Addressing Noncompliance in the Earned Income Tax Credit

The EIC is a refundable tax credit that operates through the federal individual income tax system. It is available to low-income, working taxpayers. The credit was originally designed to offset the impact of Social Security taxes. It has since evolved into a work incentive for low-income workers, a benefit for children of low-income workers, and an income supplement for low-income taxpayers without children. Each of these new roles has increased the complexity of the credit and compliance problems.The most recent IRS study of EIC noncompliance estimates that there were $4.4 billion in EIC overclaims between January 15 and April 1, 1995. This is 25.8 percent of total EIC claims. EIC overclaims are claims by taxpayers who either were not eligible to take the credit or claimed a larger credit than they were eligible to claim

Nuclear Parton Distributions at the future Electron-Ion Collider

The 2015 nuclear physics long-range plan endorsed the realization of an Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) as the next large construction project after the completion of FRIB. With its high luminosity ( $> 10^{33} cm^{-2}s^{-1}$), wide kinematic reach in center-of-mass-energy (45GeV to 145GeV) and high lepton and proton beam polarization, an EIC provides an unprecedented opportunity to reach new frontiers in our understanding of the spin and dynamic structure of nuclei. Despite of the success of the HERA collider in investigating the structure of a single nucleon, the partonic structure of nuclei at moderate-to-small Bjorken's $x$ still remains elusive. We present the evaluated impact of an EIC in extracting the nuclear structure-functions from measurements of the reduced cross section in deep inelastic scattering, including also the case of measuring heavy quark production events. The potential constraints offered by the EIC data in extracting the nuclear parton distribution functions is also discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, DIS 2017 Conference proceeding

Empirical Information Criteria for Time Series Forecasting Model Selection

In this paper, we propose a new Empirical Information Criterion (EIC) for model selection which penalizes the likelihood of the data by a function of the number of parameters in the model. It is designed to be used where there are a large number of time series to be forecast. However, a bootstrap version of the EIC can be used where there is a single time series to be forecast. The EIC provides a data-driven model selection tool that can be tuned to the particular forecasting task. We compare the EIC with other model selection criteria including Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC) and Schwarz's Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). The comparisons show that for the M3 forecasting competition data, the EIC outperforms both the AIC and BIC, particularly for longer forecast horizons. We also compare the criteria on simulated data and find that the EIC does better than existing criteria in that case also.Exponential smoothing; forecasting; information criteria; M3 competition; model selection.

The Electron-Ion Collider

The future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is a proposed new facility to collide high-energy electrons with beams of polarized protons/light nuclei and unpolarized nuclei. We overview the goals of the project and key measurements at the EIC. We also briefly comment on recent developments of the project.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. Presented at CIPANP 2009: 10th Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics, La Jolla, California, May 26-31, 200

An economic evaluation of the early impact of Aimhigher: excellence challenge on pre-16 outcomes: update to previous analysis

The Aimhigher: Excellence Challenge intervention seeks to encourage more young people to articipate in tertiary education. This paper updates previous estimates of the impact of the programme on the GCSE marks and reported expected school leaving ages, among year 11 pupils. Information from 3 different cohorts is used (whereas the previous analysis had data on the first 2 cohorts). In some schools the second and third cohorts have been exposed to the policy, whereas in others only the third cohort was exposed to the policy. This distinction is used to model the impact of the policy using linear regression analysis. However the lack of a comparison group in Spring 2004 means that the impact of the policy can only be estimated under relatively strong assumptions about the evolution of the impact of the policy across time. Under the assumption that the policy had the same impact in the original treatment (EiC Phase 1 & 2 areas) in Spring 2004 as in Spring 2003, we find evidence that being part of the Aimhigher: Excellence Challenge programme in the new areas (EiC Phase 3) has led to a 5.2 percentage point increase in the year 11 pupils expecting to leave education at age 20 or over. Although slightly larger, this estimate is not statistically significantly different from the increase of 3.7 percentage points found in the original (EiC Phase 1 & 2) areas. Across both types of area (EiC Phase 1& 2 and EiC Phase 3) we estimate that the average impact of the policy is to increase the percentage of year 11 pupils reporting that they will leave education at age 20 or above by 4.6 percentage points. We also find some evidence of a similar positive impact on GCSE English results, although the impact across other GCSEs is less clear. While the assumptions made in producing these new estimates are relatively strong it is clear that the analysis of the new data does not contradict the previous estimates (which were reliant on less strong assumptions)

Lepton-Jet Correlations in Deep Inelastic Scattering at the Electron-Ion Collider.

We propose the lepton-jet correlation in deep inelastic scattering as a unique tool for the tomography of nucleons and nuclei at the electron-ion collider (EIC). The azimuthal angular correlation between the final state lepton and jet depends on the transverse momentum dependent quark distributions. We take the example of single transverse spin asymmetries to show the sensitivity to the quark Sivers function. When the correlation is studied in lepton-nucleus collisions, transverse momentum broadening effects can be used to explore cold nuclear matter effects. These features make lepton-jet correlations an important new hard probe at the EIC

Announcing the new EiC

As I mentioned in my last editorial, my term as editor-in-chief (EiC) of the magazine is coming to an end, and it is my great pleasure to announce that the new EiC of the magazine will be Dr. Peter Corke from CSIRO in Australia. I am extremely happy and comfortable to leave the magazine to Peter who is not only an extremely distinguished scientist but also a motivated leader and pleasant person who will take care with dedication to keep the high level of the magazine and further improve it

Probing axion-like particles at the Electron-Ion Collider

The Electron-Ion Collider~(EIC), a forthcoming powerful high-luminosity facility, represents an exciting opportunity to explore new physics. In this article, we study the potential of the EIC to probe the coupling between axion-like particles~(ALPs) and photons in coherent scattering. The ALPs can be produced via photon fusion and decay back to two photons inside the EIC detector. In a prompt-decay search, we find that the EIC can set the most stringent bound for m_a \lesssim 20\,\GeV and probe the effective scales $\Lambda \lesssim 10^{5}\,$GeV. In a displaced-vertex search, which requires adopting an EM calorimeter technology that provides directionality, the EIC could probe ALPs with m_a \lesssim 1\,\GeV at effective scales \Lambda \lesssim 10^{7}\,\GeV. Combining the two search strategies, the EIC can probe a significant portion of unexplored parameter space in the 0.2 < m_a <20\,\GeV mass range.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figure