Chapter 1: I analyze economies of scale for fire and police services by considering how per-household costs are affected by a municipality’s size. Using 2005-2008 municipal data for the Province of Ontario, I employ a partial-linear model to non-parametrically estimate per-household cost curves for each service. The results show that cost per household is a U-shaped function of municipal size for each service. For fire services, these costs are minimized at a population of about 20,000 residents, while for police services they are minimized at about 50,000 residents. Based on these results, implications are drawn for municipal amalgamation policy. Chapter 2: I review how the literature has continued to exclude the business property tax (BPT) from the marginal effective tax rate (METR) on capital investment for over 25 years. I recast the METR theory as it relates to the BPT and compute 2013 estimates of the METR for all 10 provinces in Canada with provincial BPTs included. Building on these estimates, I compute the METR inclusive of municipal BPTs for the largest municipality in each province. I find the BPT to be substantially damaging to municipal, provincial and international competitiveness. With the business property tax representing over 60% of the Canadian METR, among the various capital taxes it is by far the largest contributor to Canada’s investment barrier. Chapter 3: I estimate the responsiveness of structure investment and the tax base to commercial property taxes, taking a new step toward resolving the “benefit view” vs. “capital tax view” debate within the literature. Using a first-difference structural model to analyze 2006-2013 municipal data for the Province of Ontario, I improve upon past studies and build onto the literature in a number of ways. I find that commercial structure investment and tax base are highly sensitive to the property tax with Ontario’s assessment-weighted average tax elasticity (and tax-base elasticity) ranging from -0.80 to -0.90 at 2011 taxation levels. The results support the capital tax view of the business property tax, building onto the growing consensus that business property taxes substantially impact investment in structures and the value of the tax base.

This master’s thesis is dealing with remote measuring systems and their utilization in power engineering. In the first part there are described requirements on an autonomous measuring system and description of AMM and AMR systems. Communicating and data flows working on accurately defined communicating layers are also depicted in this part. The attention is devoted to the possibility of data processing and functions of devices offered by these attributes. In the following part there are described reasons for utilization of remote measuring systems in power engineering and the main advantages of connection of more devices into one unit. After finding of required parametres and functions of systems, a suggestion of terminal device is created in the same way. The suggestion is described in the measuring part with A/D converter, processing in microprocessor, measuring and evaluating alogorithms and attributes of communication of bus used. The last part is devoted to utilization of remote analysis in small power stations in dispersed production. Formation of deformation of voltage, harmonic analysis of signal and its application for data processing are described there. Described analysis was tested on data acquired from a cogeneration unit.

Final thesis describes two variants of computational models to simulate cross-roll leveling of rods, which are based on the Lagrangian approach to describe the continuum. Implementation of both variants was performed in ANSYS software, and their main difference lies in the choice of the type of elements for the discretization. An integral part of this thesis is the description of the principle, which is an evaluation of the curvature of the rod after completion of the simulation leveling. In the other part of the work are presented the results, which are then compared with realized experiment and simulation algorithm for cross-roll leveling based on the Euler approach. The final part is dedicated to the optimal settings of the leveller.