Many economists and politicians have blamed fixed exchange rate regimes for several crises taking place in developing countries after the 1980s. According to them, since the beginning of the 2000s, widespread implementation of flexible exchange rate regimes and high international reserves have prevented developing countries from experiencing similar catastrophic experiences. This interpretation seems to be misleading. We believe that even flexible exchange rate regimes with high international reserves do not have a magic to prevent a financial crisis. Although flexible exchange rate regimes and high international reserves might have played some positive roles in the relatively calm period of 2001-2008 / the main reason behind the calmness of this period is the fact that developing countries did not face a strong financial shock during this period. In the presence of &ldquo / safe havens&rdquo / , which implies existence of safe developed countries for financial capital to move into, flexible exchange rate regimes and the accumulated large reserves may not be adequate when a wave of financial shocks, as in the form of sudden stops and capital reversals, hit developing countries. Indeed, the absence of safe heavens and very low yields in developed countries eased the pressure on developing countries during the recent financial crisis of 2008-2009. If developed economies get their safe haven status back, developing countries might face new financial shocks. In this sense developing countries would experience new financial crises in this new period. We will elaborate on the possible conditions of these prospective financial crises in this thesis.

Urban nature provides local ecosystem services such as absorption of air pollutants, reduction of noise, and provision of places for recreation, and is therefore crucial to urban sustainable development. Nature conservation in cities is also part of the global effort to halt biodiversity decline. Urban landscapes, however, display     distinguishing social and ecological characteristics and therefore the implementation of nature conservation frameworks into cities, requires reconsideration of what nature to preserve, for whom and where. The aim of this thesis was to examine the current urban nature conservation with special focus on formally protected areas, and discuss their future role in the urban landscape. A social-ecological systems approach was used as framework and both quantitative and qualitative methods were applied. The studies were performed at local to regional scales in the southern part of Sweden. Four key questions were addressed: i) What are the characteristics of nature conservation in urban landscapes? ii) How does establishment of nature conservation areas affect the surrounding urban landscape? iii) In what ways are spatial and temporal scales recognized in practical management of nature conservation areas? and iv) How can the dichotomy of built up and nature conservation areas be overcome in urban planning? Nature reserves in urban, compared to rural landscapes were in general fewer, but larger and included a higher diversity of land covers. They were also based on a higher number and different kinds of objectives than rural nature reserves. Urbanisation adjacent to nature reserves followed the general urbanisation patterns in the cities and no additional increase in urban settlements could be detected. In general, there was a lack of social and ecological linkages between the nature conservation areas and the urban landscape and practical management showed a limited recognition of cross-scale interactions and meso-scales. Such conceptual and physical isolation risks decreasing the public support for nature conservation, cause biodiversity decline, and hence impact the generation of ecosystem services. A major future challenge is therefore to transform current conservation strategies to become a tool where urban nature is perceived, planned and managed as valuable and integrated parts of the city. To enable social-ecological synergies, future urban planning should address proactive approaches together with key components like active enhancement of multifunctional landscapes, cross-scale strategies and border zone management. / At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 3: Submitted. Paper 5: Manuscript.

This study is a contribution to the development of the theory of bank portfolio selection behaviour. A central idea in the study is that this behaviour can be explained to a large extent by liquidity considerations which banks make in view of the partly uncontrollable and partly unforeseeable fluctuations which occur in their deposits and to a certain extent, also in their loans. This idea was presented originally in a now-classic article by Edgeworth entitled "The Mathematical Theory of Banking" which was published in 1888 and which has been the basis for a number of studies published in the past few decades. In the present study Edgeworth1s approach is developed in a number of different respects. At the same time, it is integrated with two other significant theory formations regarding banks' portfolio selection behaviour: (i) the well-known theory of the bank system's credit multiplier process which is found in many textbooks, and (ii) the related theory of the adjustment in the bank system's free reserves. Special attention is given to the effects of monetary policy. / digitalisering@umu

A series of experiments were conducted during 2005 and 2006 to evaluate five perennial grass species for forage yield and quality, steer performance and grazing capacity, animal intake, plant energy reserves and economic return under grazed conditions. In 1999, two 0.8 ha replicates each of Paddock meadow bromegrass (<i>Bromus riparius</i>Rehm.), Carlton smooth bromegrass (<i>Bromus inermis</i>Leyss.) and AC Knowles hybrid bromegrass (<i>B. riparius</i> x <i>B. inermis</i>) were seeded. In 2003, two 0.8 ha replicates each of AC Goliath crested wheatgrass (<i>Agropyron cristatum </i> (L.) Gaertn.), hybrid bromegrass, and Courtenay tall fescue (<i>Festuca arundinacea </i> Schreb.) were seeded. A long established stand of crested wheatgrass acted as the control pasture. For 2003 established pastures, AC Goliath crested wheatgrass (7515 kg ha-1) had greater (P<0.05) cumulative dry matter yield than hybrid bromegrass (3136 kg ha-1) during the 2005 grazing season. Average (2005-2006) crude protein (CP) was greatest (P<0.05) for hybrid and smooth bromegrass for 1999 established pastures at start and middle of period one. Control pastures had the greatest (P<0.05) neutral detergent fiber (NDF) mid-grazing period. Over 2 years, smooth bromegrass had greater acid detergent fiber (ADF) (P<0.05) than control pastures at the end of the grazing period one. Average (2005-2006) in vitro organic matter digestibility (IVOMD) was greatest for hybrid and meadow bromegrass (P<0.05) at the start of grazing period one. Control pastures (129 g kg-1) had lower CP levels at the start of the 2005-2006 (average) grazing period 1 (P<0.05) compared to species seeded in 2003. Control and hybrid bromegrass pastures had the greatest NDF and ADF levels at the start of grazing period 1 (2005-2006 average) while tall fescue pastures had the lowest (P<0.05) NDF and ADF levels. Over 2 years, control pastures had the lowest IVOMD at start of grazing (P<0.05). In 2006, hybrid and smooth bromegrass had greater etiolated re-growth than control pastures (P<0.05). In 2006, grazed plants seeded in 1999 had greater (P<0.05) etiolated re-growth than ungrazed plants. For 2003 seeded grasses, crested wheatgrass produced greater (P<0.05) etiolated re-growth than tall fescue and control pastures. Average daily gain was similar (P>0.05) for all 1999 and 2003 seeded grasses. Overall, bromegrasses seeded in 1999 produced greater animal grazing days (AGD) than control pastures (P<0.05). Total beef production (TBP) was greater (P<0.05) for hybrid and meadow bromegrass compared to the control. All species seeded in 2003 produced greater AGD (P<0.05) compared to the control. Crested wheatgrass produced greater (P<0.05) TBP than the control over both years of the study. The C33:C32 alkane ratio estimated greater DMI (P<0.05) for hybrid bromegrass (9.9 kg d-1) and control pastures (9.6 kg d-1) compared to crested wheatgrass (6.8 kg d-1) or tall fescue (6.8 kg d-1) during period 1 in 2006. Over 2 years, net return to labor, equity and personal draw was greater (P<0.05) for hybrid bromegrass ($91.24 ha-1) compared to the control (-$54.32 ha-1). For 2003 seeded pastures, all pastures generated positive returns over 2 years. Crested wheatgrass ($92.49 ha-1) had greater net return than control pastures (-$54.32 ha-1) (P<0.05). Finally, the results of this grazing study indicate beef producers can manage these grasses during the summer grazing season and maintain high levels of animal performance and pasture production. This study has demonstrated that bromegrasses, crested wheatgrass and tall fescue could work well in a complementary grazing system.

The importance of the Hotelling Valuation Principle (HVP) in economic study lies in its ability to examine and drive the decision of how much of a non-renewable natural resource to produce now versus how much to conserve for future generations - the root of natural resource policy, conservation, regulation, and taxation. Hotelling (1931) assumes that net price (selling price less cost per unit of production) will grow at the discount rate, which in a deterministic setting implies that reserve value is equal to current net price. However, the application of this ideal theory to the oil and gas industry may be difficult.<p>The oil and gas industry is influenced by government regulation, potential monopolistic forces, and well production characteristics - each of which violate the assumptions of Hotellings (1931) basic theory. How these violations affect the HVP is an open question. Most have the effect of limiting current supply, and thus driving prices higher than they would be in a perfectly competitive market. On the other hand, at least in the Canadian context, government regulation tends to increase costs, whereas technological advancement tends to reduce costs. The net result of these effects on future net prices and their discounted value, and therefore the effect on the HVP, is not clear a priori.<p>Another problem relating Hotellings (1931) basic theory to the oil and gas industry lies in the stochastic nature of a firms future net prices and extraction quantities, the product of which gives the firms future cash flows. Correlation between quantity and net price may result from expanding production when prices are high and reducing production when prices are low. Of course such correlation will affect the expected cash flows, and therefore firm value. Or, in other words, the ability to adjust production quantity provides real options for oil and gas firms which may add value.<p>Previous tests of the HVP on oil and gas reserves have utilized data that may contain confounding information that results in unreliable conclusions. The two major deficiencies include using (1) acquisition values, which utilize basin-average rather than firm specific net price data, and (2) conventional oil and gas company market valuations, which incorporate additional management exploration expertise value beyond the reserves value.<p>This study contributes to the literature by providing a more definitive test of the HVP through the use of Canadian oil and gas royalty trusts. These pure play publicly traded entities are focused on production rather than exploration and essentially remediate the deficiencies found in previous literature. Additionally, I include an ancillary variable to proxy real option value and control variables for firm characteristics such as oil weighting (proportion of oil relative to natural gas reserves), reserve quality (proportion of proven producing reserves relative to proven non-producing reserves), and firm size (based on enterprise value). This gives the reader a better understanding of value drivers in the Canadian oil and gas royalty trust sector and how they relate to the HVP.<p>My study generally fails to find support for the HVP. In particular, the results indicate that the HVP overestimates reserve value. This suggests that market participants expect net prices to grow at a rate significantly lower than the fair cost of capital, and production constraints limiting the extraction rate are binding. I do find that the real option proxy explains a significant amount of the difference between the value observed and the value predicted by the HVP. This differs markedly from what previous literature on the HVP applied to market data for the oil and gas industry documents. Each of these papers fails to reject the HVP. The fact that I generally find the value to be lower than that predicted by the HVP is not surprising given the previous literature using market data to test it. Since these studies use conventional oil and gas companies, which likely overvalue reserves because of an exploration premium, finding support for the HVP likely means that royalty trusts will likely correspond to a value lower than that predicted. The difference could account for the exploration premium. On the other hand, when I use the log-linear specification over the second, more volatile sub-sample, I also fail to reject Hotellings theoretical value, which is consistent with previous literature using market data.

Environmental monitoring initiatives are typically conceived as strictly scientific affairs designed to provide support for managerial decision-making; as a consequence most initiatives are centered on a formal mandate or an overarching mission statement that provides direction for monitoring activity. But official frameworks tend to marginalize lay perspectives as experts pursue disciplinary rigor at the expense of public input, a situation not in keeping with the spirit of the biosphere reserve concept. This thesis argues that an alternative design approach that reaches beyond scientists and resource managers is necessary. Environmental monitoring under an ecosystem approach is subject to scientific, social, and bureaucratic demands that defy easy disentanglement. A medley of factors influence how data are collected, interpreted, and used; neglect of these 'soft' dimensions runs the risk of failing to win the enduring support of stakeholders. There is a need to coordinate activity and to partially align multiple perspectives-this is the 'soft underbelly' of integrated monitoring that gets short shrift in most designs. While there is much monitoring being done in and around the Long Point World Biosphere Reserve, there is little coordination among monitoring groups and no obvious way to combine disparate data sets in a meaningful way. This thesis describes the elements of a locally-sensible framework for monitoring practice that is mainly concerned with trying to make sense of confusing and ambiguous situations; it strives to integrate the 'why', 'what', and 'how' of monitoring in as transparent a manner as possible by crafting 'boundary objects' that help to congeal understanding and provide centers of coordination. Using principles of participatory design in the soft-systems tradition, the overall intent is to primarily support sense-making, not decision-making; to generate searching questions, not final solutions; to facilitate learning, not control.

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.

The total amount of frequency deviations have during the last decade increased exponentially in the Nordic synchronous power system. The transmission system operators have therefore decided to implement load frequency control as a new automatic control system to stem these frequency deviations. The aim of this feasibility study is to analyse the effects of an LFC implementation in Swedish hydropower stations by using a more dynamic river governing. The method chosen to analyse the effects of LFC-governing was to create a Matlab Simulink hydropower station library including dynamic modules for rivers and turbine governors. The library is then used to create a river reach that is implemented in an ENTSO-E model for the Nordic frequency reserves. The governing of the river uses economical dispatch theory to optimally distribute a LFC setpoint signal from the ENTSO-E model to the different hydropower stations. Results show that the developed method has a future potential to create more frequency controlled reserves. By creating a central governing unit it was possible to govern frequency controlled reserves over an entire river reach under certain scenarios, but there are still many obstacles to overcome before an actual implementation. The method does however show both the possibilities and drawback of frequency controlled reserves in cascade coupled hydropower systems.

Environmental monitoring initiatives are typically conceived as strictly scientific affairs designed to provide support for managerial decision-making; as a consequence most initiatives are centered on a formal mandate or an overarching mission statement that provides direction for monitoring activity. But official frameworks tend to marginalize lay perspectives as experts pursue disciplinary rigor at the expense of public input, a situation not in keeping with the spirit of the biosphere reserve concept. This thesis argues that an alternative design approach that reaches beyond scientists and resource managers is necessary. Environmental monitoring under an ecosystem approach is subject to scientific, social, and bureaucratic demands that defy easy disentanglement. A medley of factors influence how data are collected, interpreted, and used; neglect of these 'soft' dimensions runs the risk of failing to win the enduring support of stakeholders. There is a need to coordinate activity and to partially align multiple perspectives-this is the 'soft underbelly' of integrated monitoring that gets short shrift in most designs. While there is much monitoring being done in and around the Long Point World Biosphere Reserve, there is little coordination among monitoring groups and no obvious way to combine disparate data sets in a meaningful way. This thesis describes the elements of a locally-sensible framework for monitoring practice that is mainly concerned with trying to make sense of confusing and ambiguous situations; it strives to integrate the 'why', 'what', and 'how' of monitoring in as transparent a manner as possible by crafting 'boundary objects' that help to congeal understanding and provide centers of coordination. Using principles of participatory design in the soft-systems tradition, the overall intent is to primarily support sense-making, not decision-making; to generate searching questions, not final solutions; to facilitate learning, not control.

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.