Interlibrary Loan entails obtaining copies of library materials not found in the library's collection on behalf of the library's patrons (borrowing), as well as providing copies of library materials requested by other libraries (lending). The dynamic nature of today's library environment is well illustrated by the rapid changes occurring in the role of interlibrary loan. The vision statement of the University of Central Florida Library is: The library performs a central role of adding value to information for the academic community by creatively improving and providing information resources and services. The library strives to create an environment that encourages the pursuit of intellectual endeavors and the creation of new knowledge. In an endeavor to fulfill this vision, the Interlibrary Loan Department at the UCF main library wants to set up a document delivery service within the UCF main campus in order to facilitate research efforts on campus. The document delivery service will include delivery and pickup of library materials for ILL requests by faculty online (via computers). In this study, we build a Traveling Salesperson model for obtaining a routing sequence for the document delivery service. Next, we analyze this model in order to check the feasibility of the routing sequence in presence of demand (delivery and pickup) by simulating the demand over the route using computer simulation software. We conclude by validating the model under given conditions and providing route sequence recommendations in the case of extreme demands.

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This experiment examines the effects of financial reporting bases (GAAP and income tax) and service levels offered by external accountants (audits and reviews) on loan officers. The effects are measured using a loan approval decision and four perceptions: (1) appropriate interest premium, (2) likelihood of default, (3) confidence in the financial report, and (4) usefulness of the financial report. Analysis of variance techniques are used to ascertain the effects of accounting reports on the perceptions of loan officers; legit model development is used to isolate the effects on loan approval decisions. Reviews result in higher interest premiums than audits. Loan officers also associate higher default risks with reviews and tax-basis financial reports. Loan officers are most confident with audited GAAP-basis financial reports and least confident with audited income tax basis financial reports. In addition, loan officers indicate that GAAP-basis financial reports are more useful than income-tax-basis financial reports. Neither reporting basis nor service level affected their loan-approval decisions, however. Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses are used to develop surrogates for decision usefulness using Statement of Financial Accounting Concepts (SFAC) Number 2. The most dependable surrogate for decision usefulness developed involves two characteristics that SFAC Number 2 suggests as being nonessential to accounting information: certainty and precision. The reporting basis affected this surrogate and decision usefulness itself in the same manner; in both cases, GAAP-basis financial reports are more useful than tax-basis financial reports. Managers, accountants, and loan officers should be aware that using income-tax-basis financial reports can detrimentally affect loan officer perceptions of default risk, confidence, and decision usefulness. Further, using a review rather than an audit may affect loan officer perceptions of confidence and interest rates. Future research could introduce additional independent variables. These variables include the effects of a statement of changes in financial position, financial ratios, industries, or differential reporting. Research using qualitative characteristics of accounting information could lead to strong measures of decision usefulness that would be beneficial in ascertaining effects on loan-officer perceptions and decisions. / Ph. D.

Firm size, in and of itself, is hardly a "goal" of the regulators. Indeed, the growth of very large firms, and the increase in market concentration that accompanies it, will add to the debate over the adequacy of the regulator's management of the industry. It must be demonstrable that very large firms assist the regulators in attaining some of their espoused goals, goals that they might not attain otherwise. What have we learned? The evidence does not all point in one direction. On the question of whether large firms can deliver their services more efficiently than can small ones, our answer is that scale economies are not as easily demonstratable as others have concluded. Such economies turn out to be crucially dependent on the way in which they are specified in the cost function. An examination of the likely biases of each functional form suggests that only relatively small firms would experience real efficiency gains from growth. Large firms seem to be neither more nor less efficient than their smaller cousins, insofar as private costs reflect public costs. / Ph. D.

This diploma thesis is concerned with the theme of adopted German words in Russian language. While working on my thesis I used method of excerption words from the dictionary of foreign words. In accordance with this method, I was able to find more than 700 words which I finally processed from different linguistic perspectives. In theoretic part of my diploma thesis I was concerning possibility of word adoption, types of adopted words, adoptions from foreign languages and history of word adoption from German language to Russian language. In practical part, I was concerning with phonetic, orthographic, morphological, word-forming and stylistic aspect of adopted German words. The last chapter is devoted to the semantic characteristics of loanwords and their division into thematic categories. The list of all excerpted words in Russian and also their Czech translation is included in the annexe.

A topical issue in financial economics is the development of appropriate stochastic dynamic models for banking items and behavior. The issue here is to fulfil the need to generalize the more traditional discrete-time models of banking activity to a Levy process setting. In this thesis, under the assumption that the loan market is imperfectly competitive, we investigate the evolution of banking items such as bank assets (cash, bonds, shares, Treasuries, reserves, loans and intangible assets), liabilities (demand deposits) and bank capital (bank equity, subordinate debt and loan loss reserves). Here we consider the influence of macroeconomic factors and profitability as well as its indicators return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE). As far as bank assets are concerned, we note that loan pricing models usually reflect the financial funding cost, risk premium to compensate for the risk of default by the borrower, a premium reflecting market power exercised by the bank and the sensitivity of the cost of capital raised to changes in loans extended. On the other hand, loan losses can be associated with an offsetting expense called the loan loss provision (LLP), which is charged against Nett profit. This offset will reduce reported income but has no impact on taxes, although when the assets are finally written off, a tax-deductible expense is created. An important factor influencing loan loss provisioning is regulation and supervision. Measures of capital adequacy are generally calculated using the book values of assets and equity. The provisioning of loans and their associated write-offs will cause a decline in these capital adequacy measures, and may precipitate increased regulation by bank authorities. Greater level of regulation generally entail additional costs for the bank. Currently, this regulation mainly takes the form of the Basel II Capital Accord that has been implemented on the worldwide basis since 2008. It is clear that bank profitability is a major indicator of financial crises for households, companies and financial institutions. An example of this from the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis (SMC) is the U.S. bank, Wachovia Corp., who reported a big loss as from the first quarter of 2007 and eventually was bought by the world's largest bank, Citigroup, on 29 September 2008. A further example from the SMC is that both the failure of the Lehman Brothers investment bank and the acquisition in September 2008 of Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns by Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase, respectively, were preceded by a decrease in profitability and an increase in the price of loans and loan losses. The subprime mortgage crisis is characterized by contracted liquidity in the global credit markets and banking system. The level of liquidity in the banking sector affects the ability of banks to meet commitments as they become due without incurring substantial losses from liquidating less liquid assets. Liquidity, therefore, provides the defensive cash or near-cash resources to cover banks' liability. An undervaluation of real risk in the subprime market is cascading, rippling and ultimately severely adversely affecting the world economy. The downturn in the U.S. housing market, risky lending and borrowing practices, and excessive individual and corporate debt levels have caused multiple adverse effects tumbled as the US housing market slumped. Banks worldwide are hoarding cash and showing a growing reluctance to lend, driving rates that institutions charge to each other on loans to record highs. Also, global money markets are inoperative, forcing increased injections of cash from central banks. The crisis has passed through various stages, exposing pervasive weaknesses in the global financial system and regulatory framework. The stochastic dynamics of the aforementioned banking items assist in formulating a maximization problem that involves endogenous variables such as profit consumption, the value of the bank's investment in loans and provisions for loan losses as control variants. In particular, we demonstrate that the bank is able to maximize its expected utility of discounted profit consumption over a random time interval, [t,r], and terminal profit at time r. Here the term profit consumption refers to the consumption of the bank's profits by dividend payments on equity and interest and principal payments on subordinate debt. The associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation has a smooth solution when the optimal controls are computed by means of power, logarithmic and exponential utility functions. This enables us to make a direct comparison between the economic properties of the solutions for different choices of the utility function. In keeping with the main theme of this thesis, we simulate the financial indices ROE and ROA that are two measures of bank profitability. We further discuss optimization with power utility where we show the convergence of the Markov Chain Approximation Method (MCAM) and the impact of varying the model parameters in the form of loan loss severity, P, and loan loss frequency, <f>. We investigate the connections between the banking models and Basel II capital accord as well as the current subprime mortgage crises. As a way of conclusion, we provide remarks about the main issues discussed in the thesis and speculate about future research directions. The contents of this thesis is based on 3 peer-reviewed journal articles (see [105], [106] and [107]) and 1 peer-reviewed conference proceedings paper (see [104]). In addition, the paper [108] is currently being prepared for submission to an accredited journal. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Applied Mathematics))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.