The Internet is a haven for regular shoppers and bargain hunters alike. Considering many Internet sales transactions cross state lines, the lack of a sales tax often offsets shipping costs. The prevalence of Internet shopping has caused cities and states across the country to publicly cry about lost revenue. Some locales have even declared tax-free shopping periods to help local merchants compete. Many of the largest failures of the dot-com boom were online retailers. Billions of dollars were invested in such enterprises by persons and organizations with the glint of an online gold rush in their eyes. Many e-tailers are doing quite well. In the last quarter of 2002, online retail sales were estimated at $14.33 billion. (Verisign). Online sales will continue to grow as more people and businesses accept and trust such transactions.
How is this possible? Three letters: SSL. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is the protocolthat secures every financial transaction between a shopper’s web browser and retail web sites such as Amazon.com, Hotwire.com, Thinkgeek.com and Buy.com, among others. By protecting the confidentiality of sales transactions, online consumers have confidence that their credit card information is locked away from prying eyes as it crosses the Internet. Without this assurance, online retail would be practically non-existent.
Granite Reliable Power, LLC (GRP) is proposing a 99 MW wind power project in Coos County, New Hampshire. The power project will consist of 33 (3 MW) wind turbines situated along the ridgelines of Dixville Peak, Owlhead Mountain, Mount Kelsey, and Fishbrook Ridge. The current project schedule is for two seasons starting in 2009. In 2009, construction commences with the development of access roads, installation of overhead and underground power lines, and preparation of the turbine sites. Wind turbine delivery and installation are scheduled for 2010. The Granite Reliable Power wind power project is expected to involve a total investment of approximately$250 million.
Noble Environmental Power (NEP), founded in 2004, is the wind energy company developing the GRP power project. They have 726 megawatts of wind power projects operating in New York and Texas. NEP is majority-owned by JPMorgan Partners Fund, which is managed by CCMP Capital.
Recursive preferences have become a common-place feature of the modern consumption based asset pricing literature. Impoeting this ingredient into the production based models allows us to study the joint behaviour of real and financial variables along the business cycle. As the analysis of risk premia naturally require computing risk adjustments simple log-linearization techniques become insuffiecient for solving such models. In this paper we describe how log-linear dynamics and correct risk adjustments based on these dynamics can be computed relying on log-normality of the typical RBC model. We compare our suggested method with existing alternatives and show the log-linear dynamics plus risk adjustment are much more tractable mathematically, while preserving the accuracy of the approximation compared to second and higher order perturbation methods.
