Methods for incorporating ecological impacts with climate uncertainty to support robust flood management decision-making

Modern and historic flood risk management involves accommodating multiple sources of sources of uncertainty and potential impacts across a broad range of interrelated sectors. Sources of uncertainty that affect planning include internal climate variability, anthropogenic changes such as land use and system performance expectations, and more recently changes in climatology that affect the resources supporting the system. Flood management systems potentially impact human settlements within and beyond the systems’ scope of planning, local weather patterns, and associated ecological systems. Federal guidelines across nations have called for greater consideration of uncertainty and impacts of water resources planning projects, but methods for meeting these needs remain poorly established. At the same time, there is increased attention to the ecological impacts of water resources systems and growing expectations that negative impacts be mitigated. The confluence of climate change and increasing demand for environmental quality presents a challenging flood management decision context. This work presents several alternative methods for incorporating ecological impacts into flood risk management and evaluation procedures alongside climate uncertainty, which are illustrated through application to a flood management system on the Iowa River. First, to integrate climate change and uncertainty information into these decision models, the dissertation presents a decision-centric trend detection test in which the threshold for accepting or rejecting a trend in observed data is determined by the expected cost of drawing a false conclusion. Next, the dissertation presents a decision model to choose a portfolio of adaptation options based on portfolios’ expected economic and monetized ecological performance under uncertain future flood hazard. The dissertation also develops a robust optimization model with an alternate treatment of ecological performance to maximize the range of future conditions over which performance is acceptable in both economic and ecological impact sectors. Lastly, the dissertation presents a method for deriving a posterior distribution of changes in climate parameters based on a combination of a prior constructed based on climate model projections and likelihood based on the historic record. The goals of this work are to develop enhanced decision support tools that accommodate the unique context of flood risk management decisions and to improve the set of methods available to characterize future flood hazard and its associated uncertainty

A Network Model of Financial Markets

This thesis introduces a network representation of equity markets.The model is based on the premise that assets share dependencies on abstract ‘factors’ resulting in exploitable patterns among asset price levels.The network model is a collection of long-run market trends estimated by a 3 layer machine learning framework.The network model’s comprehensive validity is established with 2 simulations in the fields of algorithmic trading, and systemic risk.The algorithmic trading validation applies expectations derived from the network model to estimating expected future returns. It further utilizes the network’s expectations to actively manage a theoretically market neutral portfolio.The validation demonstrates that the network model’s portfolio generates excess returns relative to 2 benchmarks. Over the time period of April, 2007 to January, 2014 the network model’s portfolio for assets drawn from the S&P/ASX 100 produced a Sharpe ratio of 0.674.This approximately doubles the nearest benchmark. The systemic risk validation utilized the network model to simulate shocks to select market sectors and evaluate the resulting financial contagion.The validation successfully differentiated sectors by systemic connectivity levels and suggested some interesting market features. Most notable was the identification of the ‘Financials’ sector as most systemically influential and ‘Basic Materials’ as the most systemically dependent. Additionally, there was evidence that ‘Financials’ may function as a hub of systemic risk which exacerbates losses from multiple market sectors

Semiparametric and Nonparametric Methods in Econometrics

The main objective of this workshop was to bring together mathematical statisticians and econometricians who work in the field of nonparametric and semiparametric statistical methods. Nonparametric and semiparametric methods are active fields of research in econometric theory and are becoming increasingly important in applied econometrics. This is because the flexibility of non- and semiparametric modelling provides important new ways to investigate problems in substantive economics. Moreover, the development of non- and semiparametric methods that are suitable to the needs of economics presents a variety of mathematical challenges. Topics to be addressed in the workshop included nonparametric methods in finance, identification and estimation of nonseparable models, nonparametric estimation under the constraints of economic theory, statistical inverse problems, long-memory time-series, and nonparametric cointegration

EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON QUEUEING THEORY 2016

International audienceThis booklet contains the proceedings of the second European Conference in Queueing Theory (ECQT) that was held from the 18th to the 20th of July 2016 at the engineering school ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, France. ECQT is a biannual event where scientists and technicians in queueing theory and related areas get together to promote research, encourage interaction and exchange ideas. The spirit of the conference is to be a queueing event organized from within Europe, but open to participants from all over the world. The technical program of the 2016 edition consisted of 112 presentations organized in 29 sessions covering all trends in queueing theory, including the development of the theory, methodology advances, computational aspects and applications. Another exciting feature of ECQT2016 was the institution of the Takács Award for outstanding PhD thesis on "Queueing Theory and its Applications"

Introduction to JET Symposium Issue on ‘Dynamic Contracts and Mechanism Design

The Introduction to the Symposium Issue on “Dynamic Contract and Mechanism Design” of the Journal of Economic Theory provides an overview of the dynamic mechanism design literature. We then introduce the papers that are contained in the Symposium issue and finally conclude by discussing avenues for future research. Several of the papers contained in the Symposium issue were presented at the Economic Theory Workshop of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University in June 2013

Solving Multi-objective Integer Programs using Convex Preference Cones

Esta encuesta tiene dos objetivos: en primer lugar, identificar a los individuos que fueron víctimas de algún tipo de delito y la manera en que ocurrió el mismo. En segundo lugar, medir la eficacia de las distintas autoridades competentes una vez que los individuos denunciaron el delito que sufrieron. Adicionalmente la ENVEI busca indagar las percepciones que los ciudadanos tienen sobre las instituciones de justicia y el estado de derecho en Méxic