Curbing Tax Expenditures

Reviews trends in tax expenditures and their effects and examines three options for raising tax revenue by applying limits to large and widely utilized tax preferences: a fixed percentage credit, a cap based on income, and a constant percentage reduction

An Analysis of the Factors Affecting Training Transfer within the Work Environment

A meta-analysis of 34 studies was performed to explore the magnitude in which work environment manipulates training transfer. The independent variables for this study included supervisor support, subordinate support, peer support, transfer climate, relapse prevention, goal setting, continuous learning culture, task constraints, and frequency of use. This study performed a moderator analysis to compare the effect these independent variables had on management and non-management training; and self-reporting versus supervisor or peer reporting; and training versus development. Results revealed that relapse prevention (.65) had the highest levels of correlation of all independent variables to training transfer. The results also showed that managerial training (.32) had higher levels of correlation to training transfer as compared to non-managerial training (.20). Self-reporting (.28) showed higher levels of training transfer than did supervisor or peer reporting (.16). Training (.30) showed higher levels of training transfer compared to development (.16). Finally, limitations and future research are discussed

Digitization, testing, and evaluation of a device for rapid determination of rms granularity

A rotary stage microdensitometer was interfaced to an Apple II personal computer for the purpose of making rapid rms granularity measurements. An experimentally determined relationship was found between standard deviation in voltage and rms granularity. By using this relationship the device proved accurate to within 7 percent of the known values of rms granularity on a conventional microdensitometer for the same samples with 95 percent confidence

Community detection in temporal multilayer networks, with an application to correlation networks

Networks are a convenient way to represent complex systems of interacting entities. Many networks contain "communities" of nodes that are more densely connected to each other than to nodes in the rest of the network. In this paper, we investigate the detection of communities in temporal networks represented as multilayer networks. As a focal example, we study time-dependent financial-asset correlation networks. We first argue that the use of the "modularity" quality function---which is defined by comparing edge weights in an observed network to expected edge weights in a "null network"---is application-dependent. We differentiate between "null networks" and "null models" in our discussion of modularity maximization, and we highlight that the same null network can correspond to different null models. We then investigate a multilayer modularity-maximization problem to identify communities in temporal networks. Our multilayer analysis only depends on the form of the maximization problem and not on the specific quality function that one chooses. We introduce a diagnostic to measure \emph{persistence} of community structure in a multilayer network partition. We prove several results that describe how the multilayer maximization problem measures a trade-off between static community structure within layers and larger values of persistence across layers. We also discuss some computational issues that the popular "Louvain" heuristic faces with temporal multilayer networks and suggest ways to mitigate them.Comment: 42 pages, many figures, final accepted version before typesettin

The Mirage of Triangular Arbitrage in the Spot Foreign Exchange Market

We investigate triangular arbitrage within the spot foreign exchange market using high-frequency executable prices. We show that triangular arbitrage opportunities do exist, but that most have short durations and small magnitudes. We find intra-day variations in the number and length of arbitrage opportunities, with larger numbers of opportunities with shorter mean durations occurring during more liquid hours. We demonstrate further that the number of arbitrage opportunities has decreased in recent years, implying a corresponding increase in pricing efficiency. Using trading simulations, we show that a trader would need to beat other market participants to an unfeasibly large proportion of arbitrage prices to profit from triangular arbitrage over a prolonged period of time. Our results suggest that the foreign exchange market is internally self-consistent and provide a limited verification of market efficiency

Temporal Evolution of Financial Market Correlations

We investigate financial market correlations using random matrix theory and principal component analysis. We use random matrix theory to demonstrate that correlation matrices of asset price changes contain structure that is incompatible with uncorrelated random price changes. We then identify the principal components of these correlation matrices and demonstrate that a small number of components accounts for a large proportion of the variability of the markets that we consider. We then characterize the time-evolving relationships between the different assets by investigating the correlations between the asset price time series and principal components. Using this approach, we uncover notable changes that occurred in financial markets and identify the assets that were significantly affected by these changes. We show in particular that there was an increase in the strength of the relationships between several different markets following the 2007--2008 credit and liquidity crisis.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. E. v2 includes additional section