables. Just as in the single-parameter situation, the approach is amenable to economic interpretation, a welcome feature for users of maintenance models with a prime interest in its economic (rather than its mathematical) aspects. As an added bonus of the marginal cost approach, in our example, some otherwise necessary tools from the theory of stochastic processes are dispensable.