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The purpose of this study was to analyze the cost implications of various provisions of the Virginia Nutrient Credit Exchange Act. The first objective was to estimate the cost implications of point source trading provisions of the Act. An integer programming cost minimization model was constructed to estimate the cost of achieving four point source trading policy scenarios. The model estimated the annual cost of meeting two different nutrient cap levels, each with and without a limits-of-technology concentration standard requirement for new and expanding point sources. The limits-of-technology concentration standard requirement was found to significantly affect cost while providing little apparent benefit to water quality. The second objective was to develop a screening procedure for municipalities to estimate the cost of generating waste load allocation from nonpoint source offsets under their jurisdictional control. A spreadsheet based cost screening procedure was developed for municipalities to estimate the cost of implementing of nitrogen offsets from stormwater practices, septic retirement, and land conversion. One of the important findings from developing the screening procedure is that the cost of generating WLA from non-point sources under the control of local governments was much higher than the cost of removing nitrogen at wastewater treatment plants. / Master of Science

<p>The problem with unequal distribution of land ownership, in developing countries, has been debated in numerous papers. It is important to solve this problem and one of the major contributions in finding a solution is the implementation of a land reform. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the outcome of two different approaches to land reform, i.e. coercive and market based, and to find out how successful they are in reducing the concentration of land ownership in a sustainable direction. The conclusion of this paper is that neither of the approaches alone is successful in this task, the strength lies instead in a combination of the coercive and market based approach.</p>

Abstract Ever since 1980, facing the impact of the more freedom of trading market and the fast developing on the new technology, financial market grows rapidly in prosperity. Especially the derivative financial goods are brought to the market, the financial organization¡¦s affairs and trading styles become more diversified, also added new risks of uncertainty. Furthermore, more complicated credit risk patterns caused the traditional measuring tools of financial risk among market participants, even risk structure and credit culture being severely challenged. During 1990, financial crisis or fraud cases consecutively happened in the international financial market, so the financial risk management has become a subject concerned by financial organizations, government and the public investors. However, credit risk is always the focus in all the financial risks. Especially the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, (a branch of the Bank for International Settlements, BIS), published ¡§The New Basel Capital Accord¡¨ (Basel II). In this New Basel Capital Accord, it not only emphasizes the importance of credit risk, but also allows financial organizations to develop Internal Rating Based Approach, ¡§IRB¡¨ to evaluate and calculate proper risk capital. These operations for credit risk evaluation model¡¦s development have been focused on the academic circle, government, and business circle. Since Merton (1974) has applied options pricing model as a technology to evaluate the credit risk of enterprise, it has been drawn a lot of attention from western academic and business circles. Merton¡¦s Model is the theoretical foundation of structural models. Currently, the famous KMV Model in practically is the extension of application of Merton¡¦s Model. Merton¡¦s model is not only based on a strict and comprehensive theory but also used market information stock price as an important variance to evaluate the credit risk. This makes credit risk to be a real-time monitored at a much higher frequency. This advantage has made it widely applied by the academic and business circle for a long time. According to this research topics: (1) Credit risk holds geographical and culture character. Though credit risk evaluating model introduced from the foreign, yet it still has to be modified locally and it also needs more supports from local theory and practical case study. (2)Structural model is based on ¡§look-forward¡¨ analysis. It implies market-based information contents. (3) After prudent and careful analytical consideration about domestic capital market, the electronic business is the mainstream of domestic stock market, and also the competitive business for Taiwan in the world, meantime, electronic business has a higher level of sensitivity in three phases of profit, prosperity and risk. So that, I choose electronic companies in the public stock market as my research target and time frame is across 2004 to 2006, by means of KMV model which is a mainstream of structural model to evaluate credit risk, developed by Moody¡¦s Co. USA. I also referred to ¡§Small and Medium Enterprise Credit Guarantee Fund Main Guarantee Business Default Probability and Credit Risk Valuation Research Report¡¨, authored by C. J. Kuo (2006) for the variable definition and selections giving very thorough considerations. As I proceed a series of research in using EDF (Expected Default Frequency) of KMV model as well as a number of empirical investigation procedures in integrity and individual electronic business. I find out that EDF of KMV model it can obtain the prominent effect in credit risk and the prediction ability in advance. This paper can provide research result as a reference to risk-manager and to assist investors and governor to discern the depth of risks that the enterprise involved and then to decide the policy of strategy investment and level of risk management. Eventually to minimize the cost of credit checking and enterprise capitals, while to maximize the managerial efficiency and the profitability is the contribution of this paper could be.

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The objective of this dissertation is to provide insights on key actors who affect the link between marketing and firm value. The first essay examines financial analysts who provide earnings estimates about firms, thereby connecting firm and the stock market. The author uncovers whether and how financial analysts link market-based assets (e.g., brand equity) to a firm's cash flows, drivers of firm value. The author predicts market-based assets affect a firm's cash flow level, volatility, and acceleration through two marketing strategies, the ability to charge price premiums and penetrate new product markets. Hypotheses are tested using data from surveys of 220 North America based financial analysts. Based on analysts' feedback, brand and channel equity affect a firm's ability to penetrate new product markets, and brand equity also affects a firm's ability to charge price premiums. The ability to charge price premiums increases cash flows level while the ability to penetrate new product markets enhances cash flow level and acceleration of cash flows. Finally, channel equity directly lowers cash flow volatility and market intelligence enhances cash flow level. The findings offer evidence that analysts connect a firm's market-based assets to the generation of its cash flows. This has important implications for managers who maintain communications with the financial analyst community. In the second essay, the author examines the impact of a firm's shareholders and board of directors on the marketing-firm value link. The author hypothesizes that a firm's shareholders and board of directors affect how its advertising and R&D dollars are spent and also affect stock market participants' perceptions of this spending, thereby affecting its firm value. Hypotheses are tested using data on 575 publicly listed firms in the United States. The findings indicate that higher shareholder governance and higher marketing spending (both advertising and R&D spending) increase firm value. However, somewhat interestingly, higher board governance and higher advertising spending decrease firm value. These results highlight the importance of considering corporate governance when analyzing the marketing-shareholder value link and offer yet another important reason for the marketing function to have a voice in the firm's boardroom. / text

The problem with unequal distribution of land ownership, in developing countries, has been debated in numerous papers. It is important to solve this problem and one of the major contributions in finding a solution is the implementation of a land reform. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the outcome of two different approaches to land reform, i.e. coercive and market based, and to find out how successful they are in reducing the concentration of land ownership in a sustainable direction. The conclusion of this paper is that neither of the approaches alone is successful in this task, the strength lies instead in a combination of the coercive and market based approach.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud platforms are incredibly complex: they rent hundreds of different types of servers across multiple geographical regions under a wide range of contract types that offer varying tradeoffs between risk and cost. Unfortunately, the internal dynamics of cloud platforms are opaque in several dimensions. For example, while the risk of servers not being available when requested is critical in optimizing these risk-cost tradeoffs, it is not typically made visible to users. Thus, inspired by prior work on Internet bandwidth probing, we propose actively probing cloud platforms to explicitly learn such information, where each "probe'' is a request for a particular type of server. We model the relationships between different contracts types to develop a market-based probing policy, which leverages the insight that real-time prices in cloud spot markets loosely correlate with the supply (and availability) of fixed-price on-demand servers. That is, the higher the spot price for a server, the more likely the corresponding fixed-price on-demand server is not available. We incorporate market-based probing into SpotLight, an information service that enables cloud applications to query this and other data, and use it to monitor the availability of more than 4500 distinct server types across 9 geographical regions in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud over a 3 month period. We analyze this data to reveal interesting observations about the platform's internal dynamics. We then show how SpotLight enables two recently proposed derivative cloud services to select a better mix of servers to host applications, which improves their availability from 70-90% to near 100% in practice.

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