Exploring How Macroeconomic Factors Affect REITs and Evaluating Its Downside Risk – Empirical Evidence From China and the US

Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) is considered as a financial instrument operated and managed by professional management teams based on a range of income-producing real estate. The focus of this thesis is on publicly traded equity REITs. There are four research questions that this thesis attempts to answer. How did REITs develop in the United States (US)? What are the critical factors that incentivized the Chinese government to promote REITs, and what is the progress? Are REITs a good hedge against macroeconomic risk factors? How can the downside risk of REITs be evaluated? To begin, the first two questions have been answered using the literature review methodology. The VAR model is constructed to evaluate the relation between the REIT market and macroeconomic factors. Ultimately, downside risk of REIT market is assessed by the GARCH(1,1)-VaR model based on the student’s t-distribution. Keywords: Equity REITs; Macroeconomic risks; VAR; VaR; GARCH(1,1).Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) is considered as a financial instrument operated and managed by professional management teams based on a range of income-producing real estate. The focus of this thesis is on publicly traded equity REITs. There are four research questions that this thesis attempts to answer. How did REITs develop in the United States (US)? What are the critical factors that incentivized the Chinese government to promote REITs, and what is the progress? Are REITs a good hedge against macroeconomic risk factors? How can the downside risk of REITs be evaluated? To begin, the first two questions have been answered using the literature review methodology. The VAR model is constructed to evaluate the relation between the REIT market and macroeconomic factors. Ultimately, downside risk of REIT market is assessed by the GARCH(1,1)-VaR model based on the student’s t-distribution. Keywords: Equity REITs; Macroeconomic risks; VAR; VaR; GARCH(1,1)

Needs and Response: Chinese Urban Family Caregivers' Needs and Social Support

Caregiving is emerging as a global issue, as countries around the world are facing aging populations, including China. The intent of this study is: (1) to explore what needs Chinese urban family caregivers express, and in what way they may differ depending on certain background variables; (2) to explore what support, both formal and informal, is available for them; and (3) what changes to existing support may be appropriate in order to improve the quality of caregiving as well as the quality of life for caregivers so that they can be better able to provide caring services for old people. In-depth interviews and questionnaires were adopted to collect both qualitative and quantitative data from family caregivers of older adults living in urban Shanghai. The study has found that family caregivers’ needs are diversified and differentiated. The support they have received mainly comes from relatives, while formal social support remains still insufficient for them and their families, thus failing to meet family caregivers’ diversified and differentiated needs. The findings suggest the efforts to embed the micro-level informal support network into the macro-level formal support system by integrating all parties into forces including governmental and non-governmental sectors, communities and social work, thus enriching the forms, enhancing the strength, and consolidating the foundation of social support for family caregivers

A Comprehensive Framework for White-Box Damage Detection in Structural Systems Based on Extended Constitutive Relation Error Method

Early detection of the deterioration and degradation in civil infrastructure is critical for structural engineers and infrastructure managers to develop rehabilitation and maintenance plans. In the field of structural health monitoring, numerous techniques have been developed to detect and localize damage by examining changes in measured vibration response. Among vibration-based damage detection techniques, model-based approach has been widely used as its damage detection process incorporates the geometric configuration, physical properties, and behavioral characteristics of the structural system. However, the model-based approaches depend on a model calibration procedure that is based only on the outputs of numerical models without explicitly taking the knowledge regarding the mechanistic behavior of the system into account. Moreover, due to the limitation of measurement degrees of freedom (DOFs), the number of identified vibration modes are typically far fewer than the number of model variables to be calibrated. Consequently, these model-based damage detection methods frequently suffer from an ill-posed inverse-problem. This dissertation contributes to the field of model-based damage detection by implementing the Extended Constitutive Relation Error (ECRE), a method developed for error localization in finite element models for detecting structural damage. Implementing ECRE for damage detection leads to the localization of elements with high residual energy through the identification of discrepancies between experimental measurements and model predictions due to damage. The ECRE-based damage detection technique incorporates the underlying physics of the problem in a tangible and visible manner, and thus leading to more reliable solutions in the damage detection and localization process. This dissertation applies the ECRE-based damage detection in the context of both linear and nonlinear dynamical systems. In particular, the dissertation integrates the Multi-harmonic balance method with ECRE to accurate identify the modeling errors of locally nonlinear dynamical systems. This approach has a potential to be applied for damage detection in the nonlinear structural system, as well as to be used as a damage prognosis tool for the estimation of structural system\u27s remaining useful life

Immersion on the Edge: A Cooperative Framework for Mobile Immersive Computing

Immersive computing (IC) technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality are gaining tremendous popularity. In this poster, we present CoIC, a Cooperative framework for mobile Immersive Computing. The design of CoIC is based on a key insight that IC tasks among different applications or users might be similar or redundant. CoIC enhances the performance of mobile IC applications by caching and sharing computation-intensive IC results on the edge. Our preliminary evaluation results on an AR application show that CoIC can reduce the recognition and rendering latency by up to 52.28% and 75.86% respectively on current mobile devices.Comment: This poster has been accepted by the SIGCOMM in June 201

The Discussion of aoInfanta Problem: The Situation and Trends of Chinese Childrens Animation

The problem Infant in Chinese animation will be analyzed the differences between Chilren s Animation and Infant will be declaired then it will be point out that Childish view in Chinese public opinion is wrong There are shown that the Chinese animation s experiences and trend