Public policy and the labor supply of older Americans

Most of the papers prepared for this conference make clear the desirable economic effects if older Americans worked longer and spent fewer years in retirement. Despite a small upturn in labor market participation by older workers in recent years, there is substantial room for significantly greater movement in this direction. The public policy framework is a major determinant of when Americans decide to retire. Both workers and employers take some account of the rules related to retirement that are present in the Social Security laws, tax laws, and regulations governing private pension plans and individual retirement savings. This paper addresses the issue of whether the current set of laws can be changed to provide fewer incentives to retire early and offer more encouragement to work longer.Labor supply ; Older people

Reheating Metastable O'Raifeartaigh Models

In theories with multiple vacua, reheating to a temperature greater than the height of a barrier can stimulate transitions from a desirable metastable vacuum to a lower energy state. We discuss the constraints this places on various theories and demonstrate that in a class of supersymmetric models this transition does not occur even for arbitrarily high reheating temperature.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figure. Typos corrected and some references adde

Discovering the Higgs with Low Mass Muon Pairs

Many models of electroweak symmetry breaking have an additional light pseudoscalar. If the Higgs boson can decay to a new pseudoscalar, LEP searches for the Higgs can be significantly altered and the Higgs can be as light as 86 GeV. Discovering the Higgs boson in these models is challenging when the pseudoscalar is lighter than 10 GeV because it decays dominantly into tau leptons. In this paper, we discuss discovering the Higgs in a subdominant decay mode where one of the pseudoscalars decays to a pair of muons. This search allows for potential discovery of a cascade-decaying Higgs boson with the complete Tevatron data set or early data at the LHC.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Federal Income Tax Treatment of United States Oil Corporations

Oil and gas operations are the single most important activity carried on by American multinational corporations. While there is a vast general literature on the tax laws applicable to foreign income, the particular application of this law to the oil industry is so sparse that one can count on the fingers of one hand the number of significant articles that have dealt specifically with this subject

It's On: Early Interpretations of ATLAS Results in Jets and Missing Energy Searches

The first search for supersymmetry from ATLAS with 70/nb of integrated luminosity extends the Tevatron' s reach for colored particles that decay into jets plus missing transverse energy. For gluinos that decay directly or through a one step cascade into the LSP and two jets, the mass range m_g < 205 GeV is disfavored by the ATLAS searches, regardless of the mass of the LSP. In some cases the coverage extends up to m_g ~ 295 GeV, already surpassing the Tevatron's reach for compressed supersymmetry spectra.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; references and figure added; Physics Letters B (2011