This thesis analyzes the location and size distribution of arts and entertainment industries in Sweden as well as the size distribution of Swedish labor market regions. Several sectors of the arts and entertainment industry are investigated empirically by comparing their location and overall capacity to the size of their respective markets and testing their conformity with the rank-size rule. The analyzed establishments are opera houses, football stadiums, concert performances and movie theaters. The results are brought in context with transportation cost, market size, subsidies and optimal firm size. In conclusion, most arts and entertainment industries tend to locate close to urban agglomerations, their distributions in general follow the distribution of the population as determined by the labor market regions. Exceptions occur when the identified market differs significantly from the general population or when large amounts of subsidies distort the natural distribution

<p>This thesis analyzes the location and size distribution of arts and entertainment industries in Sweden as well as the size distribution of Swedish labor market regions. Several sectors of the arts and entertainment industry are investigated empirically by comparing their location and overall capacity to the size of their respective markets and testing their conformity with the rank-size rule. The analyzed establishments are opera houses, football stadiums, concert performances and movie theaters. The results are brought in context with transportation cost, market size, subsidies and optimal firm size. In conclusion, most arts and entertainment industries tend to locate close to urban agglomerations, their distributions in general follow the distribution of the population as determined by the labor market regions. Exceptions occur when the identified market differs significantly from the general population or when large amounts of subsidies distort the natural distribution</p>

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Also available in print.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Economics and Finance / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

The focus of my PhD research has been on the acquisition of computational modeling and simulation methods used in both theoretical and applied Economics. My first chapter provides an interactive review of finite-difference methods for solving systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) commonly encountered in economic applications using Python. The methods surveyed in this chapter, as well as the accompanying code and IPython lab notebooks should be of interest to any researcher interested in applying finite-difference methods for solving ODEs to economic problems. My second chapter is an empirical analysis of the evolution of the distribution of bank size in the U.S. This paper assesses the statistical support for Zipf's Law (i.e., a power law, or Pareto, distribution with a scaling exponent of α = 2) as an appropriate model for the upper tail of the distribution of U.S. banks. Using detailed balance sheet data for all FDIC regulated banks for the years 1992 through 2011, I find significant departures from Zipf's Law for most measures of bank size inmost years. Although Zipf's Law can be statistically rejected, a power law distribution with α of roughly 1.9 statistically outperforms other plausible heavy-tailed alternative distributions. In my final chapter, which is based on joint work with Dr. David Comerford, I apply computational methods to model the relationship between per capita income and city size. A well-known result from the urban economics literature is that a monopolistically competitive market structure combined with internal increasing returns to scale can be used to generate log-linear relations between income and population. I extend this theoretical framework to allow for a variable elasticity of substitution between factors of production in a manner similar to Zhelobodko et al. (2012). Using data on Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the U.S. I find evidence that supports what Zhelobodko et al. (2012) refer to as "increasing relative love for variety (RLV)." Increasing RLV generates procompetitive effects as market size increases which means that IRS, whilst important for small to medium sized cities, are exhausted as cities become large. This has important policy implications as it suggests that focusing intervention on creating scale for small populations is potentially much more valuable than further investments to increase market size in the largest population centers.

Pagrindinis darbo tikslas – pritaikyti matematinius ir statistinius metodus lietuvių kalbos analizėje, identifikuojant ir atsižvelgiant į lietuvių kalbos ypatumus, jos heterogeniškumą, sudėtingumą ir variabilumą. / The target of the work is to apply mathematical and statistical methods in the analysis of the Lithuanian language by identifying and taking into account peculiarities of the Lithuanian language, its heterogeneity, complexity and variability.

The target of the work is to apply mathematical and statistical methods in the analysis of the Lithuanian language by identifying and taking into account peculiarities of the Lithuanian language, its heterogeneity, complexity and variability. / Pagrindinis darbo tikslas – pritaikyti matematinius ir statistinius metodus lietuvių kalbos analizėje, identifikuojant ir atsižvelgiant į lietuvių kalbos ypatumus, jos heterogeniškumą, sudėtingumą ir variabilumą.

Zipf’s law is one of the empirical statistical regularities found within many natural systems, ranging from protein sequences of immune receptors in cells to the intensity of solar flares from the sun. Verifying the universality of Zipf’s law can provide many opportunities for us to further seek the commonalities of phenomena that possess the power law behavior. Since power law-like phenomena, as many studies have previously indicated, is often interpreted as evidence for studying complex systems, exploring the universality of Zipf’s law is also of potential capability in explaining underlying generative mechanisms and endogenous processes, i.e. self-organization and chaos theory. The main purpose of this study was to verify whether Zipf’s law is valid for city sizes, city numbers and population extracted from natural cities. Unlike traditional city boundaries extracted by applying census-imposed and top-down imposed data, which are arbitrary and subjective, the study established the new kind of boundaries of cities, namely, natural cities through using four location-based social media data from Twitter, Brightkite, Gowalla and Freebase and head/tail breaks rule. In order to capture and quantify the hierarchical level for studying heterogeneous scales of cities, ht-index derived from head/tail breaks rule was employed. Furthermore, the validation of Zipf’s law was examined. The result revealed that the natural cities had deviations in subtle patterns when different social media data were examined. By employing head/tail breaks method, the result calculated the ht-index and detected that hierarchy levels were not largely influenced by spatial-temporal changes but rather data itself. On the other hand, the study found that Zipf’s law is not universal in the case of using location-based social media data. Compared to city numbers extracted from nightlight imagery, the study found out the reason why Zipf’s law does not hold for location-based social media data, i.e. due to bias of customer behavior. The bias mainly resulted in the emergence of natural cities were much more frequent than others in certain regions and countries so that making the emergence of natural cities was not exhibited objectively. Furthermore, the study showed whether Zipf’s law could be well observed depends not only on the data itself and man-made limitations but also on calculation methods, data precisions and scales and the idealized status of observed data.

Moore's Law has helped Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) scale continuously in speed, capacity and energy efficiency, allowing the integration of ever-larger systems into a single FPGA chip. This brings challenges to the productivity of developers in leveraging the sea of FPGA resources. Higher level of design abstractions and programming models are needed to improve the design productivity, which in turn require memory architectural supports on FPGAs. While previous efforts focus on computation-centric applications, we take a bandwidth-centric approach in designing memory systems. In particular, we investigate the scheduling, buffered switching and searching problems, which are common to a wide range of FPGA applications. Despite that the bandwidth problem has been extensively studied for general-purpose computing and application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designs, the proposed techniques are often not applicable to FPGAs. In order to achieve optimized design implementations, designers need to take into consideration both the underlying FPGA physical characteristics as well as the requirements from applications. We therefore extract design requirements from four driving applications for the selected problems, and address them by exploiting the physical architectures and available resources of FPGAs. Towards solving the selected problems, we manage to advance state-of-the-art with a scheduling algorithm, a switch organization and a cache analytical model. These lead to performance improvements, resource savings and feasibilities of new approaches for well-known problems.