The frequency with which acquisitions occur in the South African business environment served as motivation to evaluate the effect of acquisition announcements on the share performance of JSE listed shares. The basis of the study was to use event study methodology to evaluate short term effects as well as to investigate size effects in acquisition announcements. Companies were grouped into small and large companies using market capitalisation as segmentation criteria. To evaluate effects on the share price and volume traded, the market demand curve for traded securities was used. It proved to be a useful tool specifically in the evaluation of smaller companies, where information asymmetry was prevalent. The shift in the demand curve was evaluated by constructing a Demand Curve Variable, which showed the direction (if any) of the change in the demand curve. Acquisition announcements by JSE listed companies over the last seven years were evaluated and confounding events were controlled for. The findings supported the fact that there exist differences in the results of the small and large company samples when making acquisition announcements, and that small companies have more pronounced negative effects subsequent to the announcement of an acquisition. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Geothermal energy is an important source of clean and renewable energy. This project deals with the study of deep geothermal power plants for the generation of electricity. The design involves the extraction of heat from the Earth and its conversion into electricity. This is performed by allowing fluid deep into the Earth where it gets heated due to the surrounding rock. The fluid gets vaporized and returns to the surface in a heat pipe. Finally, the energy of the fluid is converted into electricity using turbine or organic rankine cycle (ORC). The main feature of the system is the employment of side channels to increase the amount of thermal energy extracted. A finite difference computer model is developed to solve the heat transport equation. The numerical model was employed to evaluate the performance of the design. The major goal was to optimize the output power as a function of parameters such as thermal diffusivity of the rock, depth of the main well, number and length of lateral channels. The sustainable lifetime of the system for a target output power of 2 MW has been calculated for deep geothermal systems with drilling depths of 8000 and 10000 meters, and a financial analysis has been performed to evaluate the economic feasibility of the system for a practical range of geothermal parameters. Results show promising an outlook for deep geothermal systems for practical applications.

Geothermal energy is an important source of clean and renewable energy. This project deals with the study of deep geothermal power plants for the generation of electricity. The design involves the extraction of heat from the Earth and its conversion into electricity. This is performed by allowing fluid deep into the Earth where it gets heated due to the surrounding rock. The fluid gets vaporized and returns to the surface in a heat pipe. Finally, the energy of the fluid is converted into electricity using turbine or organic rankine cycle (ORC). The main feature of the system is the employment of side channels to increase the amount of thermal energy extracted. A finite difference computer model is developed to solve the heat transport equation. The numerical model was employed to evaluate the performance of the design. The major goal was to optimize the output power as a function of parameters such as thermal diffusivity of the rock, depth of the main well, number and length of lateral channels. The sustainable lifetime of the system for a target output power of 2 MW has been calculated for deep geothermal systems with drilling depths of 8000 and 10000 meters, and a financial analysis has been performed to evaluate the economic feasibility of the system for a practical range of geothermal parameters. Results show promising an outlook for deep geothermal systems for practical applications.

Geothermal energy is an important source of clean and renewable energy. This project deals with the study of deep geothermal power plants for the generation of electricity. The design involves the extraction of heat from the Earth and its conversion into electricity. This is performed by allowing fluid deep into the Earth where it gets heated due to the surrounding rock. The fluid gets vaporized and returns to the surface in a heat pipe. Finally, the energy of the fluid is converted into electricity using turbine or organic rankine cycle (ORC). The main feature of the system is the employment of side channels to increase the amount of thermal energy extracted. A finite difference computer model is developed to solve the heat transport equation. The numerical model was employed to evaluate the performance of the design. The major goal was to optimize the output power as a function of parameters such as thermal diffusivity of the rock, depth of the main well, number and length of lateral channels. The sustainable lifetime of the system for a target output power of 2 MW has been calculated for deep geothermal systems with drilling depths of 8000 and 10000 meters, and a financial analysis has been performed to evaluate the economic feasibility of the system for a practical range of geothermal parameters. Results show promising an outlook for deep geothermal systems for practical applications.

[pt] A IS intertemporal, que representa a dinâmica da Demanda Agregada em modelos estruturais que visem avaliar a política monetária, pode ter diferentes formatos dependendo das hipóteses que são feitas a respeito da estrutura da economia. Neste trabalho buscou-se modelar as diferentes hipóteses, tais como formação de hábito de um e dois períodos, de maneira independente da política monetária e testar seu ajuste aos dados. Os resultados indicam que não só é importante introduzir defasagens do hiato do produto na regressão (tanto para aumentar seu poder de explicação quanto para retirar a autocorrelação dos resíduos), como que a taxa de juros só consegue ter coeficiente significantemente diferente de zero se for incluída na regressão a curva de juros nominais futuros. Entretanto, tais resultados são viesados pela amostra escolhida, um período que apresentou uma série de taxa de juros com indícios de não-estacionariedade. / [en] The intertemporal IS equation, which replicate de dynamics of Agregate Demand in structural models that aim to evaluate monetary policy, might take different shapes depending on the assumptions made on the structure of the economy underlying it. In the present work were modeled different hypothesis about the economy, such as habit formation of one and two periods, independent of monetary policy and tested the fit of such equations to the observed data. The results indicate that not only it is important to introduce lags of the output gap in the regression (in order to both elevate its explaining power and to retrieve any autocorrelation of the residuals), and that interest rates can only have a coefficient significantly different from zero if an nominal yield curve is also included. But these results are biased by the time sample used, in which the interest rate were repeatedly raised, and therefore the series suggest some signs of non-stationarity, which may have had some effect in the results.

This thesis presents a multi-stage linear stochastic mixed integer programming (SMIP) model for planning power generation in a pool-type day-ahead electricity market. The model integrates a reserve demand curve and shares most of the features of a stochastic unit commitment (UC) problem, which is known to be NP-hard. We capture the stochastic nature of the problem through scenarios, resulting in a large-scale mixed integer programming (MIP) problem that is computationally challenging to solve. Given that an independent system operator (ISO) has to solve such a problem within a time requirement of an hour or so, in order to release operating schedules for the next day real-time market, the problem has to be solved efficiently. For that purpose, we use some approximations to maintain the linearity of the model, parsimoniously select a subset of scenarios, and invoke realistic assumptions to keep the size of the problem reasonable. Even with these measures, realistic-size SMIP models with binary variables in each stage are still hard to solve with exact methods. We, therefore, propose a scenario-rolling heuristic to solve the SMIP problem. In each iteration, the heuristic solves a subset of the scenarios, and uses part of the obtained solution to solve another group in the subsequent iterations until all scenarios are solved. Two numerical examples are provided to test the performance of the scenario-rolling heuristic, and to highlight the difference between the operative schedules of a deterministic model and the SMIP model. Motivated by previous studies on pricing MIP problems and their applications to pricing electric power, we investigate pricing issues and compensation schemes using MIP formulations in the second part of the thesis. We show that some ideas from the literature can be applied to pricing energy/reserves for a relatively realistic model with binary variables, but some are found to be impractical in the real world. We propose two compensation schemes based on the SMIP that can be easily implemented in practice. We show that the compensation schemes with make-whole payments ensure that generators can have non-negative profits. We also prove that under some assumptions, one of the compensation schemes has the interesting theoretical property of minimizing the variance of the profit of generators to zero. Theoretical and numerical results of these compensation schemes are presented and discussed.

This thesis presents a multi-stage linear stochastic mixed integer programming (SMIP) model for planning power generation in a pool-type day-ahead electricity market. The model integrates a reserve demand curve and shares most of the features of a stochastic unit commitment (UC) problem, which is known to be NP-hard. We capture the stochastic nature of the problem through scenarios, resulting in a large-scale mixed integer programming (MIP) problem that is computationally challenging to solve. Given that an independent system operator (ISO) has to solve such a problem within a time requirement of an hour or so, in order to release operating schedules for the next day real-time market, the problem has to be solved efficiently. For that purpose, we use some approximations to maintain the linearity of the model, parsimoniously select a subset of scenarios, and invoke realistic assumptions to keep the size of the problem reasonable. Even with these measures, realistic-size SMIP models with binary variables in each stage are still hard to solve with exact methods. We, therefore, propose a scenario-rolling heuristic to solve the SMIP problem. In each iteration, the heuristic solves a subset of the scenarios, and uses part of the obtained solution to solve another group in the subsequent iterations until all scenarios are solved. Two numerical examples are provided to test the performance of the scenario-rolling heuristic, and to highlight the difference between the operative schedules of a deterministic model and the SMIP model. Motivated by previous studies on pricing MIP problems and their applications to pricing electric power, we investigate pricing issues and compensation schemes using MIP formulations in the second part of the thesis. We show that some ideas from the literature can be applied to pricing energy/reserves for a relatively realistic model with binary variables, but some are found to be impractical in the real world. We propose two compensation schemes based on the SMIP that can be easily implemented in practice. We show that the compensation schemes with make-whole payments ensure that generators can have non-negative profits. We also prove that under some assumptions, one of the compensation schemes has the interesting theoretical property of minimizing the variance of the profit of generators to zero. Theoretical and numerical results of these compensation schemes are presented and discussed.

In this study, we apply "the equilibrium price" to investigate the efficiency and the elasticity of Taiwan securities trading market. The "the equilibrium price" of each transaction are used to represent the true price of the security. The intra-daily tick-by-tick data of the Taiwan security market is used to obtain the equilibrium prices. Empirical transaction of the two companies Uni-President Enterprises Corporation and Formosa Plastics Corporation are studied. Time-series models of the equilibrium price and the transaction price are established. The time lengths returning to the equilibrium status are also studied, called the efficiency time. Based on the results, we discuss the efficiency of the two stocks. In order to understand the impact of the efficiency time, linear regression models of the efficiency time are built. Furthermore, the variance ratios of the two stocks are also investigated to study their market efficiency. Finally, the elasticity of demand and the elasticity of supply are studied and their Markov chain models are established. The results show that the two companies stay more time in the inelastic states.

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This paper investigates how the number of students changed due to tuition fee was introduced at KTH. Since fall in 2011, all universities in Sweden have started to charge tuition fee from non-EU/EEA students. Setting tuition fee is always a topic in free education countries. After tuition fee is charged, if non-EU potential master students would invest in a master program and whether they will invest at KTH. There are some important factors influencing the decisions and resulted in two approaches (cross country comparison and willingness to pay tuition fee). According to countries‟ tuition fee and students‟ living cost, we made estimation of education demand curve and categories showing various groups of students studying abroad. Compare with other countries‟ tuition setting, we see phenomenon of KTH and other universities of Sweden about tuition fee and enrollments. According to data from several questionnaires, the paper shows how international students consider of tuition fee at KTH. The data also indicates how factors such as reputation, education quality and tuition cost, living cost affect their choices, and how much tuition fee students would like to pay for studying at KTH by experience. KTH has some students‟ package to compensate fee-paying students, and give some students scholarships, but students are still very few to come. Meanwhile, KTH has competitors which are not only Swedish universities, but also other universities in other countries. How to compete with them and by the society comments, KTH has heavy pressure on its shoulders. / Tuition