FADS VERSUS FUNDAMENTALS IN FARMLAND PRICES

This paper develops an approach to decompose farmland price time series into three components: permanent fundamental component, temporary fundamental component, and nonfundamental component. This decomposition is useful for studying the importance of fundamental versus nonfundamental factors in explaining farmland price behavior and the dynamic response of farmland price to shocks to each of these components, among other issues. The approach is applied to annual Iowa farmland prices over the 1992-1994 sample period.

Synthesis method of asymmetric gold particles.

Asymmetric particles can exhibit unique properties. However, reported synthesis methods for asymmetric particles hinder their application because these methods have a limited scale and lack the ability to afford particles of varied shapes. Herein, we report a novel synthetic method which has the potential to produce large quantities of asymmetric particles. Asymmetric rose-shaped gold particles were fabricated as a proof of concept experiment. First, silica nanoparticles (NPs) were bound to a hydrophobic micro-sized polymer containing 2-chlorotritylchloride linkers (2-CTC resin). Then, half-planar gold particles with rose-shaped and polyhedral structures were prepared on the silica particles on the 2-CTC resin. Particle size was controlled by the concentration of the gold source. The asymmetric particles were easily cleaved from the resin without aggregation. We confirmed that gold was grown on the silica NPs. This facile method for synthesizing asymmetric particles has great potential for materials science

Government debt, Consumption, and Interest Rates: An Empirical Study of the Ricardian Equivalence Hypothesis

This paper investigates the effects of the government debt on private consumption and interest rates (i.e., the Ricardian equivalence hypothesis) in a nonlinear-quadratic equilibrium framework, combined with a time series analysis of the data. The model is summarized by the restrictions on the coefficients of a vector auto regressive (VAR) representation of the relevant variables. The model is not rejected for the sample period of 1947 through 1979 even though the evidence was not overwhelming. It is rejected when the sample period is. extended, to... include, the. Reagan .administration .period up to 1987,1. A more detailed data analysis based on a VAR implies, however\u27,- that the rejection of the model does not necessarily imply rejection of the equivalence hypothesis for recent years and that the Ricardian equivalence hypothesis still provides a plausible approximation of reality

Fabrication and Analysis of Multilayer Structures for Coherent Thermal Emission

This dissertation describes a theoretical and experimental study on coherent thermal emission from thin-film multilayer structures. A novel multilayer structure consisting of a one-dimensional photonic crystal and a polar material (or a metal) is proposed as a coherent thermal-emission source. Surface electromagnetic waves can be excited at the edge of photonic crystal, enabling coherent emission characteristics (i.e., spectral- and directional-selectivity in the emissivity). A near-infrared coherent emission source is designed and fabricated using vacuum deposition and chemical vapor deposition techniques. Measurements were performed using a Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer and a laser scatterometer. The agreement between the resonance conditions obtained from experiments and the calculated dispersion relation confirms that surface waves at the photonic crystal-metal interface can be utilized to build coherent thermal-emission sources. The second part of this dissertation focuses on the energy propagation direction in near-field thermal radiation. The energy streamline method based on the Poynting vector is applied to near-field thermal radiation by incorporating the fluctuational electrodynamics, in which thermal emission is viewed as originated from random motion of electric dipoles at temperatures above absolute zero. It is shown that the Poynting vector is decoupled for each parallel wavevector component due to the randomness of thermal emission. The spectral radiative energy travels in infinite directions along curved lines; this is a fundamental characteristic of near-field thermal radiation. The findings in this dissertation are important for the design of near-field optical sensors and energy conversion devices.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Zhang, Zhuomin; Committee Member: Citrin, David; Committee Member: Graham, Samuel; Committee Member: Hesketh, Peter; Committee Member: Tsai, Benjami