Organization of the college weekly newspaper.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Taxation, Risk, and Portfolio Choice: The Treatment of Returns to Risk Under a Normative Income Tax

Many articles in the legal and economic literature claim that a pure Haig-Simons income tax cannot effectively tax investment income. This is because an investor can use leverage to gross up her investments in risky assets such that the increased gain (or loss) exactly offsets any income tax (or deduction) on the returns to risk-taking. This article argues, however, that while it is possible for an investor to make such portfolio shifts, she almost certainly will not because of the increased risk of doing so. Central to any discussion of the effects of taxation on investment risk-taking is the meaning of risk itself. The central claim of this article is that a better conception of investment risk is the risk of loss and not merely the variance of returns. Applying this notion of risk—one that is well supported in the finance literature but new to the taxation-and-risk literature—to an investor’s portfolio choice question shows that an investor will not increase her investment in risky assets by enough to offset the tax. As a result, there is an effective tax on investment risk-taking under a normative income tax

Boston University Choral Ensembles, March 27, 2010

This is the concert program of the Boston University Choral Ensembles performance on Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 7:30 p.m., at Marsh Chapel, 735 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were O Lux Beatissimia by Howard Helvey, Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day arranged by John Rutter, Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal by Alice Parker, Salmo 150 by Ernani Aguiar, Psalm 133 by Michael Hennagin, Blagoslovi, dushe moia, Gospoda by Pavel Chesnokov, Before I Go My Way by Peter Hamlin, The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard by Benjamin Britten, The Lighthearted Lovers by Kirke Mechem, "Ring Out, Wild Bells" from The Passing of the Year by Jonathan Dove, "Suite" de Lorca, Opus 72 by Einojuhani Rautavaara, Pilgrim's Hymn and The Rome Home by Stephen Paulus, Old America songs by Aaron Copland, Hold On! by Simpson, and I was glad when they said unto me by Charles Hubert and Hastings Parry. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Identifying Slope Failure Deposits from a Potentially Mixed Magnetic Susceptibility Signal in Gas Hydrate Bearing Regions

The marine gas hydrate stability zone (GHSZ) occurs in the slope environment along many active and passive continental margins. In this environment, slope failures are common and can occur near the shelf slope break, within submarine canyons, or on the flanks of bathymetric highs, resulting in a spectrum of slope failure deposits from landslides to turbidites. On the Cascadia margin, the GHSZ occurs within the bathymetric thrust ridges and slope basins of the accretionary wedge. Here, the ridges are composed of uplifted abyssal plain deposits associated with submarine fans and/or paleoslope basin deposits formed during the evolution of the accretionary wedge (Johnson et al., 2006; Torres et al., 2008). The adjoining slope basins contain the deposits from slope failure of the ridges. Both ridges and slope basins offshore Central Oregon and Vancouver Island were sampled by drilling during ODP Leg 204 and IODP Expedition 311, respectively (Figure 1). The recovered cores document the distribution and abundance of gas hydrate in these regions within a stratigraphy that is dominated by silt and sand turbidites, debris flows, and intervals of silty clay, separated by hemipelagic clay

Please Bring me the New York Times – On the European Roots of Richard Abel Musgrave

Richard Musgrave was one of the around 200 academic economists who emigrated from Germany when Fascism came to dominate the country. This memorial lecture traces the German and European roots of Richard Musgrave’s oeuvre, trying to shed light on his family background as well as on the political and scientific factors that influenced his education as an economist. Particular emphasis is given to the development of his notion of public goods.Richard Musgrave, Public Finance and Economic Thought

On the Spectral Properties of Matrices Associated with Trend Filters

This paper is concerned with the spectral properties of matrices associated with linear filters for the estimation of the underlying trend of a time series. The interest lies in the fact that the eigenvectors can be interpreted as the latent components of any time series that the filter smooths through the corresponding eigenvalues. A difficulty arises because matrices associated with trend filters are finite approximations of Toeplitz operators and therefore very little is known about their eigenstructure, which also depends on the boundary conditions or, equivalently, on the filters for trend estimation at the end of the sample. Assuming reflecting boundary conditions, we derive a time series decomposition in terms of periodic latent components and corresponding smoothing eigenvalues. This decomposition depends on the local polynomial regression estimator chosen for the interior. Otherwise, the eigenvalue distribution is derived with an approximation measured by the size of the perturbation that different boundary conditions apport to the eigenvalues of matrices belonging to algebras with known spectral properties, such as the Circulant or the Cosine. The analytical form of the eigenvectors is then derived with an approximation that involves the extremes only. A further topic investigated in the paper concerns a strategy for a filter design in the time domain. Based on cut-off eigenvalues, new estimators are derived, that are less variable and almost equally biased as the original estimator, based on all the eigenvalues. Empirical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the method

Isolated tau leptons in events with large missing transverse momentum at HERA

A search for events containing isolated tau leptons and large missing transverse momentum, not originating from the tau decay, has been performed with the ZEUS detector at the electron-proton collider HERA, using 130 pb^-1 of integrated luminosity. A search was made for isolated tracks coming from hadronic tau decays. Observables based on the internal jet structure were exploited to discriminate between tau decays and quark- or gluon-induced jets. Three tau candidates were found, while 0.40 +0.12 -0.13 were expected from Standard Model processes, such as charged current deep inelastic scattering and single W-boson production. To search for heavy-particle decays, a more restrictive selection was applied to isolate tau leptons produced together with a hadronic final state with high transverse momentum. Two candidate events survive, while 0.20 +-0.05 events are expected from Standard Model processes.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, accepted by Phys. Lett. B. Updated with minor changes to the text requested by the journal refere