Many stylized facts of leverage, trading, and asset prices follow from a frictionless general equilibrium model that features agents’ heterogeneity in endowments and habit preferences. Our model predicts that aggregate debt increases in good times when stock prices are high, return volatility is low, and levered agents enjoy a “consumption boom.” Our model is consistent with poorer agents borro...

The He and Krishnamurthy models imply that the financial intermediary sector – measured broadly, and not just focused for example on hedge funds – has leverage that rises during crisis. The prediction is due to a mix of general equilibrium and corporate finance arguments. First, in the model, in general equilibrium the intermediary sector must retains the bulk of risk exposure from intermediate...

A home is the single largest purchase that most households make, and it is one that usually requires some debt financing. Because housing debt is such a large component of households’ balance sheets, it is important to understand the financing decision. In this paper, we use household level data from the HILDA survey to relate households’ leverage to their observed characteristics using both gr...

This thesis presents a two-level approach to energy accounting in virtual machine environments. Instead of accounting the energy consumption of the hardware directly to the applications, as done by previous approaches, we account it to virtual machines. Each guest operating system can then obtain the energy consumption of the virtual machine and split it between its applications. Thus, energy m...

Using a sample of Australian firms, we document improvements in operating performance following performance shocks. These improvements result in part from turnaround strategies adopted by management. Evidence suggests that changes made to leverage and operating expenses result in a negative contemporaneous effect on performance improvement. The adjustments made to working capital (revenue growt...

Real-time multimedia applications require processing of multiple data streams while maintaining responsiveness. Development of such applications can be greatly accelerated by the use of a middleware framework that abstracts operating system dependencies and provides optimized implementations of frequently used components. In this paper we present the Nizza multimedia framework which enables rap...

Xax is a browser plugin model that enables developers to leverage existing tools, libraries, and entire programs to deliver feature-rich applications on the web. Xax employs a novel combination of mechanisms that collectively provide security, OS-independence, performance, and support for legacy code. These mechanisms include memory-isolated native code execution behind a narrow syscall interfa...

While western corporate operating procedures were adequate in a world where resource consumption was dominated by a small segment of the population, their application on a global scale is not sustainable. At the same time, the inefficiencies inherent in industry in developing and lesser developed countries is also not an option as global consumption increases. New corporate operating procedures...

In this paper, we examine the role of political connections by analyzing the short-and long-term performance of Chinese state owned enterprise (SOE) acquirers relative to private owned enterprise (POE) from 1994 to 2008. The empirical result shows that 1) SOE acquirers outperform the POE acquirer both in terms of long-run stock and operating performance; 2) announcement effect of POE acquirer t...