Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University. / Subtitle of caption title on p. iv.: A comprehensive trust model based on the TRA/TPB. Includes bibliographical references.

The Renewable Fuel Standard requires US oil refineries to blend biofuels into domestic transportation fuels. To ensure that compliance costs under this mandate don’t disproportionately affect any subset of refiners, the regulation includes a compliance credit program, whereby refiners blending excess biofuels can sell their excess compliance to refiners that do not blend enough. The price of these credits can be interpreted as the marginal cost of compliance with the mandate. I measure how changes in the prices of these compliance credits affect the stock prices of oil refining firms. There are a number of ways one might expect these compliance credits to affect firms. Much economic research finds that oil refiners are able to pass the costs of RFS compliance to consumers quite easily, suggesting that changes in the compliance cost should not affect firms’ value at all. Large refiners tend to claim that the RFS imposes a large cost and drags down their profits. Perhaps the most interesting claim is that of the “merchant refiners”—generally small refiners who do not own the infrastructure to blend biofuels on their own and are thus forced to comply with the mandate completely with compliance credits. They claim that larger refiners are able to hoard the credits and sell them for windfall profits at the expense of the merchant refiners. My results indicate that positive shocks in compliance credit prices are associated with stock losses only among large, non-merchant refiners, and that even this association is small. This discredits the claims of merchant refiners, but opens a new puzzle: why are large, integrated refiners the only ones affected? I conclude my paper with a number of potential explanations, though I am not able to test between them using my data.

Although the 2005 EPAct was enacted to help bolster the emerging biofuel industry, 52% of advanced biofuel projects were closed or shut down by 2015. However, there are no complete lists of barriers that impeded these projects. The goal of this study was to develop a framework of barriers impeding success of advanced biofuel projects by conducting a literature review of barriers, spatial analysis of status, survey of barriers, and determination of coproducts and byproducts and their marketing and distribution barriers from the industry stakeholders. The spatial analysis indicated 59 biofuel projects were attempted, and their Eastern and Western location by status was not a barrier. Using Grounded Theory, nine barriers were derived and aggregated in major categories, including product development, strategy, technology, competition, energy costs, funding, government, suppliers, and third-party relations. A contingency analysis was conducted relating their status to internal and external barriers, indicating no relationship between type of closing and type of barrier. Next, the number of barriers was expanded to 23, and a survey was conducted to gain knowledge on these barriers from industry stakeholders. When comparing the barriers by stakeholders, there were differences based on status, type, and technology of the projects. In addition, the survey and discussion identified 79 barriers different across years, type of industry (pilot, demonstration, or commercial), status (open, closed, or planning), and technology (thermochemical, biochemical, or hybrid). Forty-seven coproducts and byproducts and many unknown barriers to their marketability and distribution were determined and ranked by primary and secondary barriers. These extensive lists of barriers and coproducts will aid future biofuels projects in their planning, research, and development stages. / Master of Science

Trismegistos (TM, http://www.trismegistos.org) is a metadata platform for the study of texts from the Ancient World, coordinated and maintained by the KU Leuven research group of Ancient History. Originating from the Prosopographia Ptolemaica, TM was developed in 2005 as a database containing information about people mentioned in papyrus documents from Ptolemaic Egypt. In other related databases additional information about these texts was found: when they were written (dates), where they are stored (collections) and to which archive they belong (archives). The following years also epigraphic data were added to these databases. The TM platform has two important goals: firstly it functions as an aggregator of metadata for which it also links to other projects (e.g. Papyrological Navigator, Epigraphic Database Heidelberg), secondly it can be used as an identifying tool for all of its content such as Ancient World texts, places and people. With its unique identifying numbers and stable URI\'s, TM sets standards for and bridges the gap between different digital representations of Ancient World texts. In the future TM aims not only to expand its coverage, but also to provide new ways to study these ancient sources, for example via social network analysis trough its latest addition: Trismegistos networks ((http://www.trismegistos.org/network).

Trismegistos (TM, http://www.trismegistos.org) is a metadata platform for the study of texts from the Ancient World, coordinated and maintained by the KU Leuven research group of Ancient History. Originating from the Prosopographia Ptolemaica, TM was developed in 2005 as a database containing information about people mentioned in papyrus documents from Ptolemaic Egypt. In other related databases additional information about these texts was found: when they were written (dates), where they are stored (collections) and to which archive they belong (archives). The following years also epigraphic data were added to these databases. The TM platform has two important goals: firstly it functions as an aggregator of metadata for which it also links to other projects (e.g. Papyrological Navigator, Epigraphic Database Heidelberg), secondly it can be used as an identifying tool for all of its content such as Ancient World texts, places and people. With its unique identifying numbers and stable URI\''s, TM sets standards for and bridges the gap between different digital representations of Ancient World texts. In the future TM aims not only to expand its coverage, but also to provide new ways to study these ancient sources, for example via social network analysis trough its latest addition: Trismegistos networks ((http://www.trismegistos.org/network).