Determinants of the Variability of Corporate Effective Tax Rates (ETRs): Evidence for the Netherlands

A sizeable portion of US research has tried to assess the ‘fairness’ of the corporate income tax system, that is: are companies treated in a non-discriminatory way under the corporate income tax system. Similar research has, however, never taken place in the Netherlands. The goal of this paper is to address this shortcoming. This paper examines whether an association can be found between the variation in average effective tax rates (ETRs) among Dutch companies and company characteristics such as size, asset mix, extent of foreign operations, performance, leverage, being a public company and being a listed company. Controls are used for net operating loss status, negative tax expense status, and interaction between firm size and net operating loss status and negative tax expense status. The results in the paper are based on an analysis of a pooled panel of company-level data from financial statements in the CD-ROM REACH A datafile for five years, 1994 to 1998. In this paper two financial statement based ETR measures are used. One ETR measure is based on income before taxes and another ETR measure is based on cash flow. Results from a fixed effects generalised linear model provide support for the conclusion that, after controlling for indirect effects, the taxation of corporate profits in the Netherlands is fairly neutral. These results are supported by additional sensitivity analysis.microeconomics ;

Strongly anisotropic roughness in surfaces driven by an oblique particle flux

Using field theoretic renormalization, an MBE-type growth process with an obliquely incident influx of atoms is examined. The projection of the beam on the substrate plane selects a "parallel" direction, with rotational invariance restricted to the transverse directions. Depending on the behavior of an effective anisotropic surface tension, a line of second order transitions is identified, as well as a line of potentially first order transitions, joined by a multicritical point. Near the second order transitions and the multicritical point, the surface roughness is strongly anisotropic. Four different roughness exponents are introduced and computed, describing the surface in different directions, in real or momentum space. The results presented challenge an earlier study of the multicritical point.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, REVTeX

Adaptive interpolation of discrete-time signals that can be modeled as autoregressive processes

This paper presents an adaptive algorithm for the restoration of lost sample values in discrete-time signals that can locally be described by means of autoregressive processes. The only restrictions are that the positions of the unknown samples should be known and that they should be embedded in a sufficiently large neighborhood of known samples. The estimates of the unknown samples are obtained by minimizing the sum of squares of the residual errors that involve estimates of the autoregressive parameters. A statistical analysis shows that, for a burst of lost samples, the expected quadratic interpolation error per sample converges to the signal variance when the burst length tends to infinity. The method is in fact the first step of an iterative algorithm, in which in each iteration step the current estimates of the missing samples are used to compute the new estimates. Furthermore, the feasibility of implementation in hardware for real-time use is established. The method has been tested on artificially generated auto-regressive processes as well as on digitized music and speech signals

Scaling regimes and critical dimensions in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang problem

We study the scaling regimes for the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation with noise correlator R(q) ~ (1 + w q^{-2 \rho}) in Fourier space, as a function of \rho and the spatial dimension d. By means of a stochastic Cole-Hopf transformation, the critical and correction-to-scaling exponents at the roughening transition are determined to all orders in a (d - d_c) expansion. We also argue that there is a intriguing possibility that the rough phases above and below the lower critical dimension d_c = 2 (1 + \rho) are genuinely different which could lead to a re-interpretation of results in the literature.Comment: Latex, 7 pages, eps files for two figures as well as Europhys. Lett. style files included; slightly expanded reincarnatio

Specificity and Kinetics of Haloalkane Dehalogenase

Haloalkane dehalogenase converts halogenated alkanes to their corresponding alcohols. The active site is buried inside the protein and lined with hydrophobic residues. The reaction proceeds via a covalent substrate-enzyme complex. This paper describes a steady-state and pre-steady-state kinetic analysis of the conversion of a number of substrates of the dehalogenase. The kinetic mechanism for the “natural” substrate 1,2-dichloroethane and for the brominated analog and nematocide 1,2-dibromoethane are given. In general, brominated substrates had a lower Km, but a similar kcat than the chlorinated analogs. The rate of C-Br bond cleavage was higher than the rate of C-Cl bond cleavage, which is in agreement with the leaving group abilities of these halogens. The lower Km for brominated compounds therefore originates both from the higher rate of C-Br bond cleavage and from a lower Ks for bromo-compounds. However, the rate-determining step in the conversion (kcat) of 1,2-dibromoethane and 1,2-dichloroethane was found to be release of the charged halide ion out of the active site cavity, explaining the different Km but similar kcat values for these compounds. The study provides a basis for the analysis of rate-determining steps in the hydrolysis of various environmentally important substrates.

Low-dimensional light-emitting transistor with tunable recombination zone

We present experimental and numerical studies of a light-emitting transistor comprising two quasi-lateral junctions between a two-dimensional electron and hole gas. These lithographically defined junctions are fabricated by etching of a modulation doped GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure. In this device electrons and holes can be directed to the same area by drain and gate voltages, defining a recombination zone tunable in size and position. It could therefore provide an architecture for probing low-dimensional devices by analysing the emitted light of the recombination zone.Comment: 12 Pages, to be published in Journal of Modern Optic