661 research outputs found
The earned income tax credit: recipients, labor force participation, and credit constraints
There has been a longstanding debate in the United States about how to assist low-income families. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is designed to augment income while encouraging work: The tax credit increases with earnings for low levels of household income, but declines and ultimately is phased out as incomes rise. The EITC appears to have increased labor force participation but its effects on hours worked is ambiguous. Given the low levels of net wealth of most EITC recipients, it is likely that many are credit constrained and unable to smooth their consumption patterns.Credit
T. E. Harris and branching processes
T. E. Harris was a pioneer par excellence in many fields of probability
theory. In this paper, we give a brief survey of the many fundamental
contributions of Harris to the theory of branching processes, starting with his
doctoral work at Princeton in the late forties and culminating in his
fundamental book "The Theory of Branching Processes," published in 1963.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOP599 the Annals of
Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Consumption smoothing and the measured regressivity of consumption taxes
In this article, we address two questions. First, how will a move to pure consumption taxation matter for aggregate outcomes? Second, how regressive are consumption taxes? We find as follows. First, a move to a consumption tax will increase savings taken into retirement but will not alter either labor supply or consumption variability substantially. Second, we show that regressivity is a measure that is quantitatively sensitive to the frequency of income being used. In particular, we show that when measures of tax incidence are based on annual income, successful consumption smoothing leads to the appearance of high regressivity. Our preferred measure, which is based on lifetime earnings, shows that consumption taxes are proportional taxes.Taxation ; Consumption (Economics)
AR(1) sequence with random coefficients: Regenerative properties and its application
Let be a sequence of real valued random variables such that
, where
are i.i.d. and independent of initial value
(possibly random) . In this paper it is shown that, under some natural
conditions on the distribution of , the sequence
is regenerative in the sense that it could be broken up into
i.i.d. components. Further, when and are independent, we
construct a non-parametric strongly consistent estimator of the characteristic
functions of and
Growth of preferential attachment random graphs via continuous-time branching processes
A version of ``preferential attachment'' random graphs, corresponding to
linear ``weights'' with random ``edge additions,'' which generalizes some
previously considered models, is studied. This graph model is embedded in a
continuous-time branching scheme and, using the branching process apparatus,
several results on the graph model asymptotics are obtained, some extending
previous results, such as growth rates for a typical degree and the maximal
degree, behavior of the vertex where the maximal degree is attained, and a law
of large numbers for the empirical distribution of degrees which shows certain
``scale-free'' or ``power-law'' behaviors.Comment: 20 page
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