Lend Lease (United Kingdom)

This paper provides strategies and techniques for occupiers to capitalise on lease language to minimise occupancy expenses. Identifying ways to reduce occupancy related expenses may significantly benefit organisations’ bottom line. Establishing a ‘right fit’ occupancy cost lease compliance programme is a prudent component of managing a real estate portfolio. The paper discusses techniques in reviewing and verifying that some of the more frequent occupancy expenses have been billed in accordance with the lease. It includes a detailed review of the many facets involved in the calculation of occupancy expenses payable by an occupier, and the ways to validate the accuracy of the expense billing. The paper includes the review of additional lease provisions which if not complied with may result in reduced rent and additional beneficial remedies available for the occupier.

In this article, we aim to reflect on some possible connections between theatre/performance and the city, considering different practices, links and relations that allow us to rethink Buenos Aires as a stage based on its urban configuration, its cultural memory and its heritage. We intend to put together a decalogue of modalities that enable the intersection between the present and the past of the scenery we live and to observe how, in each case, they call for a more sensitive look that can experience a different perception of the urban, incorporating other practices of memory, other deconstructions, and, thus, providing new meanings.

Given the crucial role played by natural resources in any economic activity, many efforts have focused on accounting for their contribution to individual industrial processes and broader life cycles. These include traditional engineering approaches such as pinch [1, 2], exergy (see Chap. 2) and exergoeconomic analysis (see Chap. 15 by Tsatsaronis), that are used extensively for equipment and process design. Because environmentally conscious decisions require consideration of a broader boundary that accounts for the whole life cycle, many of these approaches have also been extended from the equipment to the life-cycle scale.

Engineering and design activities constitute a critical link in a project's life cycle. Thus, an efficient project control system requires an instrument to measure and assess engineering performance among different projects. In conventional industry practices, the measurement of engineering performance is usually tied to the production of design documents during the detailed design phase of the project. Realizing the far-reaching impacts of engineering activities, researchers in the past have investigated other comprehensive measures of engineering performance that address the entire project life cycle. As part of a study for the Construction Industry Institute, this particular research employs a multiple attribute utility function method for the collective assessment of engineering performance in construction projects. The paper begins with a summary of previous studies in the area of engineering performance measurement and assessment. Afterwards, the concept of engineering performance is thoroughly explained. The paper then reviews the background and basic theories of using utility functions in assessing engineering performance, along with an illustrative example of the functionality of this approach. The paper goes on to show the development of the utility function model for the industrial construction sector through expert opinion and real project data. The use of the model is further illustrated in the assessment of total and relative engineering performance. Lastly, conclusions of this study are drawn and potential future work is pointed out.

Abstract Financial time series data are typically found to possess leptokurtic frequency distributions, time varying volatilities, outliers and correlation structures inconsistent with linear generating processes, nonlinear dependence, and dependencies between series that are not stable over time. Regime Switching Vector Autoregressions are of interest because they are capable of explaining the observed features of the data, can capture a variety of interactions between series, appear intuitively reasonable, are vector processes, and are now tractable.This paper considers a vector autoregression subject to periodic structural changes. The parameters of a vector autoregression are modelled as the outcome of an unobserved discrete Markov process with unknown transition probabilities. The unobserved regimes, one for each time point, together with the regime transition probabilities, are determined in addition to the vector autoregression parameters within each regime.A Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo estimation procedure is developed which efficiently generates the posterior joint density of the parameters and the regimes. The complete likelihood surface is generated at the same time, enabling estimation of posterior model probabilities for use in non-nested model selection. The procedure can readily be extended to produce joint prediction densities for the variables, incorporating both parameter and model uncertainty.Results using simulated and real data are provided. A clear separation of the variance between a stable and an unstable regime was observed. Ignoring regime shifts is very likely to produce misleading volatility estimates and is unlikely to be robust to outliers. A comparison with commonly used models suggests that Regime Switching Vector Autoregressions provide a particularly good description of the observed data.