The present paper provides further evidence on the importance of sunk costs as determinant of the turnover, entry, and exit of firms by studying the Austrian manufacturing industry using a 14-year panel. This study explicitly considers sunk costs related to investment in dedicated intangible assets such as investment relating to organizational and goodwill capital. The empirical results confirm the relevance of sunk costs as mobility barriers, their symmetry in respect to entry and exit and suggest that the influence of sunk costs is robust to aggregation. Sunk costs relating to capital expenditure and to organizational capital are found to be symmetric. Sunk costs relating to advertising expenditures seem to be only barriers to entry but not mobility barriers. Industry growth and profitability growth are found to be asymmetric, having a positive influence on entry and a negative on exit. Export growth is found to reduce the turnover of firms and to have a negative effect on exit suggesting that the decision to export may be associated with substantial sunk costs. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers Series "Growth and Employment in Europe: Sustainability and Competitiveness"

This thesis employs a case study approach to investigate local implications of globally restricted mobility by examining Queenstown’s vulnerability to peak oil and climate change. Qualitative research methods are the principal means of inquiry. The research findings suggest that Queenstown is particularly vulnerable to peak oil and climate change at a broad scale because of its dependence on tourism and heavy reliance on air transport. However, Queenstown has fortuitously built up resilience to peak oil and climate change through tourism industry diversity, comparative advantage and an increasing proportion of short-haul visitors. A selection of key Queenstown tourism stakeholders interviewed as part of the research demonstrated some grasp of peak oil and climate change issues but lacked in-depth understanding. They generally considered the issues as being beyond their control although several suggested ways that Queenstown could strengthen resilience to peak oil and climate change. In terms of solutions, this research identifies three potential strategies. The first involves investing in a low carbon local transport system to increase destination level resilience to peak oil and climate change and enhance the uniqueness of the Queenstown brand. The second involves Queenstown promoters targeting the high-end niche tourism market in order to create a more resilient visitor profile. And the third involves the creation of new and expansion of existing industries not tied to tourism – preferably industries that are not excessively oil dependent and carbon intensive. But in order to successfully tackle the problem, it is imperative to first raise awareness. The research recommends implementing a framework that ensures an inclusive community-wide open dialogue process as the most effective way to achieve this.

(Agro)pastoralism in Sahelian Niger, as elsewhere, operates through household enterprises. Katsinen-ko’en (Fulбe) households, interconnected within kin and community networks, utilize a range of flexible strategies to manage a variety of ecological and economic risks. This dissertation argues that (agro)pastoralist households and communities maintain or improve viability in risky environments first by employing various mobility patterns, among other strategies, and relying on the tightly knit interdependence between household and herd. Secondly, households that most successfully sustain a cooperative integrity (i.e. partnerships between husband and wife, or wives, and parents and children) to negotiate decisions and strategies best withstand adversities such as droughts. The continuance of vital links between household and herd helps the household enterprise more easily weather difficult times and profit during advantageous times. Thirdly, the transfer of endowments from parents to children of ecological, economic and political knowledges and socio-economic networks ensures the continuity of family livelihoods. This dissertation analyzes a range of household/herd mobility patterns on a livelihood continuum from sedentary agropastoralism to exclusive pastoralism, and the household decisions that lead to those mobilities. In this way, it adds to a growing body of literature that examines household strategies employed in very uncertain natural environments, contributing to pastoral studies and environmental anthropology. By folding household economics and political ecology into household ecology, it analyses resource and asset transfers within and between households, all under the influence of the natural and political-economic environments. Contributing to development anthropology, I argue that the most important buffer against the risks of unpredictable environments is a stable, undivided household, migrating with and managing its own herd. I conclude by showing how development research and projects should support household/herd integrity to enhance livelihood security. When government or development agencies institute policies and projects that remove children from the household, or separate households and herds, they endanger the integrity of the household and the reproduction of livelihoods that make essential contributions to national economies. Rather than urging pastoralists to modify their livelihoods to fit images held by ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION administrators, these organizations and agencies should help pastoralists to build on adaptations that already facilitate their management of risky environments.

This thesis contributes to recent theorizations in economic geography on the effects of proximity on firm competitiveness. One of the great challenge in the contemporary economy is for firms to remain competitive. Their innovative ability is highly dependent on the knowledge they possess and their ability to acquire new knowledge. It is argued that a relational proximity between individuals reduces uncertainty and offers a joint platform for communication and learning. Therefore, does this thesis apply a micro-perspective in which the labor force and the knowledge composition within plants is examined. The aim is pursued by exploring the interrelationship between different types of proximity in the labor force and plant performance. The proximity dimensions under scrutiny are; the cognitive-, the organizational-, and the geographical proximity dimension. The three empirical papers in the thesis are based on longitudinal micro-data from the database ASTRID. The database connects detailed socio-economic data of individuals to features of plants and firms in the entire Swedish economy. The empirical findings suggest that the different types of proximities are interdependent with regard to learning in firms. The interdependence is manifested through the variable impact on plant performance that a given distance in one dimension has, depending on what other type of proximity is accounted for at the plant. It is further found that the proximity dimensions have conditional effects on learning and innovation in firms. The empirical findings also indicate that the circumstances under which learning and knowledge application take place, vary between capital-intensive and labor-intensive sectors. Moreover, it is found that relatedness in the cognitive dimension is not unambiguously positive for interactive learning and innovativeness. Similarity in one dimension and unrelatedness in the cognitive dimension, has a significantly stronger impact on interactive learning than simply having relatedness in the cognitive dimension. It therefore seems as if the combined distance of several proximity dimensions should be taken into account when estimating the innovative power of a firm or industry. When the empirical findings are considered together it is evident that the local environment generates relational proximity between agents through formal- and informal networks. This proximity reproduces and rejuvenates the localized capabilities by allowing for the combination of heterogeneous pieces of knowledge in firms through local unrelated labor inflow. In conclusion, time and place are the paramount dimensions that shape the micro-dynamics of knowledge generation and innovation in firms.

<p>Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Umeå universitet, 1998</p> / digitalisering@umu

The impact of graded levels of daylength on the productivity, health and behaviour of hens and toms was studied in two experiments to 18 wk of age. Daylength treatments (trt) were 14 (14L), 17 (17L), 20 (20L) and 23 (23L) h and were started at 10 d of age. Turkeys (720 hens and 480 toms) were randomly allocated to 8 rooms (2 rooms per lighting trt) with six pens (3 hen and 3 tom) per room in each experiment. Body weight (BW) and feed consumption (FC) were assessed throughout the trial and feed efficiency (G:F; g of gain/g of feed) calculated from BW and FC values. Birds were checked daily for mortality and culls, and affected birds sent for necropsy. Bird well-being was evaluated by gait score (GS), the incidence of foot pad dermatitis (FPD), breast buttons and blisters, ocular size and pressure, and tom behavioural observations. Data were analyzed using SAS 9.3 based on a completely randomized design nested within four daylengths. Regression analysis established relationships between response criteria and daylength. Differences were considered significant at P≤0.05 and trends noted at P≤0.10. At 21 and 42 d, body weight increased linearly with daylength, but by 84 d tom weights decreased in a quadratic fashion and hen weights were unaffected by daylength. At 126 d, both male and female weights decreased linearly with increasing daylength, with the magnitude of the response gender dependent. Feed consumption corresponded to body weight changes, increasing for d 10-21 and 21-42, and decreasing for d 63-84, 84-105, and 105-126 with increasing daylength. Feed efficiency (G:F) was not affected by daylength for 10-84, 10-105 and 10-126 d periods. The incidence of mortality and culling was not affected by daylength for the 10-84 d period, but increased in a quadratic manner with increasing daylength for the 10-105 and 10-126 d periods. The incidence of skeletal disorders (valgus-varus and rotated tibia), injurious pecking and pendulous crops (females only) increased linearly with increasing daylength. Average GS increased linearly with daylength at 11 and 17 wk for both hens and toms, but the effect was larger in toms. Daylength did not affect FPD, but more lesions and more severe scores were found for hens than toms. The presence of breast buttons and blisters increased linearly with daylength (11 wk) with the effect on blisters predominately seen in toms. Eye weight increased and corneal diameter decreased linearly with increasing daylength at 12 and 18 wk. Dorso-ventral and media-lateral diameter, and anterior to posterior depth exhibited a quadratic relationship with the highest values seen for the 23L trt. Ocular pressure was not affected by daylength. Over 24 h of behavioural observation (both photo- and scotoperiod), resting increased, and walking, and environmental and feather pecking decreased with increasing daylength. During the photoperiod, inactive resting increased and feeding, drinking, standing, walking, preening, and environmental and feather pecking behaviours decreased as daylength increased. To conclude, daylength affects the growth and feed intake of turkeys in an age and gender specific manner, and mortality and culling increase with longer daylength. Health and welfare parameters are also affected by daylength with 23L demonstrating poorest overall bird well-being.

<p>This research examines the economic well-being of nonmetropolitan low-income households through an analysis of their objective economic outcomes and subjective experiences of poverty. Despite a large body of scholarship aimed at urban poverty, comparatively little research examines economic hardship among impoverished nonmetropolitan families. This research contributes to existing work through an analysis of nonmetropolitan low-income households' employment experiences and short-term economic trajectories. Additionally, this research uses fine-grained longitudinal data to address how families subjectively experience poverty and economic im/mobility. The analyses use ethnographic data from a sample of households (n=71) in the Family Life Project, a multi-method, longitudinal study conducted in six counties within Pennsylvania and North Carolina. The analyses reveal that families across these two regions experience a high level of constraint with respect to their employment choices and economic mobility outcomes. The analyses also present alternative metrics for job quality and job satisfaction which explicitly include criteria from the perspectives of low-wage nonmetropolitan workers. Most households experience little or no upward economic mobility throughout their participation in the study, and family members express conservative expectations for their long-term economic well-being. The study concludes with suggestions for continued research in the nonmetropolitan U.S. This work contributes to existing scholarship in the areas of economic mobility, work and poverty. These analyses reveal scholarly assessments of work, poverty and the decisions of economic actors can be improved through the inclusion of subjective household perspectives. Additionally, these analyses should motivate scholars to reevaluate the effectiveness of employment for promoting upward economic mobility, especially among contemporary nonmetropolitan low-income households.</p> / Dissertation

The Internet as of 2014 connects billions of devices, and is expected to connect tens of billions by 2020. To meet escalating requirements, networks must be scalable, easy to manage, and be able to efficiently execute programs and disseminate data. The prevailing use of centralized systems and control in, e.g., pools of computing resources, clouds, is problematic for scalability. A promising approach to management of large networks is decentralization, where independently acting network nodes communicate with their immediate neighbors to achieve desirable results at the global level. The research in this thesis addresses three distinct but interrelated problems in the context of cloud computing, networks, and programs running in clouds. First, we show how implementation correctness of active objects can be achieved in decentralized networks using location independent routing. Second, we investigate the feasibility of decentralized adaptive resource allocation for active objects in such networks, with promising results. Third, we automate an initial step of a process for converting programs with thread-based concurrency using shared memory to programs with message passing concurrency, which can then run efficiently in clouds. Specifically, starting from fragments of the distributed object modeling language ABS, we give network-oblivious descriptions of runtime behavior of programs, where the global state is a flat collection of objects and method calls. We then provide network-aware semantics, that place objects on network nodes connected point-to-point by asynchronous message passing channels. By relying on location independent routing, which maps object identifiers to next-hop neighbors at each node, inter-object messages can be delivered, regardless of object mobility among nodes. We establish that network-oblivious and network-aware behavior in static networks correspond in the sense of contextual equivalence. Using a network protocol reminiscent of a two-phase commit for controlled node shutdown, we extend the approach to dynamic networks without failures. We investigate node-local procedures for object migration to meet requirements on balanced allocations of objects to nodes, that also attempt to minimize exchange of object-related messages between nodes. By relying on coin-flips biased on local and neighbor load to decide on migration, and heuristics to capture object communication patterns, we show that balanced allocations can be achieved that make headway towards minimizing communication and latency. Our approach to execution of object-oriented programs in networks relies on message-passing concurrency. Mainstream programming languages generally use thread-based concurrency, which relies on control-centric primitives, such as locks, for synchronization. We present an algorithm for dynamic probabilistic inference of annotations for data-centric synchronization in threaded programs. By making collections of variables in classes accessed atomically explicit, these annotations can in turn suggest objects suitable for encapsulation as a unit of message-passing concurrency. / 2014 års Internet sammankopplar miljarder enheter, och förväntas sammankoppla tiotals miljarder år 2020. För att möta eskalerande krav måste nätverk vara skalbara, enkla att underhålla, och effektivt exekvera program och disseminera data. Den nuvarande användningen av centraliserade system och kontrollmekanismer, t ex i pooler av beräkningsresurser, moln, är problematisk för skalbarhet. Ett lovande angreppssätt för att hantera storskaliga nätverk är decentralisering, där noder som agerar oberoende av varandra genom kommunikation med sina omedelbara grannar åstadkommer gynnsamma resultat på den globala nivån. Forskningen i den här avhandlingen addresserar tre distinkta men relaterade problem i kontexten av molnsystem, nätverk och program som körs i moln. För det första visar vi hur implementationskorrekthet för aktiva objekt kan åstadkommas i decentraliserade nätverk med hjälp av platsoberoende routning. För det andra undersöker vi genomförbarheten i decentraliserad adaptiv resursallokering för aktiva objekt i sådana nätverk, med lovande resultat. För det tredje automatiserar vi ett initialt steg i en process för att konvertera program med trådbaserad samtidighet och delat minne till program med meddelandebaserad samtidighet, som då kan köras effektivt i moln. Mer specifikt ger vi, med utgångspunkt i fragment av modelleringsspråket ABS baserat på distribuerade objekt, nätverksomedvetna beskrivningar av körningstidsbeteende för program där det globala tillståndet är en platt samling av objekt och metodanrop. Vi ger därefter nätverksmedvetna semantiker, där objekt placeras på nätverksnoder sammankopplade från punkt till punkt av asynkrona kanaler för meddelandetransmission. Genom att vid varje nod använda platsoberoende routning, som associerar objektidentifierare med grannoder som är nästa hopp, kan meddelanden mellan objekt levereras oavsett hur objekt rör sig mellan noder. Vi etablerar att nätverksomedvetet och nätverksmedvetet beteende i statiska nätverk stämmer överens enligt kontextuell ekvivalens. Genom att använda ett nätverksprotokoll som påminner om en tvåstegsförpliktelse, utökar vi vår ansats till felfria dynamiska nätverk. Vi undersöker nodlokala procedurer för objektmigration för att möta krav på balanserade allokeringar av objekt till noder, som också försöker minimera utbyte av objektrelaterade meddelanden mellan noder. Genom att använda oss av slantsinglingar viktade efter lokal last och grannars last för att besluta om migration, och tumregler för att fånga kommunikationsmönster mellan objekt, visar vi att balanserade allokeringar, som gör framsteg mot att minimera kommunikation och tidsfördröjning, kan uppnås. Vår ansats för exekvering av objektorienterade program i nätverk använder meddelandebaserad samtidighet. Vanligt förekommande programspråk använder sig generellt av trådbaserad samtidighet, som kräver kontrollcentrerade mekanismer, som lås, för synkronisering. Vi presenterar en algoritm som med dynamisk probabilistisk analys härleder annoteringar för datacentrerad synkronisering för trådade program. Genom att göra samlingar av variabler i klasser som läses och skrivs atomiskt explicita, kan sådana annoteringar antyda vilka objekt som är lämpliga att kapsla in som en enhet i meddelandebaserad samtidighet. / <p>QC 20140929</p>

Mobility and using smartphones and tablets as replacement of laptops are getting to be increasingly vital for enterprises and accordingly bring new concerns from different perspective for both companies and individuals. To achieve enterprise mobility companies needs to ensure that the mobile equipment are always connected, complies with security policy in a safe and protected path toward being productivity and efficiency. To approach these purposes Mobile Device Management (MDM) was created few years back in order to not only secure enterprises information but additionally manage user’s activities and equipment. However there is no general methodology to define criteria weight for these systems and rather depends on different enterprise policy. One primary issue here is availability of many MDM solutions in market and several difficulties to compare them together and meanwhile most of comparison documents limited based on white papers of providers which mostly designed for commercial market purposes. This thesis will come up with a list of important properties for MDM solutions and evaluate several of solutions as well as categorizing all available criteria in this area. Second part of thesis is a case study of choosing proper MDM solution for two different scenarios and give recommendations on what products to utilize relying upon what sort of association you have. In order to achieve this, strong analytical methods are required to compare existing services and sharper eye from security perspective toward the applications.

Nanocrystalline materials are polycrystalline solids with grain size in the nanometer range (< 100nm), which have been found to exhibit superior properties such as high magnetic permeability and corrosion resistance, as well as a considerably increase of strength when compared with their coarse grain counterparts. All those improved properties are attributed to the high volume fraction of grain boundaries (GBs). However, the high density of GBs brings a large amount of excess enthalpy to the whole system, making the nanostructures unstable and suffer from severe thermal or mechanical grain growth. In order to maintain the advantageous properties of nanocrystalline materials, it is necessary to stabilize GB and inhibit grain growth. While alloying has been found to be an effective way of achieving stabilized nanocrystalline metal alloys experimentally, the direct quantification of solute effects on GB motion still poses great challenge for investigating thermal stability of general nanocrystalline materials. In this research, impurity segregation and solute drag effects on GB motion were investigated by extending the interface random-walk method in direct molecular dynamics simulations. It was found that the GB motion was controlled by the solute diffusion perpendicular to the boundary plane. Based on the simulation results at different temperatures and impurity concentrations, the solute drag effects can be well modeled by the theory proposed by Cahn, Lücke and Stüwe (CLS model) more than fifty years ago. However, a correction to the original CLS model needs to be made in order to quantitatively predict the solute drag effects on a moving GB.