726 research outputs found
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New evidence on the green building rent and price premium
This paper investigates the effect of voluntary eco-certification on the rental and sale prices of US commercial office properties. Hedonic and logistic regressions are used to test whether there are rental and sale price premiums for LEED and Energy Star certified buildings. The results of the hedonic analysis suggest that there is a rental premium of approximately 6% for LEED and Energy Star certification. A sale price premium of approximately 35% was found for 127 price observations involving LEED rated buildings and 31% for 662 buildings involving Energy Star rated buildings. When compared to samples of similar buildings identified by a binomial logistic regression for LEED-certified buildings, the existence of a rent and sales price premium is confirmed albeit with differences regarding the magnitude of the premium. Overall, the results of this study confirm that LEED and Energy Star buildings exhibit higher rental rates and sales prices per square foot controlling for a large number of location- and property-specific factors
Wafering economies for industrialization from a wafer manufacturer's viewpoint
The key technical limitations which inhibit the lowering of value-added costs for state-of-the-art wafering techniques are assessed. From the best experimental results to date, a projection was made to identify those parts of each system which need to be developed in order to meet or improve upon the value-added cost reduction necessary for $0.70/Wp photovoltaics modules
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Flight to quality? An investigation of changing price spreads in commercial real estate markets
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the crisis on the pricing of asset quality attributes. This paper uses sales transaction data to examine whether flight from risk phenomena took place in the US office market during the financial crisis of 2007-2009.
Design/methodology/approach
– Hedonic regression procedures are used to test the hypothesis that the spread between the pricing of low-quality and high-quality characteristics increased during the crisis period compared to the pre-crisis period.
Findings
– The results of the hedonic regression models suggest that the price spread between Class A and other properties grew significantly during the downturn.
Research limitations/implications
– Our results are consistent with the hypothesis of an increased price spread following a market downturn between Class A and non-Class A offices. The evidence suggests that the relationships between the returns on Class A and non-Class A assets changed during the period of market stress or crisis.
Practical implications
– These findings have implications for real estate portfolio construction. If regime switches can be predicted and/or responded to rapidly, portfolios may be rebalanced. In crisis periods, portfolios might be reweighted towards Class A properties and in positive market periods, the reweighting would be towards non-Class A assets.
Social implications
– The global financial crisis has demonstrated that real estate markets play a crucial role in modern economies and that negative developments in these markets have the potential to spillover and create contagion for the larger economy, thereby affecting jobs, incomes and ultimately people’s livelihoods.
Originality/value
– This is one of the first studies that address the flight to quality phenomenon in commercial real estate markets during periods of financial crisis and market turmoil.
The authors wish to thank the CoStar Group for providing a large database of property transactions to enable this research. Franz Fuerst also wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Cambridge University Land Society (CULS).This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Emerald at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/SEF-10-2013-0155
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Does energy efficiency matter to home-buyers? An investigation of EPC ratings and transaction prices in England
This paper investigates whether energy performance ratings, as measured by mandatory Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), are reflected in the sale prices of residential properties. This is the first large-scale empirical study of this topic in England involving 333,095 dwellings sold at least twice in the period from 1995 to 2012. Applying hedonic regression and an augmented repeat sales regression, we find a positive relationship between the energy efficiency rating of a dwelling and the transaction price per square metre. The price effects of superior energy performance tend to be higher for terraced dwellings and flats compared to detached and semi-detached dwellings. The evidence is less clear-cut for rates of house price growth but remains supportive of a positive association. Overall, the results of this study suggest that energy efficiency labels have a measurable and significant impact on house prices in England.The authors wish to thank the UK Department of Energy and Climate
Change (TRN 297/11/2011) for financial support. Helpful comments on
earlier drafts were received from Chris Nicholls, Jeremy Moody and two
anonymous referees of this Journal. Franz Fuerst also wishes to acknowledge
the generous support of the Cambridge University Land Society
(CULS) in enabling his research.This is the accepted manuscript of a paper published in Energy Economics Volume 48, March 2015, Pages 145–156, doi:10.1016/j.eneco.2014.12.012
Probing large-scale wind structures in Vela X-1 using off-states with INTEGRAL
Vela X-1 is the prototype of the class of wind-fed accreting pulsars in high
mass X-ray binaries hosting a supergiant donor. We have analyzed in a
systematic way ten years of INTEGRAL data of Vela X-1 (22-50 keV) and we found
that when outside the X-ray eclipse, the source undergoes several luminosity
drops where the hard X-rays luminosity goes below 3x10^35 erg/s, becoming
undetected by INTEGRAL. These drops in the X-ray flux are usually referred to
as "off-states" in the literature. We have investigated the distribution of
these off-states along the Vela X-1 ~8.9 d orbit, finding that their orbital
occurrence displays an asymmetric distribution, with a higher probability to
observe an off-state near the pre-eclipse than during the post-eclipse. This
asymmetry can be explained by scattering of hard X-rays in a region of ionized
wind, able to reduce the source hard X-ray brightness preferentially near
eclipse ingress. We associate this ionized large-scale wind structure with the
photoionization wake produced by the interaction of the supergiant wind with
the X-ray emission from the neutron star. We emphasize that this observational
result could be obtained thanks to the accumulation of a decade of INTEGRAL
data, with observations covering the whole orbit several times, allowing us to
detect an asymmetric pattern in the orbital distribution of off-states in Vela
X-1.Comment: Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society (5 pages, 3 figures). A few typos fixed to match the published
versio
Variability in high-mass X-ray binaries
Strongly magnetized, accreting neutron stars show periodic and aperiodic
variability over a wide range of time scales. By obtaining spectral and timing
information on these different time scales, we can have a closer look into the
physics of accretion close to the neutron star and the properties of the
accreted material. One of the most prominent time scales is the strong
pulsation, i.e., the rotation period of the neutron star itself. Over one
rotation, our view of the accretion column and the X-ray producing region
changes significantly. This allows us to sample different physical conditions
within the column but at the same time requires that we have
viewing-angle-resolved models to properly describe them. In wind-fed high-mass
X-ray binaries, the main source of aperiodic variability is the clumpy stellar
wind, which leads to changes in the accretion rate (i.e., luminosity) as well
as absorption column. This variability allows us to study the behavior of the
accretion column as a function of luminosity, as well as to investigate the
structure and physical properties of the wind, which we can compare to winds in
isolated stars.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomische
Nachrichten (proceedings of the XMM-Newton Workshop 2019
The two-component Beta-t-QVAR-M-lev: a new forecasting model
We introduce a new joint model of expected return and volatility forecasting, namely the two-component Beta-t-QVAR-M-lev (quasi-vector autoregression in-mean with leverage). The maximum likelihood estimator for the two-component Beta-t-QVAR-M-lev is an extension of theoretical results of the one-component Beta-t-QVAR-M. We compare the volatility forecasting performance of the two-component Beta-t-QVAR-M-lev and two-component GARCH-M (generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity), also considering their one-component frameworks. The results for G20 stock market indices indicate that the forecasting performance of the two-component Beta-t-QVAR-M-lev is superior compared with the two-component GARCH-M and their one-component versions
Multiple cyclotron line-forming regions in GX 301-2
We present two observations of the high-mass X-ray binary GX 301-2 with
NuSTAR, taken at different orbital phases and different luminosities. We find
that the continuum is well described by typical phenomenological models, like a
very strongly absorbed NPEX model. However, for a statistically acceptable
description of the hard X-ray spectrum we require two cyclotron resonant
scattering features (CRSF), one at ~35 keV and the other at ~50 keV. Even
though both features strongly overlap, the good resolution and sensitivity of
NuSTAR allows us to disentangle them at >=99.9% significance. This is the first
time that two CRSFs are seen in GX 301-2. We find that the CRSFs are very
likely independently formed, as their energies are not harmonically related
and, if it were a single line, the deviation from a Gaussian shape would be
very large. We compare our results to archival Suzaku data and find that our
model also provides a good fit to those data. We study the behavior of the
continuum as well as the CRSF parameters as function of pulse phase in seven
phase bins. We find that the energy of the 35 keV CRSF varies smoothly as
function of phase, between 30-38 keV. To explain this variation, we apply a
simple model of the accretion column, taking the altitude of the line-forming
region, the velocity of the in-falling material, and the resulting relativistic
effects into account. We find that in this model the observed energy variation
can be explained simply due to a variation of the projected velocity and
beaming factor of the line forming region towards us.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in A&
The 2-79 keV X-Ray Spectrum of the Circinus Galaxy with NuSTAR, XMM-Newton, and Chandra: A Fully Compton-thick Active Galactic Nucleus
The Circinus galaxy is one of the closest obscured active galactic nuclei (AGNs), making it an ideal target for detailed study. Combining archival Chandra and XMM-Newton data with new NuSTAR observations, we model the 2-79 keV spectrum to constrain the primary AGN continuum and to derive physical parameters for the obscuring material. Chandra's high angular resolution allows a separation of nuclear and off-nuclear galactic emission. In the off-nuclear diffuse emission, we find signatures of strong cold reflection, including high equivalent-width neutral Fe lines. This Compton-scattered off-nuclear emission amounts to 18% of the nuclear flux in the Fe line region, but becomes comparable to the nuclear emission above 30 keV. The new analysis no longer supports a prominent transmitted AGN component in the observed band. We find that the nuclear spectrum is consistent with Compton scattering by an optically thick torus, where the intrinsic spectrum is a power law of photon index Γ = 2.2-2.4, the torus has an equatorial column density of N_H = (6-10) × 10^(24) cm^(–2), and the intrinsic AGN 2-10 keV luminosity is (2.3-5.1) × 10^(42) erg s^(–1). These values place Circinus along the same relations as unobscured AGNs in accretion rate versus Γ and L_X versus L_(IR) phase space. NuSTAR's high sensitivity and low background allow us to study the short timescale variability of Circinus at X-ray energies above 10 keV for the first time. The lack of detected variability favors a Compton-thick absorber, in line with the spectral fitting results
Broadband X-ray spectral analysis of the Seyfert 1 galaxy GRS 1734-292
We discuss the broadband X-ray spectrum of GRS 1734-292 obtained from
non-simultaneous XMM-Newton and NuSTAR observations, performed in 2009 and
2014, respectively. GRS1734-292 is a Seyfert 1 galaxy, located near the
Galactic plane at . The NuSTAR spectrum ( keV) is dominated by
a primary power-law continuum with and a high-energy
cutoff keV, one of the lowest measured by NuSTAR in a
Seyfert galaxy. Comptonization models show a temperature of the coronal plasma
of keV and an optical depth, assuming a slab
geometry, or a similar temperature and
assuming a spherical geometry. The 2009 XMM-Newton
spectrum is well described by a flatter intrinsic continuum
() and one absorption line due to Fe\textsc{XXV}
K produced by a warm absorber. Both data sets show a modest iron
K emission line at keV and the associated Compton reflection, due
to reprocessing from neutral circumnuclear material
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