ONE-DIMENSIONAL PSEUDO-HOMOGENEOUS PACKED BED REACTOR MODELING INCLUDING NO-CO KINETICS

The air pollution generated from mobile sources creates a large impact on the environment and on people's health. In order to meet the stringent emission regulations worldwide, aftertreatment devices are employed to reduce the toxic emissions emanating from the Internal Combustion engines in these mobile sources. In order to continually reduce emissions levels, it is essential to understand and develop more predictive aftertreatment models. Traditional devices are of the monolithic geometry consisting of small channels employing laminar flow. However, often the reaction rate expressions utilized in these models are derived from more conventional packed bed reactor experimental setups. The aim of this thesis is to develop a one-dimensional pseudo-homogeneous packed bed reactor model for this type of reactor setup built in collaboration with the Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Department at the University of Kansas. A brief summary of the pseudo-homogeneous model is presented in order to properly develop the chemical species and energy equations for dynamically incompressible flow in one-dimension. Furthermore, the chemical kinetics on the reduction reaction of nitric oxide by carbon monoxide over rhodium-alumina and platinum-alumina catalysts is investigated in detail. This is accomplished in order to validate the model using fundamentally correct reaction kinetics via a precise global reaction mechanism. Finally, parametric studies including the different model components are presented and the specific choice of model does not largely influence the conversion profiles because of the similar effective transport values. Also, it is found that a careful consideration of source terms are required to model reactions accurately

Investment Banking Relationships and Merger Fees

This paper is among the first to investigate the effect of a prior investment banking relationship on merger advisory fees paid by acquiring firms. We find that acquiring firms pay a higher fee to advisors when they have had a continuing relationship and a lower fee when they switch to an advisor with whom they have had no prior relationship. We develop a measure of relationship strength between an acquiring firm and its merger advisor based on previous debt, equity and merger transactions completed by the acquiring firm. We also examine the relationship between a merger advisor’s reputation and its ability to retain clients. We find that firms are more likely to switch if their M and A advisor is not a top tier investment bank. To test if higher fees are compensation for better performance, we examine differences between the average announcement returns of acquiring firms that switch advisors and those that do not. We find no significant difference between these two return samples. Overall, our findings indicate that acquiring firms perceive benefits of retaining merger advisors with whom they have had a prior relationship (even at the cost of higher fees) and/or they face some other (higher) costs of switching to new bank advisors

Investment Banking Relationships and Merger Fees

This paper is among the first to investigate the effect of a prior investment banking relationship on merger advisory fees paid by acquiring firms. We find that acquiring firms pay a higher fee to advisors when they have had a continuing relationship and a lower fee when they switch to an advisor with whom they have had no prior relationship. We develop a measure of relationship strength between an acquiring firm and its merger advisor based on previous debt, equity and merger transactions completed by the acquiring firm. We also examine the relationship between a merger advisor’s reputation and its ability to retain clients. We find that firms are more likely to switch if their M and A advisor is not a top tier investment bank. To test if higher fees are compensation for better performance, we examine differences between the average announcement returns of acquiring firms that switch advisors and those that do not. We find no significant difference between these two return samples. Overall, our findings indicate that acquiring firms perceive benefits of retaining merger advisors with whom they have had a prior relationship (even at the cost of higher fees) and/or they face some other (higher) costs of switching to new bank advisors

Mixed Pfair/ERfair scheduling of asynchronous periodic tasks

PD2 uses a simpler tie-breaking scheme than PD to disambiguate equal deadlines. We present a series of counterexamples that suggest that, in general, the PD2 tie-breaking mechanism cannot be simplified. In contrast to this, we show that no tie-breaking information is needed on two-processor systems.Pfair scheduling was proposed by Baruah, Cohen, Plaxton, and Varvel as a non-work-conserving way of optimally and efficiently scheduling periodic tasks on a multiprocessor. In this paper, we introduce a work-conserving variant of Pfair scheduling called “early-release” fair (ERfair) scheduling. We also present a new scheduling algorithm called PD2 and show that it is optimal for scheduling any mix of early-release and non-early-release asynchronous, periodic tasks. In contrast, almost all prior work on Pfair scheduling has been limited to synchronous systems. PD2 is an optimization of an earlier deadline-based algorithm of Baruah, Gehrke, and Plaxton called P

Optimal rate-based scheduling on multiprocessors

The PD2 Pfair/ERfair scheduling algorithm is the most efficient known algorithm for optimally scheduling periodic tasks on multiprocessors. In this paper, we prove that PD2 is also optimal for scheduling “rate-based” tasks whose processing steps may be highly jittered. The rate-based task model we consider generalizes the widely-studied sporadic task model

Price Formation in the OTC Corporate Bond Markets: A Field Study of the Inter-Dealer Market

This is the first exploratory field study of the U.S. inter-dealer OTC corporate bond market. We do this by analyzing the trades of a major bond dealer and through interviews with personnel at the trading desk of this dealer. We document the competitive structure of the market in terms of the number of active dealers, the mechanism used to facilitate trades etc. We find that the mechanism of trading closely resembles a first price sealed bid auction. The number of active dealers is quite small - only 9 dealers account for a large fraction of the trades. We examine potential differences between different segments of the market. We develop a measure of competition for this bidding market based on the theory of auctions. This is the difference between the best and second best bid in a given trade. Our measure of competition indicates that competition is highest in US investment grade corporate bonds and lowest in junk bonds. We also examine the effect of size of the trade on this measure of competition. Surprisingly, large trades do not suffer from any adverse market impact. Lastly, we examine the effect of exclusion of individual bidders on the level of competition. The effect does not appear very large

Innovation in International Law and Global Finance: Estimating the Financial Impact of the Cape Town Convention

This paper examines the financial impact of a transfer of legal sovereignty covering the rights to collateral to an international regime in the case of the Cape Town Convention and Protocol covering international mobile assets, specifically commercial aircraft and related equipment, which came into force in 2004. We estimate the impact on financing costs facing airlines based in signatory countries in terms of access to financial markets and interest differentials, debt rating migration and stock prices using rating-sensitivity analysis, OLS regressions and event studies. We find that the present value of the resulting financing cost reductions are very significant and are biased in favor of developing countries, the sources of much of the growth in demand for commercial aircraft going forward. The results suggest the power of changes in the legal framework of financial markets to influence the costs and pricing of global financial flows