Tiebout, local school finance and the ineffciency of head taxes

The literature on local public (school) finance has shown that the use of local head taxes to finance schools leads to an effcient allocation of households and pupils to districts (Tiebout, 1956; Hamilton, 1975; Calabrese et al., 2009). This paper revises this well established result, using a two-community model with a housing market that adds two layers of realism to the analysis: not every household receives direct benefits from schools (e.g. some do not have children at school age) and communities are vertically differentiated, in the sense that one of them is exogenously preferred to the other by every household. In such context, head taxation leads to an ineffcient allocation of households to districts, even if local governments set local spending levels effciently given their population. The ineffciency emerges because too many intermediate income "in-school" households reside in the rich district in equilibrium. Income taxation is ineffcient as well but, in a counter-intuitive result, it may cause smaller effciency losses than a lump-sum tax.

Population ageing, inequality and the political economy of public education

Population ageing has triggered concerns about the sustainability of public systems of education. The empirical evidence is still inconclusive, whereas some theoretical results present a somewhat optimistic view (Gradstein and Kaganovich, 2004; Levy, 2005). The present note re-examines the political economy of public education in an ageing society, using the classical median voter model. The normative analysis shows that elderly households introduce distortions that render political outcomes inefficient except in rare circumstances. It is then explained that the interplay among the political and financial consequences of ageing gives rise to a non-linear, and possibly non-monotonic (inverted-U shaped) relationship between spending per pupil and the share of childless households in the population. Income inequality is shown to play a crucial role of in the process, revealing that ageing has a stronger tendency towards underprovision in economies with high inequality. The implications for the empirical literature are discussed.population ageing; income inequality; median voter model; public education

Opting-out and income mixing in urban economies:the role of neighborhood effects

Residence-based public education systems promote income segregation across neighborhoods or school districts (e.g. Epple and Romano, 2002). It has been argued that allowing private schools to enter the market may reduce the levels of income segregation because private education severs the link among school quality and place of residence for those using a private school. On the other hand, the socalled neighborhood effects constitute another segregating force in urban areas. We use a two-neighborhood model of an urban economy in order to study whether such externalities inhibit the desegregating effects of private education or not. The analysis reveals that they may indeed reduce or completely eliminate private education induced income mixing. This will happen if the best public school is located where neighborhood effects are most beneficial. However, it may also be the case that neighborhood effects promote the mixing of high income households using a private school with low income ones using a public school in the neighborhood providing the most beneficial neighborhood effects.residential mobility, segregation, neighborhood effects, school choice.

Off-the-peak preferences over government size*

We study the political consequences of policy preferences which are non-symmetric around the peak. While the usual assumption of symmetric preferences is innocuous in political equilibria with plat-forms convergence, it is not neutral when candidates are differentiated. We show that a larger government size emerges when preferences of the median voter off-the-peak are more intense towards overprovision (what we call wasteful preferences), whereas a smaller government results when her preferences are more intense towards underprovision (scrooge preferences). We then analyze the determinants of preferences off-the-peak and find that: (i) The sign of the third derivative of the policy-induced utility function indicates whether preferences are wasteful (positive) or scrooge (negative). (ii) The analog of Kimball's coefficient of prudence can be used to measure degrees of wastefulness and scroogeness. (iii) Consumers' risk aversion and government decreasing effectiveness in producing the public good generate scrooge.Single-peaked preferences; citizen-candidate; coefficient of prudence; differentiated platforms; risk-aversion

The impact of fiscal decentralization on income segregation

We investigate how decentralizing the provision and funding of a publicly provided good from central (or regional) to local governments affects income segregation in an urban area. As the previous theoretical literature suggests, local provision and funding of a publicly provided good by itself generates incentives for income segregation. However, other segregating forces such as local amenities are also at work in urban areas. We show that, once this important feature of urban economies is considered, decentralisation will reduce income segregation if the population has heterogeneous preferences for the publicly provided good.fiscal decentralisation, segregation, Tiebout, residential mobility.

Off-the-peak preferences over government size

In this paper, we analyze the political consequences derived from policy preferences which are non-symmetric around the peak. While the assumption of symmetric preferences is innocuous in political equi- libria with platforms convergence, it is not neutral when candidates are differentiated. Following the citizen-candidate approach, we show that a larger government size emerges when preferences of the me- dian voter off-the-peak are more intense towards overprovision (what we call wasteful preferences), whereas a smaller government results when her preferences are more intense towards underprovision (what we call scrooge preferences). We next study the determinants of the shape of preferences off-the-peak and find that: (i) A positive sign of the third derivative of the policy-induced utility function indicates wasteful preferences, while a negative sign indicates scrooge prefer- ences. (ii) The analog of KimballÕs coefficient of prudence (which is closely related to Arrow-PrattÕs coefficient of risk aversion), can be used to measure degrees of wastefulness and scroogeness. (iii) Symmetric preferences require imposing quite stringent restrictions on the policy problem. Numerical examples illustrate the discrepancies de- rived from symmetric preferences versus scrooge preferences in terms of equilibrium predictions.Single-peaked preferences, citizen-candidate, coefficient of prudence, differentiated platforms, risk-aversion

Application of Texture Descriptors to Facial Emotion Recognition in Infants

The recognition of facial emotions is an important issue in computer vision and artificial intelligence due to its important academic and commercial potential. If we focus on the health sector, the ability to detect and control patients’ emotions, mainly pain, is a fundamental objective within any medical service. Nowadays, the evaluation of pain in patients depends mainly on the continuous monitoring of the medical staff when the patient is unable to express verbally his/her experience of pain, as is the case of patients under sedation or babies. Therefore, it is necessary to provide alternative methods for its evaluation and detection. Facial expressions can be considered as a valid indicator of a person’s degree of pain. Consequently, this paper presents a monitoring system for babies that uses an automatic pain detection system by means of image analysis. This system could be accessed through wearable or mobile devices. To do this, this paper makes use of three different texture descriptors for pain detection: Local Binary Patterns, Local Ternary Patterns, and Radon Barcodes. These descriptors are used together with Support Vector Machines (SVM) for their classification. The experimental results show that the proposed features give a very promising classification accuracy of around 95% for the Infant COPE database, which proves the validity of the proposed method.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Research Agency (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) under project CloudDriver4Industry TIN2017-89266-R, and by the Conselleria de Educación, Investigación, Cultura y Deporte, of the Community of Valencia, Spain, within the program of support for research under project AICO/2017/134

Development of an Emergency Radio Beacon for Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Emergency locator transmitters (ELTs) used to locate manned aircrafts are not well suited to find and recover small crashed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). ELTs utilize an international satellite system for search and rescue (Cospas-Sarsat System), which should leverage its expensive resources to save lives as a priority. Besides, ELTs are too big and heavy to be used within small UAVs. Some of the existing solutions for this problem are based on receivers that detect signal strength, which may be a long and tedious process not suitable for user needs. Others do not have enough range or require radio license and expensive amateur radio receivers. This paper presents an emergency radio beacon specifically designed to locate small UAVs. It is triggered automatically in the event of a crash and allows finding and recovering a crashed UAV in a fast and simple way. It meets not only the required specifications of user-friendliness, size and weight of this kind of application, but also it is a high precision and low cost device. Besides, it has enough range and endurance. The experiments carried out show the operation of the proposed system

Título: Propositiones pro doctorali laurea adsequenda

Marca tip. en portSign. : A-C4, D