In this paper, we report the survey results from executives of companies in ten countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) – Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia – regarding their companies’ capital budgeting practices. We document interesting insights on how theoretical corporate finance concepts are applied by practit...

This paper examines the relationship among disaster tolerant systems, Information Technology (IT) application operation and availability, and the executive level management visibility necessary for system operational success. The current state of disaster tolerant application systems is explored including an investigation into the reliability and survivability requirements necessary to achieve ...

Thin-film photovoltaic (PV) modules often suffer from a variety of parasitic resistive losses in transparent conductive oxide (TCO) and absorber layers that significantly affect the module electrical performance. This paper presents the holistic investigation of resistive effects due to TCO lateral sheet resistance and shunts in amorphous-silicon (a-Si) thin-film PV modules by simultaneous use ...

Raman scattering is a rare event. It is only the extreme brightness of a focused laser radiation that makes Raman spectroscopy practical. Thus, since the laser beam is not materially affected by the interaction, it should be possible to pass the same laser beam through a sample multiple times with little attenuation of the laser power. We have accomplished this by means of a probe design in whi...

The scattering properties of transparent conductive oxide (TCO) films into dielectric and semiconductor surrounding media are modeled and compared to experiment. The new approach is not only valid for smooth optical films but also for films with enhanced roughness in order to generate light trapping structures for thin film solar cells. ©2010 Optical Society of America. OCIS codes: (310.0310) t...

We develop an empirical method to assess the degree of financial exposure associated with medical care spending among non-elderly U.S. households with employer-sponsored insurance. A key feature of this method is its simplicity – it only requires data on out-of-pocket (OOP) health care spending and total health care spending and does not require detailed knowledge of health insurance benefit de...

Your SAP environment is critical to business operations. Migrating your SAP systems to Oracle Solaris delivers the availability, performance, scalability, flexibility, and security you need for mission-critical operations, all at a lower total cost of ownership than other UNIX and Linux systems. And, Oracle ACS Lifecycle Migration Services and Oracle Migration Factory help you make the change q...

In Part I of this paper the development of allocated and incremental cost and revenue techniques was described. have become predominant. In contrast, methodologies for dealing with revenues, particularly incremental measures, are in their infancy. Part II of the paper describes the state-of-the-art for these methods. This review is explicitly not meant as a cookbook of methodology, and the read...

Merger simulations focus on the price changes that may occur once previously independent competitors set prices jointly and other market participants respond. This paper considers an additional effect – the possibility that market participants choose to change their product offerings after a merger. Using a model that endogenizes both product choice and pricing, we conduct equilibrium market si...

Over the past two years a combination of circumstances has fueled intense efforts to rethink the integration of IP networking and mass storage. Chief among these facts are the universal acceptance of Internet technologies for network infrastructure, the relentless acceleration of the Ethernet substrate, and the ongoing, exponential rise in the amount of data that must be moved and managed. Take...