Public concern over the state of the environment has grown over the past decade. All indications are that this concern will continue to influence policy making into the foreseeable future. Road transport is seen as the major contributor to environmental degradation. Transportation planners...

This dissertation is comprised of three essays. The first essay is an empirical examination into determining which spot rate processes are well suited to capturing the dynamics of the term structure of interest rates. The second essay explores a relatively new 'Price Deflator' approach to...

The use of derivatives in corporate risk management has grown rapidly in recent years, motivated in part by the success of the financial industry in creating a variety of over-the-counter and exchange-traded products. To evaluate the effectiveness of a risk management program or to test...

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) from Spain made large foreign direct investments (FDIs) in Latin America between 1990 and 2002, making Spain the second largest direct investor in this region since 1998, behind the United States. This dissertation explains the reasons that led Spanish firms to...

There are three chapters to this dissertation. Chapter 1 conceptualizes how volatile (i.e., easily changeable, elastic, unpredictable, unverifiable) regulatory environments in emerging markets influence multinational enterprise wholly owned foreign subsidiary (WOFS) strategy formulation,...

This field study addressed behavioral and organizational issues related to office automation technology. The objective was to determine if the manner in which office support is designed and managed makes a difference in the job satisfaction and productivity of support personnel. Two underlying...

Valuation of infrastructure assets has drawn close attention in the U.S. since the Governmental Accounting Standards Board Statement 34 (GASB 34) was issued in 1999. GASB 34 recommends two valuation methods: the depreciation method and the modified approach. The depreciation method estimates the...

This study examines the accuracy of various time series models in forecasting daily levels of occupancy. A reservation data set of 3 hotels that include over 3450 booking curves is used to test the performance of five models in forecasting occupancy levels up to 99 days in advance. Three...

There exists increasing competition in the construction industry, forcing contractors to be more cautious in calculating the mark-up for a project. For most contracts, the percent-markup is limited up to a certain range. In a tight bidding environment, the general tendency is even to...

Since the beginning of deregulation, natural gas markets have been opened up to competition, with the creation of open access to pipeline transportation and storage and unbundling of sales from pipeline transportation. However, although there is strong evidence that replacing regulation with...