The paper documents the importance of leasing in the UK retail sector and estimates the potential balance sheet impact of new accounting proposals to bring all leases onto lessees’ balance sheets. Off-balance sheet operating leases are shown to be a major source of finance, and far more important (3.3 times higher) than onbalance sheet long-term debt; by contrast, finance leases are immaterial....

The development of cheap computing resources and an efficient networking infrastructure has led to the abundance of large computing clusters. Clusters introduce interesting resource management problems. A significant challenge for a cluster’s resource manager is to dynamically and efficiently allocate resources to competing consumers according to a configurable policy and to provide guarantees ...

This article introduces volume leases as a mechanism for providing server-driven cache consistency for large-scale, geographically distributed networks. Volume leases retain the good performance, fault tolerance, and server scalability of the semantically weaker client-driven protocols that are now used on the web. Volume leases are a variation of object leases, which were originally designed f...

This article introduces volume leases as a mechanism for providing server-driven cache consistency for large-scale, geographically distributed networks. Volume leases retain the good performance, fault tolerance, and server scalability of the semantically weaker client-driven protocols that are now used on the web. Volume leases are a variation of object leases, which were originally designed f...

In this paper, we argue that weak cache consistency mechanisms supported by existing Web proxy caches must be augmented by strong consistency mechanisms to support the growing diversity in application requirements. Existing strong consistency mechanisms are not appealing for Web environments due to their large state space or control message overhead. We focus on the lease approach that balances...

Most countries prohibit the export of certain antiquities. This practice often leads to illegal excavation and looting for the black market, which damages the items and destroys important aspects of the archaeological record. We argue that long-term leases of antiquities would raise revenue for the country of origin while preserving national long-term ownership rights. By putting antiquities in...

This paper investigates the impacts of smoke-free housing policies on compliance, enforcement and smoking behavior. From 2012 to 2014, we studied two affordable housing providers in Canada with comprehensive smoke-free policies: Waterloo Regional Housing that required new leases to be non-smoking and exempted existing leases, and Yukon Housing Corporation that required all leases (existing and ...

This paper introduces volume leases as a mechanism for providing cache consistency for large-scale, geographically distributed networks. Volume leases are a variation of leases, which were originally designed for distributed file systems. Using trace-driven simulation, we compare two new algorithms against four existing cache consistency algorithms and show that our new algorithms provide stron...

We review the issues involved in designing a mechanism for allocating resource rights. We focus on the case of exploration and development rights for oil and gas leases in U.S. federal lands to highlight the tradeoffs at play. The main issues concern the design of the lease contract, the design of the auction, and the supply of leases. A distinguishing feature of oil and gas leases is that the ...

In this paper, we argue that cache consistency mechanisms designed for stand-alone proxies do not scale to the large number of proxies in a content distribution network and are not flexible enough to allow consistency guarantees to be tailored to object needs. To meet the twin challenges of scalability and flexibility, we introduce the notion of cooperative consistency along with a mechanism, c...