This study investigates the macroeconomic consequences of firm-level accounting conservatism. Consistent with conditional conservatism extending to the aggregate level, I demonstrate that annual estimates of aggregate corporate profits and gross domestic product from 1929 to 2007 compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis are more sensitive to negative aggregate cash flow news than to positive aggregate cash flow news. Next, I estimate the dollar value impact of firm-level accounting conservatism on measurements of macroeconomic fundamentals. Finally, I show that the federal funds rate set by the U.S. Federal Reserve tends to be lower when the dollar value impact of firm-level accounting conservatism on gross domestic product measurements is larger. These results suggest that accounting can impact social welfare by altering the measurement attributes of key macroeconomic indicators and shaping monetary policy decisions which regulate the money supply and alter macroeconomic growth. / text

In the current era of globalization in supply chain, business continuity planning should play an even more important role than previously. Business continuity planning provides company with an analysis of potential business threatening situations, everything from natural disasters to supply shortages, and ensures that actions are taken in order to mitigate the probability that those risks will become reality. Business continuity planning does not come without a cost, since companies will in some cases have to spend money in actions like redundancies (e.g. supplier). In the Semiconductor industry, supply chains might are extremely complex and globalized. These supply chains can go from having suppliers in the United States, to front-end manufacturing in Europe, to back-end manufacturing and packaging in Asia. Raw materials for semiconductor manufacturing, for example raw wafers, can be found for above $500 per wafer. It is due to not only the complexity of the supply chain in semiconductors, but also due to the high costs of raw materials and manufacturing, that it is crucial for companies in this particular industry to ensure business continuity planning is taken seriously, and adequate measures are taken to mitigate as many risks to their supply chain as possible. / text

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

Introduction: The Office of Arid Lands Studies (OALS), the Water Resources Research Center (WRRC), of the University of Arizona, and the Arizona Water Commission (AWC) have developed a generalized data storage and retrieval system on the DEC-10 computer system at the University of Arizona for systematic reporting of water information (quality and quantity) within the State of Arizona. The objective of the on-line system is to expand the AWC's efficiency in answering routine questions regarding Arizona's water resources easily and on short notice through remote terminal access to hydrologic information. Currently, two files reside on AWIS whereby water-related information can be extracted for the entire State on either quarter- township basis or regionally by drainage basin. AWC is given authority to "collect and investigate information upon and prepare and devise means and plans for the development, conservation, and utilization of all waterways, watersheds, subterranean waters, groundwater basins and water resources in the State. . ." To this end, AWC is developing a State Water Plan, and the data residing on the two files in AWLS are part of the Plan's first phase--an inventory of the resource, current uses and associated problems as presented in Arizona Water Commission Report "Arizona State Water Plan, Inventory of Resources and Uses, Phase I, July, 1975."

Introduction: A trip was taken from July 3 to July 17, 1985 to Sudan to study the El Obeid compartmented reservoir system. This system supplies most of the domestic water for the city of El Obeid which has a population of 200,000 to 250,000 people. This water supply was exhausted in March of 1985 and the town was out of water until the monsoon rains began July 2, 1985. Approximately one week was spent in El Obeid and Kadugli. The remainder of the time was spent in Khartoum where the IBM PC was used. Some time was also spent in Khartoum in obtaining flattened ceramic spheres for evaporation control.

No description available.

During our study trip to Tanzania we discovered one of the great issues for farmers to be need of running water. So we asked ourselves: How can water from Lake Victoria be transported to the small scale farmer’s household and farm in the most optimized way? During the stay in North West of Tanzania we made field trips to the rural areas in Mara Region in order to understand the farmers who are the potential users. We performed semi structured interviews and observations during the whole field study. We also came to the conclusion that wind is a good source of power which can be used to pump water. The wind comes in from Lake Victoria in the same direction everyday. So therefore we decided to construct a water pumping wind power station for small scale farmers.

The term "Food Crops" as used in this thesis embraces Root Crops (which are generally referred to as "Ground Provisions" in Barbados), Fruit trees, Vegetables, and Seasonings. There are many types of these food crops cultivated in Barbados and it would be beyond the scope of this work to treat the cultivation of all of them in detail. All that shall be attempted therefore is a consideration of those crops commonly cultivated on the island. [...]

In this thesis, we study the statistical issues in lost sales inventory systems, focusing on the complexity arising from the stochastic demand. We model the demand by the Zero Inflated Poisson (ZIP) distribution. The maximum likelihood estimator of the ZIP parameters taking censoring into account are derived separately for the newsvendor and the (s, S) inventory systems. We also investigate the effect of the estimation errors on the optimal policies and their costs. We observe from a simulation study that the MLE taking censoring into account performed the best in terms of cost as well as policy among various estimates. We then proceed to develop a Bayesian dynamic updating scheme of the ZIP parameters. It is applied to the newsvendor system. We perform a simulation study to investigate the advantage of the Bayesian updating approach over the traditional MLE approach. We conclude that the Bayesian pproach offers a better learning technique when one lacks of good understanding of the demand pattern in the first few periods. Since inventory policy affects the information acquisition and-the demand distribution updating process, how to determine the optimal inventory policy when the demand distribution is yet to be learned is the focus of the latter part of the thesis. We investigate the effect of demand censoring on the optimal policy in newsvendor inventory models with general parametric demand distribution and unknown parameter values. We provide theoretical proof of the conjecture that it is better off to adopt a higher than the myopic optimal policy in the initial periods when demand is learned in a censoring system. We show that the newsvendor problem with observable lost sales reduces to a sequence of single-period problems while the newsvendor problem with unobservable lost sales requires a dynamic analysis. We explore the economic rationality for this observation and illustrate it with numerical examples.

The three essays in this thesis address various problems in the general area of supply chain management. In general, supply chain management is concerned with management of the flow of goods, information, and funds among supply chain members, such as suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and consumers. As such, its scope includes timing and quantity of material flow, logistics, improving efficiencies in problems with several decision makers, etc. The first essay in this thesis considers the problem of improving coordination in a decentralized system of retailers, while the second one addresses stability and profitability of Internet-based supply exchange alliances. The third essay analyzes a logistics problem, of finding an optimal route for a capacitated vehicle which travels on a graph and which can perform pickups and deliveries. In the first essay, we study a three-stage model of a decentralized distribution system with n retailers who each faces a stochastic demand for an identical product. In the first stage, before the demand is realized, each retailer independently orders her initial inventory. In the second stage, after the realization of the demand, each retailer decides what portion of her residual supply/demand she wants to share with the other retailers. In the third stage, residual inventories are transshipped in order to possibly meet residual demands, and an additional profit is allocated among the retailers. We study the effect of implementing various allocations rules in the third stage on the levels of the residual supply/demand the retailers are willing to share with others in the second stage, and the tradeoff involved in achieving a solution which is also optimal for the corresponding centralized system. The second essay is concerned with the formation of Internet-based supply exchange alliances among three or fewer retailers of possibly substitutable products. We provide some conditions, in terms of product substitutability and quality of suppliers, which would lead to the formation of a three member alliance, or a two member alliance, or no alliance at all. We also study the effect of alliance structure and quality of suppliers on the profit of a retailer. The third essay considers a vehicle routing problem with pickups and deliveries (VRPD problem) on some special graphs. Some vertices on the graph represent delivery customers, and other vertices represent pickup customers. The objective is to find a minimum length tour for a capacitated vehicle, which starts at a depot and travels on the graph while satisfying all the requests by the customers without violating the vehicle capacity constraint, and returns to a depot. We have developed linear time algorithms for the VRPD problem on a path and on tree graphs, linear and O (|V| log |V|) algorithm for a VRPD problem defined on a path with parametric initial capacity, and quadratic and O (|V|² log |V|) algorithms for a VRPD problem defined over a cycle graph.