INFLUENCE OF THE REORGANIZATION OF ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE TO AIR POLLUTION IN THE BALTIC STATES

Prognosis of environmental quality in Baltic states related with the closure of Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant according to two electricity production scenarios was made. (Scenario 1 - closure date of Block 1 is 2005, closure date of Block 2 is 2011; Scenario 2 - closure date of Block 1 is 2005, exploitation of Block 2 will be extended at least until 2020.) We can see that in accordance with both scenarios CO2 an SO2 emission will increase every year. Although the influence of the largest air pollution sources such as Estonian/Baltic PP, Lithuanian PP Riga CHP and others remains very significant to the situation in Baltic States, new power plants will forward the rise of total emission

MASS APPRAISAL OF RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE USING MULTILEVEL MODELLING

Mass appraisal, or the automatic valuation of a large number of real estate assets, has attracted the attention of many researchers, who have mainly approached this issue employing traditional econometric models such as Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). However, this method does not consider the hierarchical structure of the data and therefore assumes the unrealistic hypothesis of the independence of the individuals in the sample. This paper proposes the use of the Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM) to overcome this limitation. The HLM also gives valuable information on the percentage of the variance error caused by each level in the hierarchical model. In this study HLM was applied to a large dataset of 2,149 apartments, which included 17 variables belonging to two hierarchical levels: apartment and neighbourhood. The model obtained high goodness of fit and all the estimated variances of the parameters in HLM were lower than those calculated by OLS. It can be concluded as well that no further neighbourhood variables need be added to the model to improve the goodness of fit, since almost all the residual variance can be attributed to the first hierarchical level of the model, the apartment level