Sacrifice and Efficiency of the Income Tax Schedule

We investigate the efficiency of equal sacrifice tax schedules in an economywhich primitives are exactly those in Mirrlees (1971): a continuum of individualswith identical preferences defined over consumption and leisure who differ withrespect to their labor market productivity. Using a separable specification forpreferences we derive the minimum equal sacrifice allocation and recover thetax schedule that implements it. The separable specification allows us to usethe methodology developed by Werning (2007b) to check whether the scheduleis efficient, that is, whether there is no alternative tax schedule that raises morerevenue while delivering less utility to no one. We find that inefficiency does notarise for most parametrizations we use to approximate the US economy. For thefew cases for which inefficiency does arise, it does so only for very high levels ofincome and marginal tax rates.

A Fast and Accurate Nonlinear Spectral Method for Image Recognition and Registration

This article addresses the problem of two- and higher dimensional pattern matching, i.e. the identification of instances of a template within a larger signal space, which is a form of registration. Unlike traditional correlation, we aim at obtaining more selective matchings by considering more strict comparisons of gray-level intensity. In order to achieve fast matching, a nonlinear thresholded version of the fast Fourier transform is applied to a gray-level decomposition of the original 2D image. The potential of the method is substantiated with respect to real data involving the selective identification of neuronal cell bodies in gray-level images.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Composição da lignina de três espécies forrageiras visando à produção de bioetanol.

Editores técnicos: Marcílio José Thomazini, Elenice Fritzsons, Patrícia Raquel Silva, Guilherme Schnell e Schuhli, Denise Jeton Cardoso, Luziane Franciscon. EVINCI. Resumos