As importantes mudanças macroeconômicas e a abertura comercial ocorridas na década de 90 tiveram como uma de suas conseqüências a reversão dos superávits comerciais. Esse fato gerou uma série de análises sobre a composição das importações e exportações das firmas brasileiras. Com a abertura comercial, as empresas passaram a investir na racionalização de processos produtivos e gerenciais para se tornarem competitivas. A desvalorização da taxa de câmbio, no final da década de 90, implicou no aumento significativo da parcela exportada pela indústria brasileira e mudanças ocorreram na estratégia competitiva da indústria. A análise destas diferenças e do caminho percorrido por elas contribuem para um melhor mapeamento e discussão das condições competitivas da indústria no mercado internacional. Diante desse contexto, o objetivo do presente trabalho é identificar os principais determinantes da atividade exportadora de indústrias paulistas. Para alcançar o objetivo proposto, utilizou-se dados referentes aos anos de 1996 e 2001 de indústrias paulistas, disponíveis na Pesquisa da Atividade Econômica Paulista (PAEP), realizada pela Fundação Estadual de Análise de Dados (SEADE). Os dois períodos de análise apresentam características distintas no que se refere ao contexto econômico, o que pode ter acarretado na adoção de estratégias competitivas diferentes pelas empresas. Para a estimação dos parâmetros das variáveis explicativas adotou-se os métodos Probit e Logit. Os resultados da pesquisa permitiram identificar o tamanho da empresa, participação estrangeira no capital, idade, importação e inovação tecnológica como determinantes da atividade exportadora das indústrias paulistas. A produtividade do trabalho e a qualificação do trabalho apresentaram resultados distintos para os anos de 1996 e 2001. / Major macroeconomic changes and trade liberalization occurred in the 90s had as one of their consequences the reversal of trade surpluses. This has raised a number of reviews on the composition of imports and exports of Brazilian firms. With the trade liberalization, companies started to invest in the rationalization of production processes and management in order to become competitive. The devaluation of the exchange rate in the end of the 90s, resulted in significant increase in the share exported by the Brazilian industry and changes occurred in the competitive strategy of the industry. The analysis of these differences contributes to a better mapping and discussion of competitive conditions in the industry internationally. In this context, the objective of this study is to identify the main determinants of export activity of Paulistas industries. To achieve the proposed objective, we used data for the years 1996 and 2001 from Paulistas industries, available on the Pesquisa da Atividade Econômica Paulista (PAEP) held by the Fundação Estadual de Análise de Dados (SEADE). These periods have different characteristics with regard to the economic context, which may have led to the adoption of different competitive strategies by companies. For the estimation of the explanatory variables we adopted the methods Probit and Logit. The research results have identified the company size, foreign ownership, age, import and technological innovation as determinants of export activity of the Paulistas industries. The labor productivity and skilled labor showed different results for the years 1996 and 2001.

O presente trabalho pretende estudar a disposição a pagar do consumidor brasileiro por produtos com maior eficiência energética. Entender o quanto o consumidor está disposto a pagar por um ganho de eficiência pode contribuir na elaboração de políticas públicas para o setor elétrico, e na criação de incentivos à indústria para produção e investimentos neste tipo de tecnologia. O trabalho utiliza-se de uma pesquisa de campo sobre posse de equipamentos e hábitos de uso, realizada pela Eletrobrás/Procel em 2005. A metodologia empregada segue a linha de trabalhos já realizados em outros países, a exemplo dos estudos realizados por Dubin e McFadden (1984) e Sammer e Wüstenhagen (2006). Os resultados encontrados apontam para uma subestimação dos consumidores quanto à avaliação da economia proporcionada por produtos mais eficientes. Sendo assim, abre-se espaço para campanhas de conscientização e valorização dessas tecnologias ou incentivos monetários para consumo dos mesmos. / The focus of this research is to investigate the Brazilian consumer\'s willingness to pay for products with more energy efficiency. Measuring how much the consumer is willing to pay could provide us with good insights that may help in discussing politics regarding the electric sector, plus it may guide politics in taking actions and decisions on incentives in order to promote this kind of more efficient technological products. This investigation is based on a field research regarding the possess of appliances and their uses, consisting of 4310 household questionnaires. The methodology applied follows previous work on this field and similar studies made for other countries. Examples are Dubin e McFadden (1984) for space and water heating in the USA and Sammer e Wüstenhagen (2006) for washing machines in the Switzerland. The results make clear an underestimation of the monetary economy due to the use of more efficient products. Therefore, there\'s an opportunity for the government to motivate and promote this kind of technology, either through advertising for and awareness of the general population, or through subsides to the industry to produce more efficient products or monetary incentives for the their purchases.

O presente trabalho procura avaliar a relevância da informação sobre a segurança dos automóveis para os consumidores brasileiros estimando um modelo de demanda logit aninhado controlado pelas notas de zero a cinco estrelas obtidas nos crash tests do Latin NCAP, pesquisa até o momento única no Brasil. Os resultados indicam que a nota nos crash tests são relevantes para a utilidade média dos consumidores com os carros mais bem avaliados mostrando um nível de utilidade maior em relação aos veículos menos seguros. Resultados auxiliares apontam que não há diferença nos preços médios dos modelos avaliados pelo Latin NCAP com notas de uma a cinco estrelas sendo os modelos avaliados com zero estrelas os únicos a apresentarem preços estatisticamente diferentes e mais baratos. Outros resultados obtidos mostram que um aumento no número de automóveis testados de uma determinada montadora aumenta mais que proporcionalmente a probabilidade de um outro automóvel da mesma marca ser avaliado / The present work aims to evaluate how important is the information about car safety for consumers in brazilian market estimating a nested logit demand model using the Latin NCAP\'s grades from zero to five stars as independent variables, yet this research is unique in Brazil. The results obtained show that Latin NCAP\'s grades show some relevance for the consumer\'s mean utiliy as the higher grades exibit higher mean utility levels related to the lowest grades. Auxiliary results show that there is no statistic diference among the car\'s prices evaluated with one to five stars in the crash tests as the automobiles evaluated with zero stars appear as being the cheapest of all. Others results show that an increase in the number of tested vehicles from a given manufacturer raises more than proportionally the probability of a car from this same brand to be tested

As importantes mudanças macroeconômicas e a abertura comercial ocorridas na década de 90 tiveram como uma de suas conseqüências a reversão dos superávits comerciais. Esse fato gerou uma série de análises sobre a composição das importações e exportações das firmas brasileiras. Com a abertura comercial, as empresas passaram a investir na racionalização de processos produtivos e gerenciais para se tornarem competitivas. A desvalorização da taxa de câmbio, no final da década de 90, implicou no aumento significativo da parcela exportada pela indústria brasileira e mudanças ocorreram na estratégia competitiva da indústria. A análise destas diferenças e do caminho percorrido por elas contribuem para um melhor mapeamento e discussão das condições competitivas da indústria no mercado internacional. Diante desse contexto, o objetivo do presente trabalho é identificar os principais determinantes da atividade exportadora de indústrias paulistas. Para alcançar o objetivo proposto, utilizou-se dados referentes aos anos de 1996 e 2001 de indústrias paulistas, disponíveis na Pesquisa da Atividade Econômica Paulista (PAEP), realizada pela Fundação Estadual de Análise de Dados (SEADE). Os dois períodos de análise apresentam características distintas no que se refere ao contexto econômico, o que pode ter acarretado na adoção de estratégias competitivas diferentes pelas empresas. Para a estimação dos parâmetros das variáveis explicativas adotou-se os métodos Probit e Logit. Os resultados da pesquisa permitiram identificar o tamanho da empresa, participação estrangeira no capital, idade, importação e inovação tecnológica como determinantes da atividade exportadora das indústrias paulistas. A produtividade do trabalho e a qualificação do trabalho apresentaram resultados distintos para os anos de 1996 e 2001. / Major macroeconomic changes and trade liberalization occurred in the 90s had as one of their consequences the reversal of trade surpluses. This has raised a number of reviews on the composition of imports and exports of Brazilian firms. With the trade liberalization, companies started to invest in the rationalization of production processes and management in order to become competitive. The devaluation of the exchange rate in the end of the 90s, resulted in significant increase in the share exported by the Brazilian industry and changes occurred in the competitive strategy of the industry. The analysis of these differences contributes to a better mapping and discussion of competitive conditions in the industry internationally. In this context, the objective of this study is to identify the main determinants of export activity of Paulistas industries. To achieve the proposed objective, we used data for the years 1996 and 2001 from Paulistas industries, available on the Pesquisa da Atividade Econômica Paulista (PAEP) held by the Fundação Estadual de Análise de Dados (SEADE). These periods have different characteristics with regard to the economic context, which may have led to the adoption of different competitive strategies by companies. For the estimation of the explanatory variables we adopted the methods Probit and Logit. The research results have identified the company size, foreign ownership, age, import and technological innovation as determinants of export activity of the Paulistas industries. The labor productivity and skilled labor showed different results for the years 1996 and 2001.

Work zone tends to cause hazardous conditions for drivers and construction workers since work zones generate conflicts between construction activities and the traffic, therefore aggravate the existing traffic conditions and result in severe traffic safety and operational problems. To address the influence of various factors on the crash severity is beneficial to understand the characteristics of work zone crashes. The understanding can be used to select proper countermeasures for reducing the crash severity at work zones and improving work zone safety. In this dissertation, crash severity models were developed to explore the factor impacts on crash severity for two work zone crash datasets (overall crashes and rear-end crashes). Partial proportional odds logistic regression, which has less restriction to the parallel regression assumption and provides more reasonable interpretations of the coefficients, was used to estimate the models. The factor impacts were summarized to indicate which factors are more likely to increase work zone crash severity or which factors tends to reduce the severity. Because the speed variety is an important factor causing accidents at work zone area, the work zone speed profile was analyzed and modeled to predict the distribution of speed along the distance to the starting point of lane closures. A new learning machine algorithm, support vector regression (SVR), was utilized to develop the speed profile model for freeway work zone sections under various scenarios since its excellent generalization ability. A simulation-based experiment was designed for producing the speed data (output data) and scenario data (input data). Based on these data, the speed profile model was trained and validated. The speed profile model can be used as a reference for designing appropriate traffic control countermeasures to improve the work zone safety.

This thesis evaluates truck route choice set generation algorithms and derives guidance on using the algorithms for effective generation of choice sets for modeling truck route choice. Specifically, route choice sets generated from a breadth first search link elimination (BFS-LE) algorithm are evaluated against observed truck routes derived from large streams of GPS traces of a sizeable truck fleet in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. A systematic evaluation approach is presented to arrive at an appropriate combination of spatial aggregation and minimum number of trips to be observed between each origin-destination (OD) location for evaluating algorithm-generated choice sets. The evaluation is based on both the ability to generate relevant routes that are typically considered by the travelers and the generation of irrelevant (or extraneous) routes that are seldom chosen. Based on this evaluation, the thesis offers guidance on effectively using the BFS-LE approach to maximize the generation of relevant routes. It is found that carefully chosen spatial aggregation can reduce the need to generate large number of routes for each trip. Further, estimation of route choice models and their subsequent application on validation datasets revealed that the benefits of spatial aggregation might be harnessed better if irrelevant routes are eliminated from the choice sets. Lastly, a comparison of route attributes of the relevant and irrelevant routes shed light on presence of systematic differences in route characteristics of the relevant and irrelevant routes.

This thesis consists of two parts. The first part analyzesthe accessibility, generation and license holding effects incar ownership models. The second part develops a route choicemodeling framework with an attempt to address the differencesin drivers' route choice behavior. These two parts of work areboth based on the discrete choice theory - the car ownershipmodels are built up on the standard logit model, whereas theroute choice models are formulated in a mixed logit form. The study result of the first part shows that measuring theaccessibility by the monetary inclusive value reasonably wellcaptures the mechanism of the accessibility impact. Otheraccessibility proxies such as the parking costs, parking typeand house type are correlated with the accessibility but not toa great extent. Both young and old households are less likelyto have a car. The reduction of the propensity to own a car issignificant for households with average birth year before 1920,whereas this reduction is moderate for households with birthyear between 1920 and 1945. It is also demonstrated thatdriving license holding choice is conditional on the carownership level choice, and that these two choices need to bemodeled in a dynamic framework. The second part of the work investigates the performance ofthe mixed logit model using both simulated data and empiricalroute switching data. The empirical study mainly focused on theimpacts of information and incident related factors on drivers'route switching behavior. The result shows that using mixed logit gives a significantimprovement in model performance as well as a more sensitiveexplanation of drivers' decision-making behavior. For apopulation with greatly varying tastes, simply using thestandard logit model to analyze its behavior can yield veryunrealistic results. However, care must be taken when settingthe number of random draws for simulating the choiceprobability of the mixed logit model in order to get reliableestimates. The empirical results demonstrate that incident relatedfactors such as delay and information reliability havesignificant impacts on drivers' route switching, where themagnitude of the response to the change in the delay is shownto vary significantly between individuals. Other factors, suchas confidence in the estimated delay, gender, frequency of cardriving and attitude towards congestion, also make majorcontributions. In addition, it is found that individual's routeswitching behavior may differ depending on the purpose of thetrip and when the choice is made, i.e. pre-trip oren-route. <b>Keywords</b>: car ownership, accessibility, logit model,route choice, heterogeneity, mixed logit model

The Printing Industry is undergoing a Digital Revolution . The importance of digital printing has been increasing substantially over the last decade. How has this development affected the paper selection of printing firms? Only paper suppliers who successfully anticipate the changing needs of the printing firms will be able to benefit from the industry trend. This paper employs a probability model to analyze a survey data set of 103 digital printing firms in the USA and Canada. The research idea is to link the firm s paper selection with the firm s characteristics in order to gain insights into the printing firm s paper purchase behavior and the overall industry structure. The first part of this work investigates the importance of certain paper aspects, such as price, runnability and print quality. Strikingly, a company s involvement in digital printing, measured by the percent of digital printers of the total number of printers in the firm, is a central determinant of the importance of all paper aspects analyzed. This finding underscores the tremendous importance of the printing firms transition to digital printing for the Paper Industry. Paper runnability is found to become more important the faster the firm grows and can be explained by the fact that more successful firms incur higher opportunity costs from downtime. Another key finding is that the importance of paper price is lower for firms who collaborate with their customer on the paper selection and are able to pass on cost increases in the paper price. The second part involves a more direct assessment of paper selection. Here, the firm s characteristics are utilized to explain the choice of coated versus uncoated paper for the printing job. The analysis shows that firms involved in sophisticated print services, such as Digital Asset Management or Variable Data Printing are more likely to use the high quality coated paper. Further it is found that the usage of coated paper increases with catalog printing whereas it decreases with book and manual printing.

<p>This thesis consists of two parts. The first part analyzesthe accessibility, generation and license holding effects incar ownership models. The second part develops a route choicemodeling framework with an attempt to address the differencesin drivers' route choice behavior. These two parts of work areboth based on the discrete choice theory - the car ownershipmodels are built up on the standard logit model, whereas theroute choice models are formulated in a mixed logit form.</p><p>The study result of the first part shows that measuring theaccessibility by the monetary inclusive value reasonably wellcaptures the mechanism of the accessibility impact. Otheraccessibility proxies such as the parking costs, parking typeand house type are correlated with the accessibility but not toa great extent. Both young and old households are less likelyto have a car. The reduction of the propensity to own a car issignificant for households with average birth year before 1920,whereas this reduction is moderate for households with birthyear between 1920 and 1945. It is also demonstrated thatdriving license holding choice is conditional on the carownership level choice, and that these two choices need to bemodeled in a dynamic framework.</p><p>The second part of the work investigates the performance ofthe mixed logit model using both simulated data and empiricalroute switching data. The empirical study mainly focused on theimpacts of information and incident related factors on drivers'route switching behavior.</p><p>The result shows that using mixed logit gives a significantimprovement in model performance as well as a more sensitiveexplanation of drivers' decision-making behavior. For apopulation with greatly varying tastes, simply using thestandard logit model to analyze its behavior can yield veryunrealistic results. However, care must be taken when settingthe number of random draws for simulating the choiceprobability of the mixed logit model in order to get reliableestimates.</p><p>The empirical results demonstrate that incident relatedfactors such as delay and information reliability havesignificant impacts on drivers' route switching, where themagnitude of the response to the change in the delay is shownto vary significantly between individuals. Other factors, suchas confidence in the estimated delay, gender, frequency of cardriving and attitude towards congestion, also make majorcontributions. In addition, it is found that individual's routeswitching behavior may differ depending on the purpose of thetrip and when the choice is made, i.e. pre-trip oren-route.</p><p><b>Keywords</b>: car ownership, accessibility, logit model,route choice, heterogeneity, mixed logit model</p>

Due to enormous growth rates during the last couple of years CarSharing has become an interesting field of research. This Master Thesis focuses on the analysis of CarSharing users. For this purpose more than 37.000 participants of the "Große SrV-Vergleichsstädte"-Survey were taken into account. After a short literature review and some general information about the statistical methods, the thesis tries to work out some major characteristics of the typical CarSharing user. It will be shown, that a high income and a young age are of central importance. Also when analysing other variables different user quotas are observed, but can mostly be explained with different age or income levels. At the end a binary logit model is sugested to differ between users and non users, by using the previous analysed observed characteristics as input.