Master of Arts / Department of Economics / William F. Blankenau / The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of the consumption, investing, and savings data across racial minority categories within the United States. This paper examines the three biggest minority racial categories within the United States. These three racial categories include Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. Consumption patterns across minority groups are examined in Chapter 2. These patterns give insights into the annual purchasing decisions of Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. Many of the choices in budget allocation to specific categories have consequences and implications that are explained at the end of this chapter. Chapter 3 focuses on savings characteristics of minority populations in the United States. 401k plans, IRAs, and other retirement plans are examined for different savings behaviors and rates across minority groups. This paper examines the savings attitudes and survey responses of participants to get a feel of the overall savings climate across racial groups. Chapter 4 examines the investment behaviors and attitudes of different minorities. The financial risk tolerance and portfolio composition of different minority groups are examined to gain insights into the large wealth gap between Whites and minorities in the United States. In addition, this paper examines the hypothesized reasons for the differences between racial categories in consumption, investing, and saving choices. In Chapter 5, I explore the different theories and assumptions presented in the literature on these topics in order to give the reader insight into why racial groups might make different consumption, investment, and savings decisions even when controlling for socioeconomic variables. The final chapter explains the consequences of consumption, investment, and savings decisions for the individual, the community, and the United States.

M.Com. (Economics) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

The nature of employee retirement plans has changed dramatically over the past fifteen years as employers have been replacing traditional defined benefit retirement plans with defined contribution plans like the 401(k) plan. This dissertation is focused on the impact that 401(k) plan have on household asset accumulation. The first essay looks at how much asset accumulation can be attributed to 401(k) plans as opposed to other factors such as demographics and saver type characteristics. Overall, the conclusions are consistent with recent research that says these plans induce a reshuffling of assets rather than being funded through a reduction in consumption. Controlling for cohort effects reduces the amount of wealth attributable to 401(k) eligibility to a negligible (and statistically insignificant) amount. The second essay considers the impact that borrowing against the assets in 401(k) plan might have on household asset accumulation. Most personal finance advice warns against borrowing against a retirement plan because of the potential negative impact on retirement wealth. This is especially true for borrowers who are also undisciplined savers and do not or cannot maintain their retirement plan contributions during loan period or who separate from their employers before the loan is repaid. For good savers a retirement plan loan only has a modest impact on retirement wealth. Only modest make-up contributions would need to be made to mitigate the impact of a retirement plan loan. It seems that many borrowers may be using retirement loans because they are in financial difficulty. It also appears that borrowers are trying to maintain their retirement savings, but their asset accumulation within broader measures of wealth is below that of households that do not have outstanding 401(k) loans.

Doctor Educationis / Formal microfinance institutions have been an important tool in the fight against poverty in developing countries, but their reach for rural people and urban slum poor are limited. Following this, Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) are established as an alternative, informal mechanism for saving and borrowing that do not require external capital or ongoing financial or administrative support from a founding organization or government bodies. Thus, this study aimed to assess the effects of women participation in VSLA on poverty reduction with a case study in Hawassa city, Ethiopia. Using a mixed qualitative and quantitative research methodology, the study tried to focus on examining the effects of VSLAs contribution to economic and social wellbeing of households, and decision makings, and women participation in community activities. The study used 254 samples (127 VSLA participants, and 127 non-participants) and collected data using questionnaire and focus group discussion. The study used propensity score matching (PSM) to estimate the impact of women participation in VSLA on average monthly household income, and the result indicated the average effect of women participation in VSLA on average monthly household income of participant women is positive and significant at 5% significant level, ranging from 169.63 Birr/month (nearest neighbor matching) to 141.55 Birr/month (Kernel matching), on average. Besides, comparison between participants and non-participants using hypothesis testing shows that women participation in VSLA has a significant positive association with improvements in household diet, health, children’s education, and women’s involvement in household decisions. However, although hypothesized, no significant association is found in relation to women participation in community activities. Findings from the focus group discussions are also consistent with the results from the PSM and hypothesis testing. Following the findings, the study recommends government and nongovernmental organizations to provide regular, timely and need based capacity building trainings for VSLA participants; Link VSLA participants with formal microfinance institutions; conduct regular monitoring and follow ups by either the city or sub-cities Women Children Affairs Department/offices or concerned government body; different concerned stakeholders in the city including government, nongovernmental organizations, microfinance institutions and others need to work in coordinated manner to solve the recurrent challenges of VSLA participants in Hawassa city; and finally government and/or nongovernmental organizations need to take best practices and lessons from existing VSLAs and expand the VSLA initiative to address more impoverished women in the city.

Student Number : 0204752J - MSc research report - School of Construction Economics and Management - Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment / Most governments in developing countries are unable to assist in the ever-growing housing needs of the informal sector, which constitutes the major part of most economies. The two reasons for this state of affairs are (i) the ever-shrinking resource base of countries, which makes the provision of subsidies impractical; and (ii) the fact that this sector is normally characterized by irregular incomes, which makes provision for loans by financial institutions difficult. This situation is particularly true for the Kingdom of Lesotho. Due to their unfortunate predicament, the informal sector has become innovative in addressing their housing needs. Various informal credit methods are widely employed to finance their houses, which are built progressively. This research therefore investigates the possibilities of linking the progressive housing investment to bank housing finance, using Maseru - Lesotho as the research focus. In order to achieve the above aim, a household survey was conducted coupled with structured interviews. The structured interviews were held with the commercial banks as well as the government housing authorities. These interviews were mainly to elicit their views about the option of Microfinance of housing. It was established that the respondents as well as the government authorities were not aware of this option. The banks were equally unaware of it and in addition to this, the perceived risk led to skepticism. As such these made Microfinance of housing impractical in the short-run. However it would be advisable to mobilize the formation of a revolving fund to which the commercial banks could on-lend, as a solution to the lack of housing finance.

<p>A halftoning method with Neugebauer Primary Area Coverage direct binary search (NPAC-DBS) is developed. With the optimized human visual system (HVS) model, we are able obtain homogeneous and smooth halftone colored image. The halftoning is based on separating the colored image represented in Neugebauer Primary in three channels based on human visual system, with swap-only DBS, we arrange the dots to bring the error metric to its minimum and the optimized halftone image is obtained. The separation of chrominance HVS filters between red-green and blue-yellow channels allows us to represent HVS more accurately. Color halftone images generated using this method and method of using traditional screening methods are compared.</p> <p>In order to speed up the halftone process with similar quality of NPAC-DBS, we developed PARAWACS screens for color halftoning. PARAWACS screen is designed level by level using DBS. With PARAWACS screen, we can create halftone using simple pixel by pixel comparison with the merit of DBS. We further optimized the screen to achieve the best quality.</p> <p>Next, a novel halftoning method that we call Ink-Saving, Single-Frequency, Single-Angle, Multi-Drop (IS-SF-SA-MD) halftoning is introduced. The application target for our algorithm is high-volume production ink-jet printing in which the user will value a reduction in ink usage. Unlike commercial offset printing in which four-colorant printing is achieved by rotating a single screen to four different angles, our method uses a single frequency screen at a single angle, and it depends on accurate registration between colorant planes to minimize dot-overlap especially between the black (K) colorant and the other colorants (C, M, and Y). To increase the number of gray levels for each colorant, we exploit the multidrop capabilities of the target writing system. We also use the hybrid screening method to yield improved halftone texture in the highlights and shadows. The proposed method can help preserve ink significantly.</p>

In the early nineteenth-century United States, many social reformers, public commentators, and legislators argued that workers must engage in prudent financial planning in order to remain independent in a capitalist economy. Their belief that personal mismanagement was the primary cause of poverty led some of them to create the first financial institutions to help Americans of limited means save and invest their earnings: savings banks. From this modest start rose both a widespread ideology that related personal financial practice to personal virtue and a multibillion dollar industry that used the savings of millions of American workers to finance government, business, and personal debt. "Little Capitalists" charts this evolution from the philanthropic savings banks of the early-nineteenth century to the myriad commercial, cooperative, and public financial institutions for the working classes of the early-twentieth century. It shows how conceptions of individual and civic responsibility interacted with actual savings practices to integrate American workers into the national economy, building the financial apparatus that funded the expansion of wage-labor capitalism by harnessing the capital of wage laborers themselves. American institutional savings pioneers sought to address increased poverty wrought by urban growth and the creation of a wage-earning class in the first half of the nineteenth century. These reformers organized the country's original savings banks on the premise that all workers were capable of saving some of their earnings--no matter how little--so that they could remain financially independent in times of unemployment, injury, or old age. Their institutions tried to teach workers how to save money by providing secure facilities in which they could do so in the small amounts that no other financial institutions would handle. They also offered depositors a chance to earn a small profit from interest paid on deposits. Because this interest derived from investing those deposits in securities, mortgages, and other loans, savings banks brought millions of nineteenth-century wage earners into the American economy as investors. In this way, these institutions promoted the idea that working-class depositors could be their own "capitalists." As more Americans saved growing amounts, legislators, political economists, social reformers, and other observers took it as evidence that any worker who exercised virtues like thrift and self-denial could save money. Because generations of Americans viewed these personal attributes as the bases of moral civilization, they increasingly looked to savings institutions to foster a better citizenry and nation. The US Congress chartered the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company after the Civil War not only to provide financial services to former slaves but also to train them for a life of citizenship grounded in the principles of free labor ideology. Likewise, a nationwide movement beginning in the late-nineteenth century brought together governments, educators, and bankers to create a system of school savings banks to inculcate virtue in children by teaching them how to save pennies and nickels. In both cases, the point was to mold a working class steeped in the social, political, and moral values that would make them amenable to the emerging system of wage-labor capitalism. Even as some savings institutions attempted social indoctrination, workers' growing deposits also demonstrated their financial power. From the 1870s to the 1910s, this motivated entrepreneurs and legislators to design and encourage new institutions to collect savings deposits and invest them widely, including: industrial life insurance firms, employee thrift plans, trust company and commercial bank savings departments, and a postal savings system. Meanwhile, organizations like building and loan associations slowly added the extension of working-class credit to the collection of working-class savings. These new institutions gave many Americans increased discretion over how to save (and spend) money. But as they began to utilize them, workers also became a significant component of the nation's for-profit finance economy as both creditors and debtors. In the process, they assumed new financial risk. "Little Capitalists" outlines this history. It shows how a group of social experiments designed to foster an independent working class in the early-nineteenth century spawned, by the second decade of the twentieth century, both an ideology of saving at the center of popular perceptions about good citizenship and a small finance industry that was indispensable to the American economy.

<p>Ever-increasing need for freight transportation and mounting environmental concerns call for a cleaner and more efficient energy source. Hybrid electric vehicles have shown potential to reduce both petroleum usage as well as harmful emissions. In this thesis, a newly developed series hybrid electric powertrain by a small start-up company is studied on a route between Florence, Kentucky and Cambridge, Ohio hubs to evaluate potential fuel savings due to hybridization.</p> <p> </p> <p>An experimental testing protocol to calculate fuel economy has been developed and the real-world fuel economy of this hybrid electric powertrain is calculated. A vehicle simulation model representing the experimental powertrain is created in Autonomie and this vehicle model is simulated on three distinct drive cycles obtained from experimental testing phase. These results are compared with a conventional class 8 truck to evaluate fuel savings. The simulation analysis indicates that fuel economy of hybrid is better on only one of the three drive cycles under consideration. Further, it is determined that the existing powertrain does not meet the gradeability criterion. To remedy this, a series electric hybrid powertrain with different compo-</p> <p>nent sizes is then modeled and simulated on the same drive cycles. The modified powertrain is found to result in fuel economy improvement on all three drive cycles considered while also meeting the gradeability requirement. The effect of drive cycle on fuel economy of a hybrid powertrain is also studied in this thesis.</p><br>

The study is designed to assess the presence or absence of recognizable planning processes within the savings and loan industry in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex. Planning processes found are analyzed as to their content and scope in order to describe them in as accurate a manner as possible.

This thesis deals with the fiscal behavior of households within the Czech Republic. The main areas of interest are the appropriate management of personal or family finance and the importance of household budgeting. It shows that the awareness of ones income and expenses are the basis of a financial literacy, which is still at an insufficient level. Such households are thus regarded as a weaker market article, which have to be protected either by means of education, awareness raising or modifying legislation in their favor. Specific elements in the protection of clients are intertwined throughout the work. The thesis also deals with the relationship of Czech households to consumption, savings and debt. It records the specific period of changing attitudes to the way we deal with money and establishes that households that are no longer thrifty, consume more and loans become a common part of life for them. The thesis also concentrates on the most used financial products, specifying the reason for their popularity. Also, the consequences of poor household management are described and international comparisons are included as well.