Mandatory vs voluntary Payment for Green Electricity

Renewable energy sources have a critical role to play in contributing to the diversity, sustainability and security of energy supplies. The main objectives of the paper is to gain an understanding of UK households’preferences for the type of mechanism that is used to support renewables. Two self-designed contingent valuation method (cvM) surveys are used to explore whether the type of payment option has an impact on households’ willingness to pay for increasin9 share of renewable energy in electricity generation. The paper also investigates whether the type of payment mode affects respondents’ self-reported certainty of paying their stated valuations.The results indicate that the likelihood of paying a positive amount for supporting renewable energy is higher under a mandatory scheme compared to a voluntary payment option in the UK. Respondents have a higher level of certainty in paying their stated WTP under a mandatory payment scheme.ESRC TSEC

MANUFACTURE OF INDIVIDUALIZED DOSING: DEVELOPMENT AND CONTROL OF A DROPWISE ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING PROCESS FOR MELT BASED PHARMACEUTICAL PRODUCTS

The improvements in healthcare systems and the advent of precision medicine initiative have created the need to develop more innovative manufacturing methods for the delivery of individualized dosing and personalized treatments. In recent years, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) introduced the Quality by Design (QbD) and Process Analytical Technology (PAT) guidelines to encourage innovation and efficiency in pharmaceutical development, manufacturing and quality assurance. As a result of emerging technologies and encouragement from the regulatory authorities, the pharmaceutical industry has begun to develop more efficient production systems with more intensive use of on-line measurement and sensing, real time quality control and process control tools, which offer the potential for reduced variability, increased flexibility and efficiency, and improved product quality

Feminist Conceptualisations of the State: One Major Critical Paradigm

This paper presents a literature review of liberal feminist Marxist feminist radical feminist socialist feminist all the other i e lesbian feminist ecofeminist race and ethnicity based feminist and Third World feminist and postmodern feminist accounts of the state Keeping in mind the fact that feminism as listed under the contemporary Western critical paradigm carries the potential to transform the state the paper ends with a brief overview of the possible inheritances of the above mentioned feminisms Choosing to use gender inequality rather than patriarchy as an all-encompassing phrase the paper concludes that in order to develop a common sense on the relationship between the state s the market and the civil society finding historical data that are not contaminated by malestream knowledge remains at the top of the agenda of the feminist political struggl

Essays in Robust and Data-Driven Risk Management

Risk defined as the chance that the outcome of an uncertain event is different than expected. In practice, the risk reveals itself in different ways in various applications such as unexpected stock movements in the area of portfolio management and unforeseen demand in the field of new product development. In this dissertation, we present four essays on data-driven risk management to address the uncertainty in portfolio management and capacity expansion problems via stochastic and robust optimization techniques.The third chapter of the dissertation (Portfolio Management with Quantile Constraints) introduces an iterative, data-driven approximation to a problem where the investor seeks to maximize the expected return of his/her portfolio subject to a quantile constraint, given historical realizations of the stock returns. Our approach involves solving a series of linear programming problems (thus) quickly solves the large scale problems. We compare its performance to that of methods commonly used in finance literature, such as fitting a Gaussian distribution to the returns. We also analyze the resulting efficient frontier and extend our approach to the case where portfolio risk is measured by the inter-quartile range of its return. Furthermore, we extend our modeling framework so that the solution calculates the corresponding conditional value at risk CVaR) value for the given quantile level.The fourth chapter (Portfolio Management with Moment Matching Approach) focuses on the problem where a manager, given a set of stocks to invest in, aims to minimize the probability of his/her portfolio return falling below a threshold while keeping the expected portfolio returnno worse than a target, when the stock returns are assumed to be Log-Normally distributed. This assumption, common in finance literature, creates computational difficulties. Because the portfolio return itself is difficult to estimate precisely. We thus approximate the portfolio re-turn distribution with a single Log-Normal random variable by the Fenton-Wilkinson method and investigate an iterative, data-driven approximation to the problem. We propose a two-stage solution approach, where the first stage requires solving a classic mean-variance optimization model, and the second step involves solving an unconstrained nonlinear problem with a smooth objective function. We test the performance of this approximation method and suggest an iterative calibration method to improve its accuracy. In addition, we compare the performance of the proposed method to that obtained by approximating the tail empirical distribution function to a Generalized Pareto Distribution, and extend our results to the design of basket options.The fifth chapter (New Product Launching Decisions with Robust Optimization) addresses the uncertainty that an innovative firm faces when a set of innovative products are planned to be launched a national market by help of a partner company for each innovative product. Theinnovative company investigates the optimal period to launch each product in the presence of the demand and partner offer response function uncertainties. The demand for the new product is modeled with the Bass Diffusion Model and the partner companies\u27 offer response functions are modeled with the logit choice model. The uncertainty on the parameters of the Bass Diffusion Model and the logic choice model are handled by robust optimization. We provide a tractable robust optimization framework to the problem which includes integer variables. In addition, weprovide an extension of the proposed approach where the innovative company has an option to reduce the size of the contract signed by the innovative firm and the partner firm for each product.In the sixth chapter (Log-Robust Portfolio Management with Factor Model), we investigate robust optimization models that address uncertainty for asset pricing and portfolio management. We use factor model to predict asset returns and treat randomness by a budget of uncertainty. We obtain a tractable robust model to maximize the wealth and gain theoretical insights into the optimal investment strategies

Türkiye’de Reel Ücretlerin TAR Modeli ile Analizi ve Birim Kök Sýnamasý

Doðrusal olmayan yapýdaki iktisadi deðiþkenler uzun yýllar doðrusal modeller araçlarý ile analiz edilmiþ bu nedenle de gerçek hayatý açýklamada yetersiz kalmýþtýr. Son dönemde yapýlan çalýþmalar sonucunda doðrusal olmayan zaman serileri analizlerinin özellikle makro ekonomik modellerin oluþturulmasýnda daha baþarýlý olduðu görülmektedir. Her geçen gün bu konudaki teorik literatürün geliþmekte olmasý iktisat literatüründe de uygulama alanlarýnýn geniþlemesine katkýda bulunmaktadýr. Bu noktada öne çýkan çalýþmalar TAR ailesi modelleridir. Bu modellerin çýkýþ ve popüler hale gelmesinde Tong (1978), Tsay (1989) ve sonrasýnda Terasvirta (1994) çalýþmalarýnýn önemi büyüktür. Bu konu üzerine çalýþmalar hýzla ilerlerken 20. yy’ýn son çeyreðinden itibaren doðrusal yapýya sahip olmadýðý saptanan deðiþkenlerin modellenmesinin bir adým ötesine geçilerek deðiþkenlerin uzun dönemli analizlerinin yapýldýðý görülmektedir. Bu çalýþma ise 1990:01 – 2007:06 döneminde Türkiye’de Reel ücretlerin yapýsýný doðrusal olmayan zaman serileri analizi yöntemleri ile ortaya koymayý amaçlamaktadýr. Bu amaç doðrultusunda çalýþmanýn ilk bölümünde doðrusal olmayan zaman serilerinden, uygulamada kullanýlacak olan TAR model ile ilgili bilgi verildikten sonra geleneksel birim kök testleri ve doðrusal olmayan birim kök testleri ile ilgili literatüre ve test prosedürlerine yer verilmiþtir. 3kinci kýsýmda ise uygulanan geleneksel birim kök testleri ile TAR modellerine uygulanan Caner ve Hansen (2001) çalýþmasýnda geliþtirmiþ olduklarý birim kök testi sonuçlarý sunulmaktadýrÜcretler, TAR Modelleri, TAR Birim Kök

Gamete Formation Resets the Aging Clock in Yeast

Gametogenesis is a process whereby a germ cell differentiates into haploid gametes. We found that, in budding yeast, replicatively aged cells remove age-induced cellular damage during gametogenesis. Importantly, gametes of aged cells have the same replicative potential as those derived from young cells, indicating that life span resets during gametogenesis. Here, we explore the potential mechanisms responsible for gametogenesis-induced rejuvenation and discuss putative analogous mechanisms in higher eukaryotes.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (grant GM62207

Inorganic Cadmium Detection Using a Fluorescent Whole-Cell Bacterial Bioreporter

Cadmium pollution has become a serious environmental issue due to its toxicity and frequent entrance into environment components such as soil, water, and air via many anthropogenic sources. Over the last two decades, whole-cell bacterial bioreporters have been acknowledged as bio-sentinels for the determination of toxic heavy metals. Herein a sensitive and quite specific bacterial bioreporter was developed to cope with the need for the rapid and simple determination of cadmium. The construction and characterization of a fluorescence-based whole-cell cadmium bioreporter strain, Escherichia coli MG1655 (pBR-PzntA), was described which is based on the expression of green fluorescent protein under the control of the zntA gene promoter of heavy metal resistance determinant. The developed bioreporter was able determine cadmium at 5 mu g/L after 3.5 hours of induction in a defined medium while the cadmium detection limit was improved to 2 mu g/L after 1.5 hours by the use of an inorganic phosphate-limiting defined medium. Drastic changes in cadmium sensitivity were obtained between bioreporter cells induced at different growth phases. The maximum fluorescence performance was obtained for early exponential growth phase cells. This cadmium bioreporter was found to be more sensitive and specific to cadmium ions than to a wide range of heavy metals and was sensitive to only cadmium at drinking water quality standard concentrations. These findings will lead to future studies including integration of the bioreporter cells into a portable device to assess bioavailable cadmium levels in environmental samples which will provide a rapid and practical field detection technique