163 research outputs found
Case study on drivers of stormwater user fees in 3 Massachusetts communities
No full textThesis: M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2016.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 66-71).Urban stormwater is a major source of pollution in U.S. water bodies. Addressing the problem of stormwater pollution at the municipal level can be expensive, from infrastructure maintenance to implementing regulatory best practices. These needs have put pressure on municipalities to look for a stable source of revenue that extends beyond general tax appropriations for public works projects. In this context, stormwater user fees have remained a hotly debated topic in local budget discussions and national forums about stormwater management. In comparison to the rest of the country, the adoption of fees in Massachusetts communities is plagued by low uptake. This thesis aims to understand the surprisingly small proliferation and early adaptation of stormwater user fees in Massachusetts by identifying the local drivers of fee adoption as an alternative to using local tax income in three communities: Chicopee, Fall River and Northampton. Through a descriptive case study approach using qualitative interviews and publicly available data, the research underscores four key drivers apparent in local fee adoption: financial pressure, local history, governance arrangements of budgets, and cost equity. Ultimately, communities face numerous tradeoffs that affect the momentum and intricacy of the fee adoption process. Lessons learned about the local drivers of stormwater user fees in these three cases are specifically applicable to the Massachusetts context, but can serve as a guide for other New England municipalities considering new fees.by Anisha Anantapadmanabhan.M.C.P
The Romanticization of Mental Illness and Substance Abuse in Young Adult Media
No full textabstract: The following creative project defends that, whether intentionally or not, mental illness and substance abuse are inevitably romanticized in young adult media and discusses the dangers of this romanticization. This project is divided into three parts. The first part consists of psychological evaluations of the main characters of two popular, contemporary forms of young adult media, Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger and Euphoria by Sam Levinson. These evaluations use textual evidence and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) to determine what symptoms of psychopathology the characters appear to display. The second part consists of a self-written short story that is meant to accurately depict the life of a young adult struggling with mental illness and substance abuse. This story contains various aesthetic techniques borrowed from the two young adult media forms. The final part consists of an aesthetic statement which discusses in depth the aesthetic techniques employed within the short story, Quicksand by Anisha Mehra. (abstract
Application of Essential Oil Compounds and Bacteriophage to Control Staphylococcus aureus
No full textStaphylococcus aureus is one of the most important pathogens, causing various diseases in humans and animals. In addition, S. aureus is a common foodborne pathogen. As methicillin- resistant S. aureus (MRSA) becomes increasingly prevalent, controlling this pathogen in animals and humans with standard antibiotic treatment has become challenging. Combinations of different antimicrobial agents represent one of the most promising approaches for combating multidrug - resistant bacteria both for treatment of clinical disease as well as in food. Two such antimicrobials with potential application in the food industry include essential oils (EO) and host-specific bacteriophage (phage). The objectives of this study were 1) to determine the efficacy of varying concentrations of pure EOs compounds against S. aureus and 2) to evaluate the efficacy of a S. aureus-specific bacteriophage against 4 strains of S. aureus. The overall goal was to combine these antimicrobials to determine potential synergism and possible application for the control of S. aureus on raw chicken products. Four EO compounds were evaluated by disc diffusion assay to determine inhibitory effects against five strains of S. aureus. Next, a growth inhibition assay was performed using a 96-well plate bioassay to measure change in optical density over a 48-hour period. Phage adsorption assays were performed up to 120 h at 6, 13, and 37°C to determine lytic activity. The results from disc diffusion, growth inhibition, and phage adsorption assays indicate that EO compounds and bacteriophage can be used as antimicrobials against S. aureus. For application in the food industry, these antimicrobials were evaluated for their efficacy against S. aureus on raw chicken pieces at 6, 13, and 25°C. Results indicate that at 25°C phage K alone inhibits S. aureus growth better as compared to other antimicrobial combination. At 6 and 13°C, there was no significant effect of EO and phage alone or in combination against S. aureus when applied on the raw chicken pieces. Therefore, for these antimicrobials to work in vivo such as raw meat products, a better delivery method should be employed for a uniform application on meat
Can Rare Events Explain the Equity Premium Puzzle?
No full textProbably not. First, allowing the probabilities of the states of the economy to differ from their sample frequencies, the consumption-CAPM is still rejected in both U.S. and international data. Second, the recorded world disasters are too small to rationalize the puzzle, unless one assumes that disasters occur every 6–10 years. Third, if the data were generated by the rare events distribution needed to rationalize the equity premium puzzle, the puzzle itself would be unlikely to arise. Fourth, the rare events hypothesis, by reducing the cross-sectional dispersion of consumption risk, worsens the ability of the consumption-CAPM to explain the cross-section of returns.</p
Can Rare Events Explain the Equity Premium Puzzle?
No full textProbably not. First, allowing the probabilities attached to the states of the economy to differ from their sample frequencies, the Consumption-CAPM is still rejected by the data and requires a very high level of Relative Risk Aversion (RRA) in order to rationalize the stock market risk premium. This result holds for a variety of data sources and samples - including ones starting as far back as 1890. Second, we elicit the likelihood of observing an Equity Premium Puzzle (EPP) if the data were generated by the rare events probability distribution needed to rationalize the puzzle with a low level of RRA. We find that the historically observed EPP would be very unlikely to arise. Third, we find that the rare events explanation of the EPP significantly worsens the ability of the Consumption-CAPM to explain the cross-section of asset returns. This is due to the fact that, by assigning higher probabilities to bad - economy wide -�states in which consumption growth is low and all the assets in the cross-section tend to yield low returns, the rare events hypothesis reduces the cross-sectional dis-persion of consumption risk relative to the cross-sectional variation of average returns.
Subjective beliefs estimators and their properties
No full textInformation-theoretic methods recover investors’ subjective beliefs by minimizing the statistical discrepancy between beliefs and the DGP, subject to assets’ Euler constraints. We show that the estimated beliefs converges in probability to its pseudo-true value. Comparing estimators in the Cressie-Read family, we show that the exponential tilting and empirical likelihood estimators produce qualitatively similar estimates of the risk aversion levels and beliefs. The quadratic divergence estimator leads to negative subjective probabilities, implausibly large risk aversion levels, and underestimation of left tail risk. Our results suggest large institutional investors, like pension funds, have countercyclical beliefs about the market return, while extrapolative investors have procyclical beliefs. Our results offer an alternative explanation of the momentum effect in stock returns, help reconcile procyclical beliefs reported in individual investor surveys versus countercyclical beliefs implied by rational expectations representative agent models, and establish the information-theoretic approach as a powerful methodology for the recovery of beliefs
Consistent estimation of the risk-return tradeoff in the presence of measurement error
No full textProminent asset pricing models imply a linear, time-invariant relation between the equity
premium and its conditional variance. We propose an approach to estimating this relation that
overcomes some of the limitations of the existing literature. First, we do not require any
functional form assumptions about the conditional moments. Second, the GMM approach is
used to overcome the endogeneity problem inherent in the regression. Third, we correct for the
measurement error arising because of using a proxy for the latent variance. The empirical
findings reveal significant time-variation in the relation that coincide with structural break dates
in the market-wide price-dividend rati
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