Impacts of International Wheat Breeding Research in the Developing World, 1988-2002

Crop Production/Industries, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Sustaining Collection Value: Managing Collection/Item Metadata Relationships

Many aspects of managing collection/item metadata relationships are critical to sustaining collection value over time. Metadata at the collection-level not only provides context for finding, understanding, and using the items in the collection, but is often essential to the particular research and scholarly activities the collection is designed to support. Contemporary retrieval systems, which search across collections, usually ignore collection level metadata. Alternative approaches, informed by collection-level information, will require an understanding of the various kinds of relationships that can obtain between collection-level and item-level metadata. This paper outlines the problem and describes a project that is developing a logic-based framework for classifying collection-level/item-level metadata relationships. This framework will support (i) metadata specification developers defining metadata elements, (ii) metadata librarians describing objects, and (iii) system designers implementing systems that help users take advantage of collection-level metadata.Institute for Museum and Libary Services (Grant #LG06070020)published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

A Heating and Cooling Load Model for Single-Family Detached Dwellings in Energy Survey Data

The National Interim Energy Consumption Survey (NIECS) and the Pacific Northwest Residential Energy Survey (PNW) are clustered random samples of households interviewed between 1978 and 1980. These surveys report household equipment holdings and energy consumption levels by fuel, as well as selected household and dwelling characteristics. To study the economic determinants of equipment and usage behavior, it is necessary to first describe the economic environment in which behavior is determined. This technical report carries out the construction of heating-ventilating-air conditioning (BVAC) physical characteristics and costs for the alternative systems available to single-family owner-occupied households. The approach of this report is to construct a very simple thermal model of representative dwellings with characteristics corresponding to those available in typical energy survey data. This model is used to estimate heating and cooling capacity requirements, energy usage, and physical characteristics, for households in the (NIECS) and (PNW) surveys. Cost data from Means (1981) are then used to estimate the capital and operating costs of 19 alternative BVAC configurations for the actual thermal integrity of the building shell and for two alternative thermal standards

Welfare Economics for Tobit Models

In this paper we demonstrate the correct calculation of consumer surplus in censored and truncated regression models, focusing on Tobit models. We review a variety of examples from the literature and isolate the nature of the bias associated with the incorrect calculation of consumer surplus in several of them

The Report of the United States to the International Fiscal Association on the Costs of Tax Administration and Compliance

This is a report prepared for the International Fiscal Association on the costs of tax administration and compliance in the United States. At the federal level, we present comprehensive data on administrative costs and review recent estimates of compliance costs. At the state level, we present new data on the administrative costs of state income taxes and general sales taxes, and review the very limited data on state level compliance costs. We also discuss the growing role of tax preparers, including new empirical results of our own. Finally, we review the recently enacted "Taxpayer Bill of Rights.

State Income Tax Amnesties 1: Causes

The purpose of this paper is to analyze empirically for the years 1980-88 the factors which led states with state income taxes to run tax amnesty programs. We find a principal factor to be the level of IRS auditing; in particular, we find that states have tended to "free-ride" on the IRS-if the IRS is active in a state, then that state is less likely to run a tax amnesty program. Indeed, our estimates indicate that had the IRS audit rate remained constant during the 1980-88 period (instead of falling by almost one-half) , then the cumulative probability that an average state would have a tax amnesty by 1988 would have fallen by almost one-half compared to its actual level

The Use and Misuse of Surveys in Economic Analysis: Natural Resource Damage Assessment Under CERCLA

This paper examines problems with the admissibility of contingent use methodology surveys in natural resource damage assessment cases under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), as well as the propriety of their use in formulating public policy. Using a contingent use survey conducted in conjunction with the New Bedford Harbor Superfund case and two follow-up surveys, a number of errors and biases associated with contingent use methodology surveys are isolated and analyzed

The Effect of Tax and Audit Rates on Compliance with the Federal Income Tax, 1977-85

This paper develops a game-theoretic model of the effects of state and federal income tax rates and audit rates on compliance with the federal income tax. Using data drawn primarily from the Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue for the years 1977-85, we find empirical confirmation of the model's prediction that increases in the tax rates increase compliance. We also investigate the overall performance of the federal revenue collection process and find that the entire IRS estimate of the increase in individual noncompliance during 1977-85 is more than accounted for by the decrease in auditing over the same period

Are We a Nation of Tax Cheaters? New Econometric Evidence on Tax Compliance

In 1982, then Commissioner of Internal Revenue Roscoe Egger reported to Congress that legal sector noncompliance with the Federal Income Tax statutes generated an income tax gap of $81 billion in 1981, up from$29 billion in 1973. He further projected a gap of $120 billion for 1985 (U.S. Congress, 1982). Perceptions of accelerating noncompliance inspired a crisis mentality within the Internal Revenue Service, Congress, and the tax bar. The IRS responded in part by funding a major independent study of tax noncompliance via the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Bar Foundation initiated an investigation of its own in 1984. Congress enacted compliance legislation in 1981, 1982, and 1984, and completely overhauled the federal income tax laws in 1986. These enactments added a wide variety of new penalties for noncompliance and strengthened others, dramatically expanded requirements for third-party reporting of information to the IRS, added to the IRS\u27s arsenal of procedural weapons, and adopted everyone\u27s favorite vehicle to combat noncompliance – lower tax rates

Putting Federalism in Its Place

What does federalism do to welfare states? This question arises in scholarly debates about policy design as well as in discussions about the right political institutions for a country. It has frustrated many, with federalism seeming to matter in all sorts of combinations with all sorts of issues, from nationalism to racism to intergovernmental competition. The diffuse federalism literature has not come to compelling answers for very basic questions. Scott L. Greer, Daniel Béland, André Lecours, and Kenneth A. Dubin argue for a new approach—one methodologically focused on configurations of variables within cases rather than a fruitless attempt to isolate “the” effect of federalism; and one that is substantively engaged with identifying key elements in configurations as well as with when and how their interactions matter. Born out of their work on a multi-year, eleven-country project (published as Federalism and Social Policy: Patterns of Redistribution in Eleven Countries, University of Michigan Press, 2019), this book comprises a methodological and substantive agenda. Methodologically, the authors shift to studies that embraced and understood the complexity within which federal political institutions operate. Substantively, they make an argument for the importance of plurinationalism, changing economic interests, and institutional legacies