Latvian pension reform

In 1995, Latvia became the first country in Central and Eastern Europe to implement parametric reform of the Soviet-style PAYGO pension system, and the first in the world to implement the"notional defined contribution (NDC) system"originally designed for Sweden. The Government's intention was to follow the overhaul of the PAYGO system with the creation of a funded second tier by 1998, but the reform has lagged. Public acceptance of the new system has been poor, and pressures for rollback of the reforms have grown. After such a splashy beginning why did the Latvian reform stall? What has been the net effect of the reforms after the roll backs? How did Latvia balance the difficult issues of system incentives, fairness, and affordability? What are the lessons of the Latvian experience with the NDC system for other reforming countries? These questions are the subject of this paper. It includes a description of pre-reform situation, describes the key provisions of the original reform, and discusses the subsequent amendments. The impact of the reform is assessed on the basis of macroeconomic and microeconomic simulations. On the basis of those, the reforms are evaluated and conclusions for other countries are drawn.Pensions&Retirement Systems,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Gender and Law

Calibration, validation and the NERC Airborne Remote Sensing Facility

The application of airborne and satellite remote sensing to terrestrial applications has been dominated by empirically-based, semi-quantitative approaches, in contrast to those developed in the marine and atmospheric sciences which have often developed from rigorous physically-based models. Furthermore, the traceability of EO data and the methodological basis of many applications has often been taken for granted, with the result that the repeatability of analyses and the reliability of many terrestrial EO products can be questioned. ‘NCAVEO’ is a recently established network of Earth Observation experts and data users committed to exchanging knowledge and understanding in the area of remote sensing data calibration and validation. It aims to provide a UK-based forum to collate available knowledge and expertise associated with the calibration and validation of EO-based products from both UK and overseas providers, in different discipline areas including land, ocean and atmosphere. This paper will introduce NCAVEO and highlight some of the contributions it hopes to make to airborne remote sensing in the UK

Living In the KnowlEdge Society (LIKES) Initiative and iSchools' Focus on the Information Field

In this poster, we describe the similarities between the Living In the KnowlEdge Society (LIKES) project and iSchools – both focus on the information field. This might lead to future collaborations between the two. One of the LIKES objectives is to spread computational thinking, fundamental CS/IT paradigms, key computing concepts and ICT paradigms across the Knowledge Society. This is analogous to iSchools’ vision of education for thorough understanding of information, IT and their applications. In the previous three LIKES workshops, participants from various disciplines had an intense discussion about grand challenges to incorporate computing/IT in their disciplines. All iSchools have courses that teach computing and information-related topics. If those courses can be expanded for other non-computing disciplines on their campuses with support from experiences of LIKES, it would further empower professionals in the iField

Three Essays on the Law and Economics of Taxation and Finance

This dissertation empirically measures how the laws governing taxation and finance affect behavior and addresses how those laws should adapt to changing circumstances. The first chapter examines the effect of joint-taxation and “marriage bonuses” on marriage formation in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It uses a natural experiment to identify the effect and finds that tax incentives caused an increase in the marriage rate of up to 9%. The second chapter shows that idiosyncratic risk has spiked in every economic downturn since the 1920s and develops new models to explain this phenomenon. It then explores the implications of spikes in idiosyncratic risk for corporate and securities law. The third chapter compares the existing corporate tax to a hypothetical “cash flow tax” to determine how much of the corporate tax base is composed of the normal return to capital. It finds that the normal return to capital made up a relatively small percentage of the corporate tax base over the last 20 years. Because taxes on the normal return to capital are the most likely to be passed on to labor, this suggests that labor’s long-run share of the corporate tax burden is likely to be lower than typically thought.PHDEconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143950/1/edfox_1.pd

Does Capital Bear the U.S. Corporate Tax After All? New Evidence from Corporate Tax Returns

This article uses U.S. corporate tax return data to assess how government revenue would have changed if, over the period 1957–2013, corporations had been subject to a hypothetical corporate cash flow tax—that is, a tax allowing for the immediate deduction of investments in long-lived assets like equipment and structures—rather than the corporate tax regime actually in effect. Holding taxpayer behavior fixed, the data indicate actual corporate tax revenue over the most recent period (1995–2013) differed little from that under the hypothetical cash flow tax. This result has three important implications. First, capital owners appear to bear a large fraction of the corporate tax today. This is because economic theory holds that corporate cash flow taxes are largely borne by capital owners and my result implies that the actual tax behaves in practice much like a cash flow tax. This theory is embodied in the Treasury’s most recent model of corporate tax incidence. Applying the model to my results implies that only a small portion (2–10 percent) of the U.S. corporate tax was borne by labor in the years before the 2017 Act and thus capital providers are the primary beneficiaries of the Act’s large corporate rate cut. Second, the results suggest that the United States could switch fully over to a cash flow tax, which is likely to be administratively simpler for both the government and corporations, at relatively low revenue cost. Third, the impact of fully switching to a cash flow tax on the operations of the real economy and its efficiency are likely to be fairly small. This is precisely because the corporate tax has already evolved to largely mimic a cash flow tax, and the article explores the reasons underlying this evolution using a novel dataset

Is There a Delaware Effect for Controlled Firms?

The impact of Delaware incorporation on firm value remains a central question in corporate law. Despite the difficulty scholars have had in agreeing on an answer to this question, there is a consensus that Delaware has long enjoyed stable and important advantages in the expertise of its judiciary and its extensive case law. These advantages are believed to be particularly important for firms with a controlling shareholder. This Article attempts to empirically measure the effect of Delaware incorporation on these controlled firms and thus helps us understand the market value of Delaware’s judiciary and case law. It finds, surprisingly, that controlled Delaware firms are actually slightly less valuable than similar companies incorporated elsewhere. This suggests that (1) Delaware does not create much, if any, premium in market value for controlled firms or (2) “lower quality” controlled firms—which would be less valuable regardless of where they incorporate—disproportionately pick Delaware. Either explanation runs counter to conventional wisdom in this literature. Finally, the results cast new light on the long-term effects of Delaware’s recent decisions weakening the doctrinal protection of minority shareholders embodied in M&F Worldwide and Synutra

Overview of a Guide for Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This chapter provides an overview of a guide for electronic theses and dissertations that is being prepared as requested by UNESCO to help with the expansion of ETD activities around the world. It roughly follows the outline developed through discussions involving the many partners working on that guide, coordinated by Shalini Urs. It builds upon experiences related to the evolution of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, a federation of groups interested in ETD programs. It introduces key concepts, explains matters according to the interests of students and universities, highlights technical issues, recommends a scheme for expanding training, and suggests likely future activities

Source Book on Digital Libraries

This extensive report outlines the steps necessary to create a national, electronic Science, Engineering and Technology Library. Step one is for NSF to play a lead role in launching a concerted R&D program in the area. Step two involves partnerships, cooperative ventures, and production conversion of backarchives. ARPA, NASA, NIST, Library of Congress, NLM, NAI, and many other groups must become involved if we are to serve the broad base of users; it will only be successful if supported by top-quality research on information storage and retrieval, hypertext, document processing, human-computer interaction, scaling up of information systems, networking, multimedia systems, visualization, education, and training. NOTE: Because of its large size, this reports is not available in hard copy from the department. It can be obtained electronically through anonynous FTP to fox.cs.vt.edu (in directory /pub/DigitalLibrary). To obtain a hard copy, write to Mark Roope at University Printing Services; "Documents on Demand"; Virginia Tech; Blacksburg VA 24061-0243; or call (703) 231-6701