Selected International Depreciation Rates by Asset and Country

The depreciation provisions in the U.S. tax system are of recurring interest to Congress. More than 100 bills were introduced in the 109th Congress that addressed some aspect of depreciation. Concerns about the U.S. depreciation system tend to begin with the criticism that updates to the system have not kept pace with technological advancements of the assets for which it is utilized to account. This report provides information on the depreciation systems of selected European Union countries (France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, and the United Kingdom) by presenting depreciation rates for buildings; computers; expensable assets; motor vehicles; patents; plant, equipment, machinery, and tools; and software

Presidential Funerals and Burials: Selected Resources

This report is a brief resource guide for congressional staff on funerals and burials for Presidents of the United States. It contains an overview of past practices for presidential funerals and selected online information resources related to official and ceremonial protocols, past presidential funerals, congressional documents, and other documents and books

Arms race modeling : honors thesis [(HONRS 499)]

There is no abstract available for this thesis.Thesis (B.?.)Honors Colleg

Measuring Neighborhood Quality With Survey Data: A Bayesian Approach

Abstract Although neighborhood quality is important for shaping public policy, it is also difficult to quantify. This study measured subjective neighborhood quality using data from two sources

Measuring Housing Quality in the Housing Choice Voucher Program with Customer Satisfaction Program Data,” Cityscape 11(2

Data Shop, a department of Cityscape, presents short articles or notes on the uses of data in housing and urban research. Through this department, PD&R introduces readers to new and overlooked data sources and to improved techniques in using well-known data. The emphasis is on sources and methods that analysts can use in their own work. Researchers often run into knotty data problems involving data interpretation or manipulation that must be solved before a project can proceed, but they seldom get to focus in detail on the solutions to such problems. If you have an idea for an applied, data-centric note of no more than 3,000 words, please send a one-paragraph abstract t

PRIVATELY PRODUCED GENERAL DETERRENCE

In this study, we use county data on private security establishments and employment for 1977–92 to test two hypotheses. First, we test whether private security deters crime. Second, we test whether John Lott and David Mustard’s estimates of the impact of shall-issue laws on crime are biased because of a lack of controls for private security. We find little evidence that private security reduces the crime rates for assault or larceny. Some estimates suggest murder, robbery, and/or auto theft may be deterred by private security, although these results are not robust. Of all the index crime categories, only rape is estimated to have a consistent negative relationship with private security. In addition, we find little evidence that the Lott and Mustard results are biased because of a lack of controls for the private security measures employed in this study

Can police deter drunk driving?

Economic studies using aggregate data generally find that higher taxes are the most effective policy to reduce drunk driving while criminologists report strong evidence supporting law enforcement measures in policy evaluations. This paper evaluates these differing perspectives using the aggregate data that is typically used in the economic literature. OLS and fixed effects models show that police can affect the probability of arrest for drunk driving and, in combination with evidence from DUI deterrence experiments, this suggests that the failure of economic models to detect deterrence reflects the lack of systematic and sustained police efforts against DUI.