The importance of the Hotelling Valuation Principle (HVP) in economic study lies in its ability to examine and drive the decision of how much of a non-renewable natural resource to produce now versus how much to conserve for future generations - the root of natural resource policy, conservation, regulation, and taxation. Hotelling (1931) assumes that net price (selling price less cost per unit of production) will grow at the discount rate, which in a deterministic setting implies that reserve value is equal to current net price. However, the application of this ideal theory to the oil and gas industry may be difficult.<p>The oil and gas industry is influenced by government regulation, potential monopolistic forces, and well production characteristics - each of which violate the assumptions of Hotellings (1931) basic theory. How these violations affect the HVP is an open question. Most have the effect of limiting current supply, and thus driving prices higher than they would be in a perfectly competitive market. On the other hand, at least in the Canadian context, government regulation tends to increase costs, whereas technological advancement tends to reduce costs. The net result of these effects on future net prices and their discounted value, and therefore the effect on the HVP, is not clear a priori.<p>Another problem relating Hotellings (1931) basic theory to the oil and gas industry lies in the stochastic nature of a firms future net prices and extraction quantities, the product of which gives the firms future cash flows. Correlation between quantity and net price may result from expanding production when prices are high and reducing production when prices are low. Of course such correlation will affect the expected cash flows, and therefore firm value. Or, in other words, the ability to adjust production quantity provides real options for oil and gas firms which may add value.<p>Previous tests of the HVP on oil and gas reserves have utilized data that may contain confounding information that results in unreliable conclusions. The two major deficiencies include using (1) acquisition values, which utilize basin-average rather than firm specific net price data, and (2) conventional oil and gas company market valuations, which incorporate additional management exploration expertise value beyond the reserves value.<p>This study contributes to the literature by providing a more definitive test of the HVP through the use of Canadian oil and gas royalty trusts. These pure play publicly traded entities are focused on production rather than exploration and essentially remediate the deficiencies found in previous literature. Additionally, I include an ancillary variable to proxy real option value and control variables for firm characteristics such as oil weighting (proportion of oil relative to natural gas reserves), reserve quality (proportion of proven producing reserves relative to proven non-producing reserves), and firm size (based on enterprise value). This gives the reader a better understanding of value drivers in the Canadian oil and gas royalty trust sector and how they relate to the HVP.<p>My study generally fails to find support for the HVP. In particular, the results indicate that the HVP overestimates reserve value. This suggests that market participants expect net prices to grow at a rate significantly lower than the fair cost of capital, and production constraints limiting the extraction rate are binding. I do find that the real option proxy explains a significant amount of the difference between the value observed and the value predicted by the HVP. This differs markedly from what previous literature on the HVP applied to market data for the oil and gas industry documents. Each of these papers fails to reject the HVP. The fact that I generally find the value to be lower than that predicted by the HVP is not surprising given the previous literature using market data to test it. Since these studies use conventional oil and gas companies, which likely overvalue reserves because of an exploration premium, finding support for the HVP likely means that royalty trusts will likely correspond to a value lower than that predicted. The difference could account for the exploration premium. On the other hand, when I use the log-linear specification over the second, more volatile sub-sample, I also fail to reject Hotellings theoretical value, which is consistent with previous literature using market data.

The text deals with the process of reorganizing and cataloging the archival material emerging from State secondary grammar school in Falun, which appears to have been poorly managed for a number of years. The work was done with consideration to former ways of organizing the material, and a great deal of research was needed in order to establish the outer provenance of the archive.The theoretical discussion goes deeper into the questions of provenance and appraisal in regard to the work,and some choices, especially the decision to reorganize the archive, are motivated with reference to Swedishrules and regulations concerning state authorities' archival management and their duties towards Swedish citizens.

Transfer pricing (TP) has for a long time been an important tax issue, however it is only within the past decade that it has gotten the attention it deserves. This since more and more corporations becomes globalized. When setting a TP within a multinational enterprise (MNE) it is important to consider the arm’s length principle. The reason for this is that all countries, involved in an internal transaction, are entitled to their fair share of tax revenues. The principle implies that when performing a transaction within a MNE, the price used shall be set on the same circumstances as if the transaction was performed between independent actors. Corporations which do not set their TPs in accordance with the arm’s length principle face the risk of adjustments and future audits. Setting a TP, which is in line with the arm’s length principle is, however, not an easy task, therefore the subject of advance pricing agreement (APA) has emerged. APA has existed since the middle of the 1980’s when it was first implemented in Japan. However, it was as recent as last year, 1st of January 2010, that a legislation concerning APA was implemented in Swedish tax legislation. The legislation implies that corporations which are a part of a MNE can apply for a binding agreement at the Swedish tax authority regarding future TP. This opportunity will provide for a foreseeable tax future. Due to this recent implementation of APA legislation in Sweden, we have chosen to conduct a cross-country analysis concerning regulations of APA, using countries which have had APA legislation for a substantial amount of time. The different countries which legislations we have studied in this thesis are Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the U.S. The purpose with this thesis is to examine if the Swedish legislation concerning APA will provide any advantages for Swedish MNEs. A qualitative research method with the focus on an abductive research approach has been used for this thesis. The abductive approach consists of both deductive and inductive research approaches. The deductive approach is used to answer our research questions and the inductive approach is used to answer the purpose with our thesis. The purpose of this thesis consists of two research questions, what the Swedish APA legislation implies and are there any differences between the Swedish APA legislation and other countries’ APA legislations. After analyzing this new Swedish legislation and performing the cross-country analysis we have come to the conclusion that in general APAs provides substantial benefits for Swedish corporations. With the main advantages being the increased predictability and the reduced administrative burden concerning TP issues. In order for the Swedish legislation to be fully beneficial for the corporations it is, however, in need of some adjustments. If adjustments to the legislation are made we conclude that APAs will only provide benefits for Swedish corporations.

Typically, design is approached as a sequence of decisions in which designers select what they believe to be the best alternative in each decision. While this approach can be used to arrive at a final solution quickly, it is unlikely to result in the most-preferred solution. The reason for this is that all the decisions in the design process are coupled. To determine the most preferred alternative in the current decision, the designer would need to know the outcomes of all future decisions, information that is currently unavailable or indeterminate. Since the designer cannot select a single alternative because of this indeterminate (interval-based) uncertainty, a set-based design approach is introduced. The approach is motivated by the engineering practices at Toyota and is based on the structure of the Branch and Bound Algorithm. Instead of selecting a single design alternative that is perceived as being the most preferred at the time of the decision, the proposed set-based design approach eliminates dominated design alternatives: rather than selecting the best, eliminate the worst. Starting from a large initial design space, the approach sequentially reduces the set of non-dominated design alternatives until no further reduction is possible ??e remaining set cannot be rationally differentiated based on the available information. A single alternative is then selected from the remaining set of non-dominated designs. In this thesis, the focus is on the elimination step of the set-based design method: A criterion for rational elimination under interval-based uncertainty is derived. To be efficient, the criterion takes into account shared uncertainty ??certainty shared between design alternatives. In taking this uncertainty into account, one is able to eliminate significantly more design alternatives, improving the efficiency of the set-based design approach. Additionally, the criterion uses a detailed reference design to allow more elimination of inferior design sets without evaluating each alternative in that set. The effectiveness of this elimination is demonstrated in two examples: a beam design and a gearbox design.

We consider the problem of finding a common fixed point of an infinite family ${T_n}$ of nonlinear self-mappings of a closed convex subset $C$ of a real Hilbert space $H$. Namely, we want to find a point $x$ with the property (assuming such common fixed points exist): [ xin igcap_{n=1}^infty ext{Fix}(T_n). ] We will use the Krasnoselskii-Mann (KM) Type inertial iterative algorithms of the form $$ x_{n+1} = ((1-alpha_n)I+alpha_nT_n)y_n,quad y_n = x_n + eta_n(x_n-x_{n-1}).eqno(*)$$ We discuss the convergence properties of the sequence ${x_n}$ generated by this algorithm (*). In particular, we prove that ${x_n}$ converges weakly to a common fixed point of the family ${T_n}$ under certain conditions imposed on the sequences ${alpha_n}$ and ${eta_n}$.

A modern democratic nation is responsible to taking care its people¡¦s basic needs. This is not only the essential reason for the existence of a nation, but also its responsibility and obligation. The right to life is an important issue in international treaties and constitutions of variable nations. People are entitled to claim care from their countries to maintain a reasonable living standard. Countries are obliged to safeguard its people¡¦s right to life through legislation, to provide basic living needs which meet human nature dignity. A nation has many obligations include the maintaining of individual health, ensuring sound environment, social relief and social insurance. Financial operation is a key issue in managing a nation. Therefore, in fulfilling the obligations, a nation must consider its financial affordability seriously so as not to deteriorate its finance for overly taking care of its people. Due to rapid aging of population and low fertility, Japan implemented Long Term Care Insurance in 2000; however, many a relative legal issue was encountered while conducting such system. For instance, for the purposes of convenience and efficiency in collecting premiums, a special levy is applied to 90% of No. 1 insurees whose age were over 65, the premiums were pre-deducted from their perpetual pensions, which may cause the qualms about trenching on the capability of people to maintain a lowest living standards and the abuse of the power of administrative decision. Eyed on financial consideration, Japanese government carried out the Law for Long Term Care Insurance, refuses its service to those whose premiums were over due, and suppresses the accessibility for the poor. The group that was supposed to be taken care of by the government is totally neglected while the middle class taking advantages from the system and waste more public fund. This is completely opposite to the objectives of the long term care system legislation. This also caused the disputes that the right to life regulated in the article 25 of Japanese Constitution is violated by administrative power. Our nation is confronted with population aging and low fertility as well lately. The total fertility rate has declined to 0.895, which is the lowest in the world. In the aging society, the long term care need of the elders and the disabled, and related heavy financial burdens are already far beyond the capacities of individuals or families and become a ¡§Social Risk.¡¨ Such a risk will need a coercive risk managing technique enforced by the nation, to organize a social insurance structure so as to share the risk and reduce individuals¡¦ burdens. Our government is engaging in planning a long term care system. The flaws of Japan¡¦s Law for Long Term Care Insurance, both in legislation and enforcement, can be valuable lessons for us. This essay discussed the legalization of the long term care system of our nation, reviewed its jurisprudence and raised integrated long term care concept. Some suggestions concerned with operation subject, insurance objects and financial plans were provided in hope with a comprehensive guideline on policy making, legislation and enforcement and system construction can be established.

Patent is a significant sign of modernizing a country. Protecting patents has been a problem since the Patent Law was conducted in 1949. At initial stage, inventors were unwilling to register patent because that they thought their inventions would not be protected by the Patent system. Until now, there are about 80,000 applications every year. It is clear that the patent system has developed more completely. However, it produced new proplems with us. For instance, the percentage of patent licensing is too law; the examining procedure is too long. Therefore, the patent system still need to be revised. In this research, the author reviewed the patent law and mechanisms on the basis of the five frameworks of administrative law, including Basic Principle, Administrative Organization, Administrative Competence, Administrative Remedy and Administrative Supervision, and literature review. For the purpose of improving Patent system, the researcher suggested that the Patent system should be revised.

Laser based underwater triangulation ranging is sensitive to the environmental conditions and laser beam profile. Also, its ranging quality is greatly affected by the algorithm choices for peak detection and for image processing. By utilizing the merging least-squares approximation for laser image processing, it indeed succeeds in increasing quality of triangulation ranging in water; however, this result was obtained on the use of a laser beam with nearly circular cross-section. Therefore, by using an ellipse-like laser beam cross-section for range finding, we are really interested in understanding the quality of range finding with different peak detection algorithms. Besides, the ellipse orientation of the laser spot projected on the image plane would be various. We are also interested in learning about the relationship between the ellipse orientation and the quality of range finding. In this study, peak detection algorithms are investigated by considering four different laser beam cross-sections which are ircle, horizontal ellipse, oblique ellipse, and vertical ellipse. First, we employ polynomial regression for processing laser image to study the effect of polynomial degree on quality of triangulation ranging. It was found that the linear regression achieves the best ranging quality than others. Then, according to this result, the ranging quality associated with peak detection is evaluated by employing three different algorithms which are the illumination center, twice illumination center and the illumination center with principal component analysis. We found that the ranging quality by using the illumination center with principal component analysis is the best, next is twice illumination center, and last the illumination center. This result indicates that the orientation of elliptical laser beam has an influential effect on the quality of range finding. In addition, the ranging quality difference among peak detection algorithms is significantly reduced by implementing the merging least-squares approximation rlaser image processing. This result illustrates that the merging least-squares approximation does reduce the effect of peak detection algorithm on the quality of range finding.

Recently, every main country in the world has implemented transfer pricing system in order to ensure every multinational enterprise would also be able to pay their taxes equitably and reasonably to the countries which they established their multinational enterprises, and has requested the prices of business transaction between every related party have to be set up and adjusted by arm¡¦s length principle. Moreover, in order to follow the initiative of OECD, adopt the current world trend, and avoid the higher inspection risk for our enterprises, Taiwan has established the method of regulation on December twenty- eighth, 2004 by consulting OECD guidelines and tax law of every country in the world, and has started to implement transfer pricing system. The Taiwanese transfer pricing system has integrated in many ways and in many-sided. It also has extended globally. If everyone could cooperate with mutual benefit, the transfer pricing system would be able to maintain the right of native taxation and effectively protect the right of multinational enterprises; hence it is not only a tax system, but art. Therefore, the checking model of transfer pricing system is very different from the case of normal profit-seeking enterprises. The checking model of the current tax authority mainly focuses on their jurisdiction and formal conditions, so it is interesting to see if our tax authority has capability of doing transfer pricing case which emphasizes on the point of taxation principles in substance or not. In addition, because our profit-seeking enterprises are mainly small or middle size corporations, there is a challenge to them to meet their duty and to provide all the requested certificates under the request of the new system, so it is also a point to discuss with. In this research, I tried to establish an evaluation standard by consulting policy estimated theory, and designed a survey which has collected all of recently related books, articles, references, and practiced thoughts in order to have an objective investigation. Also, in the survey, I would like to look into the situations of the following three points after practice of transfer pricing system. First, I would like to find out the thoughts of related interested parties after practice of this policy. Finally, what satisfactions of appropriateness, neutrality, efficiency, responsiveness, and side-effects externalities would be in this policy efficiency analysis? In addition, the collected data were analyzed with Chi-Square test, cross analysis, one-way ANOVA, multiple comparison analysis, and correlation analysis. In my major research findings, transfer pricing system has been known in the certain level by every related interested party. Moreover, this policy is in the high appropriate level and efficient level. However, this policy is in the low neutral level of land tax and other levies, and in the low responsive level. Therefore, there are other side effects in this policy as well, such us: increasing tax misgiving from every enterprise, increasing taxation, and checking cost, etc,. Also, in the result of this research paper, there are twelve suggestions that have collected from the responses of the survey, the problem finding, and some practical difficulties from the study of research institute and some other comments. These twelve suggestions could provide to related government organization as reference material in order to revise the law and advance tax system and tax policy.

After ¡§911 Attack¡¨ in 2001, every place in the world suffered destructive attack by terrorists one after another. It caused not only heavy casualties but also a shock to the international society. Religious fanaticism and technology misuse has made terror actions be serious threat to world stability and peace. United Nations Security Council not only critically condemned terror brutalities but also appealed to every member for urgent cooperation to prevent terrorist attack together and punish those who sponsor, plan, prepare for, and support terrorists; legislation sanction against terror actions has become the common consensus of the international society. Viewing the current achievements of countering terrorism, applying military strikes invariably still cannot completely solve this problem effectively. It must trace its source through knowing what problems happened in the society and how to make the most proper adjustment to cruxes of problems by means of double examination, ¡§Efficiency¡¨ and ¡§Rationality,¡¨ plus negotiation of every aspect of politics to enact the law, which conforms to principles of economy. There were a few actions of international terrorists in our country in the past, but we must have the attitude of playing the percentages and draft policies and complete laws in advance to response. At present, our country plans to finish the draft of ¡§Counter-terrorism Act,¡¨ providing the legal foundation of punishing terror actions and plan to set up a chartered counter-terrorism institute by the government to respond to significant terrorist attack. The research of our legal system of counter-terrorism is to discuss how to reach the balance between maintaining national security and protecting human rights by following the basic theory of administrative laws¡Ðprinciple, organization, authority, remedy, and supervision as the foundation of the thesis, and citing professor DENG, Syue-liang¡¦s academic quotation theory. In the light of every research structure, the research made correct description of crucial meaning of the system and explored the merits and demerits in the course of applying the legal system with objective explanation of its administrative measures and personal cognition, and brought up suggestions for follow-up researchers as reference.