Engaging as Partners in Energy Efficiency: A Primer for Utilities on the Energy Efficiency Needs of Multifamily Buildings and Their Owners

The multifamily building sector presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities for utilities seeking to implement effective energy efficiency programs. To deliver successful programs, utilities must understand what motivates building owners to take part in these programs, as well as barriers that may prevent participation.This paper outlines the opportunities to meet energy efficiency goals with multifamily programs. It then describes the benefits that multifamily building owners gain from these programs, and the barriers they face to participation. The paper focuses on rental housing, because these buildings are owned by a single entity and form the largest sector of the multifamily housing market. The paper provides a framework to help utilities develop successful programs that maximize energy savings and create benefits for building owners, tenants, and communities. And lastly, the paper recommends nine program design considerations that can help attract multifamily building owners to utility energy efficiency programs

Changes in the depository industry in Tenth District states

Recent development in Congress and the courts have focused attention on the relative roles of commercial banks, thrifts, and credit unions. As concern mounted last year about the state of the thrift deposit insurance fund, Congress required commercial banks to share the burden of recapitalizing the fund. In return, Congress promised to come up with a plan for merging the bank and thrift charters, a move the banking industry has long favored. About the same time, a federal appeals court ruled against a major source of credit union growth since the early 1980s - the acceptance of new members with a common bond different from the original members. The Supreme Court later agreed to hear the case, sparking a renewed debate in Congress about the proper role of credit unions in the financial system. ; These recent actions by Congress and the courts follow a decade and a half of dramatic changes in the depository industry in Tenth District states. Some of these changes have been due to shifts in laws and regulations. First, there has been a significant decline in the number of district depository institutions - a decline in which banks, thrifts, and credit unions have all shared. Second, total deposits have declined when adjusted for inflation or measured relative to economic activity. Third, the share of thrifts in total deposits has plummeted relative to that of banks and credit unions. And fourth, while banks, thrifts, and credit unions still specialize in different loans and investments, the three types of institutions do not look as different today as at the beginning of the 1980s. ; Such changes are important because they affect the thousands of depository institutions in the district and the supply of credit and other financial services to district households and businesses. With those effects in mind, Keeton and McKibbin show how the district depository industry has changed since 1979, explain the factors behind each change, and suggest what further changes may lie ahead.Banks and banking ; Credit unions ; Savings and loan associations ; Federal Reserve District, 10th

Solid performance at Tenth District banks

Commercial banks in Tenth District states performed well in the first half of 1997. Profitability and loan quality remained high, while loans continued to grow at a healthy pace. The only negative was that deposits grew sluggishly, adding to liquidity pressures. Banks in district states slightly outperformed banks nationwide in profitability and loan quality, while matching them in loan growth and deposit growth.Federal Reserve District, 10th

Assessing the Learning Needs of South Carolina Nurses by Exploring their Perceived Knowledge of Emergency Preparedness

Problem: Nurses are first responders to natural or man made disasters and increasing awareness of the central role nurses play in disaster response may prompt nurses to sharpen existing skills and develop new skills needed to competently respond to disaster events. Purpose: To assess South Carolina nurses\u27 learning needs by exploring their perceived knowledge of emergency preparedness in order to gain a better understanding of nurses\u27 emergency preparedness learning needs and prioritize training efforts based on these needs. Design and Methods: Boone\u27s Programming Model\u27s concept of planning provided the framework for this study which utilized a descriptive correlational design. The Emergency Preparedness Information Questionnaire was the instrument used to assess the learning needs of South Carolina nurses. Fifteen hundred potential participants were randomly selected from the South Carolina board of Nursing\u27s database. Results: Data from 207 eligible survey participants were analyzed and results indicated that study participants have a low level of self-reported emergency preparedness familiarity. Participants reported being most familiar with triage and least familiar with clinical decision making in epidemiology and biological agents. Most participants did not participate in emergency preparedness continuing education programs and participants who did participate in continuing education programs demonstrated a low level of self reported familiarity with emergency preparedness content. Findings also suggested that emergency preparedness content can be tailored to specific demographic variables allowing for a more concentrated focus on the content in which participant\u27s self-reported being least familiar related to a specific demographic variable. Study participants most preferred attending a one-day weekday, face to face/lecture/seminar training format for obtaining emergency preparedness content. Implications: This information holds promise for the generation of effective continuing education and training programs. By prioritizing learning needs based on a needs assessment and accommodating learning preferences, a systematic and planned approach to educating South Carolina nurses about this extremely important topic can be implemented and thus significantly strengthen the capabilities of South Carolina nurses to respond competently to disaster events

Identification of common and idiosyncratic shocks in real equity prices: Australia 1982 to 2002

A structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model of real equity prices in Australia is specified to contain common shocks in international equity markets and domestic shocks in Australian financial and goods markets. Common shocks are identified through the long-run comovements of international equity markets, resulting in the model being characterized as having more shocks than variables. The empirical results show that the dot-com crisis of 2000 causes Australian real equity values to depreciate significantly below a precrisis baseline forecast, while contagion from the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 is found to have a much smaller negative impact

Financial contagion and asset pricing

Asset market interconnectedness can give rise to significant contagion risks during periods of financial crises that extend beyond the risks associated with changes in volatilities and correlation. These channels include the transmission of shocks operating through changes in the higher order comoments of asset returns, including changes in coskewness arising from changes in the interaction between volatility and average returns across asset markets. These additional contagion channels have nontrivial implications for the pricing of options through changes in the payoff probability structure and more generally, in the management of financial risks. The effects of incorrectly pricing risk has proved to be significant during many financial crises, including the subprime crisis from mid 2007 to mid 2008, the Great Recession beginning 2008 and the European debt crisis from 2010. Using an exchange options model, the effects of changes in the comoments of asset returns across asset markets are investigated with special emphasis given to understanding the effects on hedging risk during financial crises. The results reveal that by not correctly pricing the risks arising from higher order moments during financial crises, there is significant mispricing of options, while hedged portfolios during noncrisis periods become exposed to price movements in times of crises.The authors gratefully acknowledge Australian Research Council Grant DP0985783

Actually this time is different

Episodes of extraordinary turbulence in global financial markets are examined during eight crises ranging from Asia in 1997-98 to the recent great recession of 2008-10. The analysis focuses on changes in the dependence structures of equity markets through correlation and coskewness to answer the question of whether the great recession is different to other crises in terms of shock transmission through contagion. The results show that ‘this time is different’ and that the great recession is truly a global financial crisis. Other US sourced crises do not affect other markets through contagion, and emerging market crises transmit unexpectedly

Are financial crises alike?

This paper investigates whether financial crises are alike by considering whether a single modeling framework can fit multiple distinct crises in which contagion effects link markets across national borders and asset classes. The crises considered are Russia and LTCM in the second half of 1998, Brazil in early 1999, dot-com in 2000, Argentina in 2001-2005, and the recent U.S. subprime mortgage and credit crisis in 2007. Using daily stock and bond returns on emerging and developed markets from 1998 to 2007, the empirical results show that financial crises are indeed alike, as all linkages are statistically important across all crises. However, the strength of these linkages does vary across crises. Contagion channels are widespread during the Russian/LTCM crisis, are less important during subsequent crises until the subprime crisis, where again the transmission of contagion becomes rampant

Automated quantification of retinal vessel morphometry in the UK Biobank Cohort

The following topics are dealt with: feature extraction; learning (artificial intelligence); image classification; image segmentation; computer vision; object detection; feedforward neural nets; image colour analysis; image representation; medical image processing

Automated retinal image quality assessment on the UK Biobank dataset for epidemiological studies.

Morphological changes in the retinal vascular network are associated with future risk of many systemic and vascular diseases. However, uncertainty over the presence and nature of some of these associations exists. Analysis of data from large population based studies will help to resolve these uncertainties. The QUARTZ (QUantitative Analysis of Retinal vessel Topology and siZe) retinal image analysis system allows automated processing of large numbers of retinal images. However, an image quality assessment module is needed to achieve full automation. In this paper, we propose such an algorithm, which uses the segmented vessel map to determine the suitability of retinal images for use in the creation of vessel morphometric data suitable for epidemiological studies. This includes an effective 3-dimensional feature set and support vector machine classification. A random subset of 800 retinal images from UK Biobank (a large prospective study of 500,000 middle aged adults; where 68,151 underwent retinal imaging) was used to examine the performance of the image quality algorithm. The algorithm achieved a sensitivity of 95.33% and a specificity of 91.13% for the detection of inadequate images. The strong performance of this image quality algorithm will make rapid automated analysis of vascular morphometry feasible on the entire UK Biobank dataset (and other large retinal datasets), with minimal operator involvement, and at low cost