Downtowns have experienced decline since the 1990s in Japan and several strategies have been implemented to deal with it. This research focuses on one of such strategies-the Town Management Organization (TMO) model. Although the model was expected to achieve downtown revitalization through...

Community development loan funds (CDLFs) play a critical role in financing affordable housing, small businesses, and non-profit organizations in low-income communities throughout the US. Since the 2008 financial crisis disrupted CDLFs' primary sources of capital-banks and foundations-many CDLFs...

Local independent businesses are critical to the economic health and quality of life of communities. This thesis examines whether marketing can motivate people to consciously and reliably support local independent businesses in their community. The first chapter provides an introduction to the...

Globalization has brought about a major shift in our understanding of how companies organize themselves and how they compete. The fragmentation of firms in their scope and structure, the vertical disintegration of firms through greater outsourcing, and the rise of global supply and value chains...

The Office Business Center (OBC) is a shared office facility, which is fully equipped, staffed and furnished. Many small business and sole proprietors choose OBC space over traditional leased office space because it alleviates the upfront cost and time required to maintain and manage an...

The major objective of this study is to test equilibrium asset pricing models with respect to how well they price risk across multiple asset classes; including the four quadrants of real estate. While using the Geltner (1999) paper as a springboard for our approach, this thesis both updates...

The German real estate open-ended fund, a major indirect real estate investment vehicle for German individual investors, is now suffering a strong pressure of globalization from its investors because of the sluggish German domestic real estate market. In order to deal with such pressure, many...

As one of the most important financial innovations in 1990s, Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS) have provided significant amounts of financing for commercial real estate. However, when the Asian and Russian financial crisis hit in 1998, the low rated CMBS market almost dried up and one...

(cont.) by presenting two case studies both in the context of the Chicago Transit Authority. One study proposes an enhanced method of inferring the rail trip OD matrix from an origin-only AFC system to replace the routine passenger survey. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of the pattern of...

Since its passage in 1972, the majority of pollution reduction under the federal Clean Water Act has resulted from technology-based limits imposed on point source dischargers. However, most U.S. water bodies are unmonitored and of those that are, between 40 and 50 percent remain impaired. Given...