(None) Technical Summary of Thesis: The topic of my thesis is currency crisis. Currency crises have been a recurrent feature of the international economy from the invention of paper money. They are not confined to particular economies or specific region. They take place in developed, emerging, and developing countries and are spread all over the globe. Countries that experience currency crises face economic losses that can be huge and disruptive. However, the exacted toll is not only financial and economic, but also human, social, and political. It is clear that the currency crisis is a real threat to financial stability and economic prosperity. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the determinants of currency crises for twenty OECD countries and South Africa from 1970 through 1998. It systematically examines the role of economic fundamentals and contagion in the origins of currency crises and empirically attempts to identify the channels through which the crises are being transmitted. It also examines the links between the incidence of currency crises and the choice of exchange rate regimes as well as the impact of capital market liberalization policies on the occurrence of currency crises. The first chapter identifies the episodes of currency crisis in our data set. Determining true crisis periods is a vital step in the empirical studies and has direct impact on the reliability of their estimations and the relevant policy implications. We define a period as a crisis episode when the Exchange Market Pressure (EMP) index, which consists of changes in exchange rates, reserves, and interest rates, exceeds a threshold. In order to minimize the concerns regarding the accuracy of identified crisis episodes, we apply extreme value theory, which is a more objective approach compared to other methods. In this chapter, we also select the reference country, which a country’s currency pressure index should be built around, in a more systematic way rather than by arbitrary choice or descriptive reasoning. The second chapter studies the probability of a currency exiting a tranquil state into a crisis state. There is an extensive literature on currency crises that empirically evaluate the roots and causes of the crises. Despite the interesting results of the current empirical literature, only very few of them account for the influence of time on the probability of crises. We use duration models that rigorously incorporate the time factor into the likelihood functions and allow us to investigate how the amount of time that a currency has already spent in the tranquil state affects the stability of a currency. Our findings show that high values of volatility of unemployment rates, inflation rates, contagion factors (which mostly work through trade channels), unemployment rates, real effective exchange rate, trade openness, and size of economy increases the hazard of a crisis. We make use of several robustness checks, including running our models on two different crisis episodes sets that are identified based on monthly and quarterly type spells. The third chapter examines the links between the incidence of currency crises and the choice of exchange rate regimes as well as the impact of capital market liberalization policies on the occurrence of currency crises. As in our previous paper, duration analysis is our methodology to study the probability of a currency crisis occurrence under different exchange rate regimes and capital mobility policies. The third chapter finds that there is a significant link between the choice of exchange rate regime and the incidence of currency crises in our sample. Nevertheless, the results are sensitive to the choice of the de facto exchange rate system. Moreover, in our sample, capital control policies appear to be helpful in preventing low duration currency crises. The results are robust to a wide variety of sample and models checks.

In an era of dawning anthropogenic climate change, people of atoll nations face grievous threats to their future. Rising sea levels, warming oceans, and changing weather patterns conspire with economic isolation, rapidly growing populations, and the loss of traditional livelihoods to perpetuate conditions of dependence and wardship which threaten the very existence of their island homes. This project examines an atoll nation of the equatorial Pacific, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, where the outward appearance of pristine tropical paradise belies a tragic history of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile testing at the hands of the US military. While the islands have been consistently framed in rhetoric which stresses vulnerability, smallness and unsustainability, this project contests the limited scope of the regimes of power in Oceania by considering how the independent, grassroots actions of local groups of islanders have achieved surprising and dramatic results in defiance of the policies and planners at the top. In developing a design proposal for the contemporary condition, this thesis examines the persistent ways in which the islands and people are framed by outsiders. This project engages with the social, political and natural history of the atolls: common tropes are challenged by the actions and agency of a people who have dealt with imperialist outsiders in sophisticated and conscious ways. It explores the traditional cultural practices which enabled the ancestors of the Marshallese people to flourish, and suggests that it is at the level of actions by ordinary people that the most fertile potentials lie, and are in fact already being played out. What forms of urbanism might be appropriate in this environment? How can islanders effectively manage their landscape and engage with the natural processes - as their ancestors once did to a remarkable degree? By pairing traditional techniques with modern technologies, a proposal is synthesized which could empower the contemporary Marshallese to transform their landscape and develop sustainable livelihoods in this extreme and dynamic environmental condition: to build a future which offers the best aspects of both traditional and contemporary ways of life.

In this study, the most prominent goodness-of-fit tests for censored samples are reviewed. Power properties of goodness-of-fit statistics of the null hypothesis that a sample which is censored from right, left and both right and left which comes from uniform, normal and exponential distributions are investigated. Then, by a similar argument extreme value, student t with 6 degrees of freedom and generalized logistic distributions are discussed in detail through a comprehensive simulation study. A variety of real life applications are given. Suitable test statistics for testing the above distributions for censored samples are also suggested in the conclusion.

This thesis focuses on the development of a distributed pair programming tool that enables two programmers to generate code together in JBuilder editor over the web. First, software development processes are generally reviewed and Extreme Programming, Distributed Extreme Programming, and Distributed Pair Programming issues are examined. The tools that enable Distributed Pair Programming are compared. This thesis also specifies the functional requirements of the newly presented tool and includes information about its design and implementation processes. Finally, an evaluation is given by indicating the positive and negative sides of the tool.

The aim of this research project was to estimate parameters for the distribution of annual maximum flood levels for the Zambezi River at Katima Mulilo. The estimation of parameters was done by using the maximum likelihood method. The study aimed to explore data of the Zambezi's annual maximum flood heights at Katima Mulilo by means of fitting the Gumbel, Weibull and the generalized extreme value distributions and evaluated their goodness of fit.

Impacts from climate change already pose major challenges for organizations and industrial systems, and vulnerabilities are expected to increase in the future, particularly in vulnerable sectors and locations. Findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that climate change related vulnerabilities of organizations and industries, but also of settlement and society as a whole, are mainly related to changes in the intensity and/or frequency of extreme weather, rather than to gradual climate change impacts. Organization researchers and managers, however, have not yet systematically considered the organizational implications of changes in trends of weather extremes, such as changes to the intensity and/or frequency of storms, floods, and droughts. While companies in the reinsurance industry (e.g., Munich Re, Swiss Re) have begun to undertake research into changes in trends of extremes, most current debates on climate change and corporate response are mainly focused on adaptation – that is, longer-term adjustments that organizations can take in response to policy and legislative changes and the observed gradual warming trend. The question of how organizations can cope with more frequent and/or intense weather extremes has largely remained outside of these debates. The thesis advances the notion that the resilience concept which originated in disciplines such as ecology and engineering may provide insights into dealing with new types of environmental change arising from changes in patterns of weather extremes. It emphasizes that organizational adaptation and resilience potentials are context-specific and related to the characteristics of particular climate change impacts. While organizations may be able to undergo steady adaptations to gradual climate change (such as gradual increases in mean temperatures), they might not be able to handle disruptions that go beyond this gradual trend and are related to changes in extremes. Included in this thesis are five papers that seek to provide a foundation for understanding, assessing and evaluating organizational responses to more frequent and/or intense weather extremes. The first paper serves as an introduction to the thesis, assesses the literatures on organizational adaptation and resilience, and proposes an initial model that draws together the different streams of literature on climate change, adaptation and resilience. The second paper extends on the themes of the first paper and provides a discussion of the concepts of adaptation and resilience, as well as their applicability to different types of climate change impacts. The third paper serves as a method paper and discusses assessment methods and pathway to study organizational resilience. The key difficulties identified in this paper are the uncertainties about future climate change outcomes across temporal and spatial scales and a lack of insight into what leads to organizational resilience, or which variables should be measured in a given study. The fourth paper is an empirical study about the 2009 Victorian Bushfires. While individual extreme events cannot be directly linked to climate change impacts, this study highlights that part of the problem in drawing out the resilience of organizations to an unprecedented and ‘more-severe-than-expected’ extreme event is that a range of contingent variables across organizational and societal and ecological levels are potentially relevant. The last paper discusses the potential inability of organization to adjust to changes in climate and weather, and implications in terms of a necessity of a geographical shift of organizational and industrial activities. The thesis highlights gaps in our understanding of organizational challenges and suggests avenues for future research.

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Thesis (Ph. D. in Chemical Engineering)--Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2008. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (MSc (Computer science))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.