Åland

kuv., 11 x 15 cm

Åland

kuv., 12 x 20 cm

Åland

kuv., 12 x 20 cm

Åland

kuv., 11 x 15 cm

Fra de tusinde Seers Land

kuv., 23 x 23 cm

Finland de billiga resornas land

kuv., 42 x 22 cm

Finnland das Land der tausend Seen

kuv., 13 x 19 cm

Price spike forecasting in a competitive day-ahead energy market

Electricity price forecasting has become an important area of research in the aftermath of the worldwide deregulation of the power industry that launched competitive electricity markets now embracing all market participants including generation and retail companies, transmission network providers, and market managers. Based on the needs of the market, a variety of approaches forecasting day-ahead electricity prices have been proposed over the last decades. However, most of the existing approaches are reasonably effective for normal range prices but disregard price spike events, which are caused by a number of complex factors and occur during periods of market stress. In the early research, price spikes were truncated before application of the forecasting model to reduce the influence of such observations on the estimation of the model parameters; otherwise, a very large forecast error would be generated on price spike occasions. Electricity price spikes, however, are significant for energy market participants to stay competitive in a market. Accurate price spike forecasting is important for generation companies to strategically bid into the market and to optimally manage their assets; for retailer companies, since they cannot pass the spikes onto final customers, and finally, for market managers to provide better management and planning for the energy market. This doctoral thesis aims at deriving a methodology able to accurately predict not only the day-ahead electricity prices within the normal range but also the price spikes. The Finnish day-ahead energy market of Nord Pool Spot is selected as the case market, and its structure is studied in detail. It is almost universally agreed in the forecasting literature that no single method is best in every situation. Since the real-world problems are often complex in nature, no single model is able to capture different patterns equally well. Therefore, a hybrid methodology that enhances the modeling capabilities appears to be a possibly productive strategy for practical use when electricity prices are predicted. The price forecasting methodology is proposed through a hybrid model applied to the price forecasting in the Finnish day-ahead energy market. The iterative search procedure employed within the methodology is developed to tune the model parameters and select the optimal input set of the explanatory variables. The numerical studies show that the proposed methodology has more accurate behavior than all other examined methods most recently applied to case studies of energy markets in different countries. The obtained results can be considered as providing extensive and useful information for participants of the day-ahead energy market, who have limited and uncertain information for price prediction to set up an optimal short-term operation portfolio. Although the focus of this work is primarily on the Finnish price area of Nord Pool Spot, given the result of this work, it is very likely that the same methodology will give good results when forecasting the prices on energy markets of other countries.

Stock Price Reactions on M&A, Dividends and Game Releases. Evidence from Gaming Industry.

A rapidly growing gaming industry, which specializes on PC, console, online and other games, attracts attention of investors and analysts, who try to understand what drives changes of the gaming industry companies’ stock prices. This master thesis shows the evidence that, besides long-established types of events (M&A and dividend payments), the companies’ stock price changes depend on industry-specific events. I analyzed specific for gaming industry events - game releases with respect to its subdivisions: new games-sequels, games ratings and subdivision according to a developer of a game (self-developed by publisher or outsourced). The master thesis analyzes stock prices of 55 companies from gaming industry from all over the world. The research period covers 5 year, spreading from April 2008 to April 2013. Executed with an event study method, results of the research show that all the analyzed events types have significant influence on the stock prices of the gaming industry companies. The current master thesis suggests that acquisitions in the industry affect positively bidders’ and targets’ stock prices. Mergers events cause positive stock price reactions as well. But dividends payments and game releases events influence negatively on the stock prices. Game releases’ effect is up to -2.2% of cumulative average abnormal return (CAAR) drop during the first ten days after the game releases. Having researched different kinds of events and identified the direction of their impact, the current paper can be of high value for investors, seeking profits in the gaming industry, and other interested parties.

Economical potential of controlling charging of electric vehicles by using price signal

The number of electric vehicles grows continuously and the implementation of charging electric vehicles is an important issue for the future. Increasing amount of electric vehicles can cause problems to distribution grid by increasing peak load. Currently charging of electric vehicles is uncontrolled, but as the amount of electric vehicles grows, smart charg-ing (controlled charging) will be one possible solution to handle this situation. In this thesis smart charging of electric vehicles is examined from electricity retailers` point of view. The purpose is to find out plausible saving potentials of smart charging, when it´s controlled by price signal. Saving potential is calculated by comparing costs of price signal controlled charging and uncontrolled charging.

GIS assessing traditional and modern agricultural land use/land cover change. A case study 1959-2005: Rekijoki, Somero, SW-Finland

Finland’s rural landscape has gone through remarkable changes from the 1950’s, due to agricultural developments. Changed farming practices have influenced especially traditional landscape management, and modifications in the arable land structure and grasslands transitions are notable. The review of the previous studies reveal the importance of the rural landscape composition and structure to species and landscape diversity, whereas including the relevance in presence of the open ditches, size of the field and meadow patches, topology of the natural and agricultural landscape. This land-change study includes applying remote sensed data from two time series and empirical geospatial analysis in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The aims of this retrospective research is to detect agricultural landscape use and land cover change (LULCC) dynamics and discuss the consequences of agricultural intensification to landscape structure covering from the aspects of landscape ecology. Measurements of LULC are derived directly from pre-processed aerial images by a variety of analytical procedures, including statistical methods and image interpretation. The methodological challenges are confronted in the process of landscape classification and combining change detection approaches with landscape indices. Particular importance is paid on detecting agricultural landscape features at a small scale, demanding comprehensive understanding of such agroecosystems. Topological properties of the classified arable land and valley are determined in order to provide insight and emphasize the aspect the field edges in the agricultural landscape as important habitat. Change detection dynamics are presented with change matrix and additional calculations of gain, loss, swap, net change, change rate and tendencies are made. Transition’s possibility is computed following Markov’s probability model and presented with matrix, as well. Thesis’s spatial aspect is revealed with illustrative maps providing knowledge of location of the classified landscape categories and location of the dynamics of the changes occurred. It was assured that in Rekijoki valley’s landscape, remarkable changes in landscape has occurred. Landscape diversity has been strongly influenced by modern agricultural landscape change, as NP of open ditches has decreased and the MPS of the arable plot has decreased. Overall change in the diversity of the landscape is determined with the decrease of SHDI. Valley landscape considered as traditional land use area has experienced major transitional changes, as meadows class has lost almost one third of the area due to afforestation. Also, remarkable transitions have occurred from forest to meadow and arable land to built area. Boundaries measurement between modern and traditional landscape has indicated noticeable proportional increase in arable land-forest edge type and decrease in arable land-meadow edge type. Probability calculations predict higher future changes for traditional landscape, but also for arable land turning into built area.

Commodity Future Price Premiums – Case EU ETS

The purpose of this thesis was to study commodity future price premiums and their nature on emission allowance markets. The EUA spot and future contracts traded on the secondary market during EU ETS Phase 2 and Phase 3 were selected for empirical testing. The cointegration of spot and future prices was examined with Johansen cointegration methodology. Daily interest rates with a similar tenor to the future contract maturity were used in the cost-of-carry model to calculate the theoretical future prices and to estimate the deviation from the fair value of future contracts, assumed to be explained by the convenience yield. The time-varying dependence of the convenience yield was studied by regression testing the correlation between convenience yield and the time to maturity of the future contract. The results indicated cointegration between spot and future prices, albeit depending on assumptions on linear trend and intercept in cointegration vector Dec-14 and Dec-15 contracts. The convenience yield correlates positively with the time-to-maturity of the future contract during Phase 2, but negatively during Phase 3. The convenience yield featured positive correlation with spot price volatility and negative correlation with future price volatility during both Phases 2 and 3.

Vårt land af J. L. Runeberg

Kansinimeke: Vårt land ; Maamme ; Our Land ; Unser Land.