Progressive Taxation, Macroeconomic Stabilization and efficiency in Europe

The paper contributes to the debate on the stability/efficiency tradeoff of automatic stabilizers. A simple AD-AS two-country model is presented and illustrates circumstances where a reduction in taxes can foster stabilization. The testable implication from the model is that tax cuts can either increase or decrease volatility depending on the structure of the taxation system. Hence, lowering taxes for efficiency purposes may have not cost in terms of stabilization. This implication is tested for OECD countries over the period 1960-2000 taking account of the endogeneity and omitted variables issues identified in the literature. We found acceptably robust evidence that the size of governments in OECD countries has played a stabilizing role for both output and inflation. However, the relationship between government size and macroeconomic stability is not linear. The composition of public finances, in particular the tax mix, matters for output and price volatility. Distorting taxes, namely taxes on labor, might have negative effects on macroeconomic stability. Consequently, the potential trade off between stability and flexibility might not exist.Automatic stabilizers, efficiency, Europe, Martinez-Mongay, Sekkat

2015 Menino Survey of Mayors

The 2015 Menino Survey of Mayors represents the second nationally representative survey of American mayors released by the Boston University Initiatives on Cities. The Survey, based on interviews with 89 sitting mayors conducted in 2015, provides insight into mayoral priorities, policy views and relationships with their key partners, including other levels of government. Sitting mayors shared insight on their specific infrastructure needs and spending priorities, from roads and transit to water treatment and bike lanes, and reacted to police reforms proposed by the White House. They also shed light on the difficult choices they must often make, to promote affordable housing or improve the fiscal health of their city. A significant portion of the Survey is devoted to mayoral leadership, including areas of mayoral control and constituent approval, as well as constraints they confront under increasingly politicized and polarized state legislatures.Cit

Monetary Integration and Regional Unemployment in the European Union

The European Central Bank will be able to reach its objective of price stability by GDP and inflation forecasts. But price stability will continue to be accompanied by the burden of high and in the case of some disadvantaged regions increasing unemployment which will be the cause of persisting and perhaps widening interregional inequality. This will impose costs from income loss which must be set against the long-term benefits of monetary integration to the disadvantage regions which might accrue by the diffusion of growth and its positive effects on employment. Monetary stability will be more beneficial for the peoples of Europe if it is combined with policies fostering balanced growth with maximum employment. This requires an integrated cohesion strategy encompassing policies for employment and regional development which will induce and accelerate real convergence for all the regions of the countries participating in the European Economic and Monetary Union.

On the tradeoff between stability and fit

In computing, as in many aspects of life, changes incur cost. Many optimization problems are formulated as a one-time instance starting from scratch. However, a common case that arises is when we already have a set of prior assignments and must decide how to respond to a new set of constraints, given that each change from the current assignment comes at a price. That is, we would like to maximize the fitness or efficiency of our system, but we need to balance it with the changeout cost from the previous state. We provide a precise formulation for this tradeoff and analyze the resulting stable extensions of some fundamental problems in measurement and analytics. Our main technical contribution is a stable extension of Probability Proportional to Size (PPS) weighted random sampling, with applications to monitoring and anomaly detection problems. We also provide a general framework that applies to top-k, minimum spanning tree, and assignment. In both cases, we are able to provide exact solutions and discuss efficient incremental algorithms that can find new solutions as the input changes

Opening remarks : the Greenspan era : lessons for the future

Greenspan, Alan ; Monetary policy

Robustness - a challenge also for the 21st century: A review of robustness phenomena in technical, biological and social systems as well as robust approaches in engineering, computer science, operations research and decision aiding

Notions on robustness exist in many facets. They come from different disciplines and reflect different worldviews. Consequently, they contradict each other very often, which makes the term less applicable in a general context. Robustness approaches are often limited to specific problems for which they have been developed. This means, notions and definitions might reveal to be wrong if put into another domain of validity, i.e. context. A definition might be correct in a specific context but need not hold in another. Therefore, in order to be able to speak of robustness we need to specify the domain of validity, i.e. system, property and uncertainty of interest. As proofed by Ho et al. in an optimization context with finite and discrete domains, without prior knowledge about the problem there exists no solution what so ever which is more robust than any other. Similar to the results of the No Free Lunch Theorems of Optimization (NLFTs) we have to exploit the problem structure in order to make a solution more robust. This optimization problem is directly linked to a robustness/fragility tradeoff which has been observed in many contexts, e.g. 'robust, yet fragile' property of HOT (Highly Optimized Tolerance) systems. Another issue is that robustness is tightly bounded to other phenomena like complexity for which themselves exist no clear definition or theoretical framework. Consequently, this review rather tries to find common aspects within many different approaches and phenomena than to build a general theorem for robustness, which anyhow might not exist because complex phenomena often need to be described from a pluralistic view to address as many aspects of a phenomenon as possible. First, many different robustness problems have been reviewed from many different disciplines. Second, different common aspects will be discussed, in particular the relationship of functional and structural properties. This paper argues that robustness phenomena are also a challenge for the 21st century. It is a useful quality of a model or system in terms of the 'maintenance of some desired system characteristics despite fluctuations in the behaviour of its component parts or its environment' (s. [Carlson and Doyle, 2002], p. 2). We define robustness phenomena as solution with balanced tradeoffs and robust design principles and robustness measures as means to balance tradeoffs. --

Aid Volatility, Policy and Development

We build on Bulir and Hamann's analysis of aid volatility (2003, 2005), showing that the conclusions reached depend on the dataset used. Their argument that the poorest countries have the highest volatility appears not to be correct. The impact of volatility on growth is negative overall, but differs between positive and negative volatility. The mix between `responsive´ components of aid, e.g. programme aid, and `proactive´ components, e.g. technical assistance, is important. Finally, we conclude that measures which increase trust between donor and recipient, and reductions in the degree of donor `oligopoly´, reduce aid volatility without obviously reducing its effectiveness

Utility Optimal Scheduling and Admission Control for Adaptive Video Streaming in Small Cell Networks

We consider the jointly optimal design of a transmission scheduling and admission control policy for adaptive video streaming over small cell networks. We formulate the problem as a dynamic network utility maximization and observe that it naturally decomposes into two subproblems: admission control and transmission scheduling. The resulting algorithms are simple and suitable for distributed implementation. The admission control decisions involve each user choosing the quality of the video chunk asked for download, based on the network congestion in its neighborhood. This form of admission control is compatible with the current video streaming technology based on the DASH protocol over TCP connections. Through simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm under realistic assumptions for a small-cell network.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted and will be presented at IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 201