Embedded Incentives in the Funding Arrangements for Residential Aged Care in Australia.

We examine the Australian Government?s role in the market for residential aged care in Australia and consider its impact on the incentives of market participants. We find that, due to the structure of the funding arrangements, providers are likely to have an incentive to discriminate against high-care residents, in favour of low-care residents. Since high-care residents, unlike low-care residents, face few viable alternatives, many are forced into public hospital beds as a result. This has placed pressure on the broader health system. In providing lessons from our analysis for reform, we stress the importance of fostering proper incentives in policy design and infer the implications for health reform more broadly.

The Angel Oak Tree of Johns Island, Charleston, South Carolina

The legend of the Angel Tree

The Black Jesus Statue of Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan

History of and reflection on the artwor

Just Enough

A poem in honor of Father Cyprian Davi

Peeps, beemers and scooby-doos: exploring community value among Scottish cruisers

Using an ethnographic approach which combines impromptu interviews, participant observation and analysis of online computer mediated communication we explore the consumer culture which surrounds the Scottish cruiser community. The on-going study uses the conceptual framework of neo-tribal consumption, exploring forms of ephemeral and emotional communities which cohere around the car. Our analysis suggests that the cultural practices of customization and the performance of the cruise make explicit a shared sense of collective consciousness which expresses the construction of community value which emerges from such ephemeral gatherings

Steve Hamilton Collection

To listen to the audio recordings from this collection please go to the following link. Steve Hamilton Oral History Collectio

Conceptual Mimetic Engulfment And its Relation to the Christian Linguistic Enterprise

Mimetics is the study of the ways in which we mimic others as a form of development. Mimetic engulfment is the state of imitating another undeliberately. In this paper, I quickly explore a number of types of mimesis that we find ourselves in, distinguishing between the medium, currency, and response to an engulfment. I focus primarily on what I term doxastic conceptual engulfment and its linguistic component: a type of mimesis that deals with our self-ascription of certain concepts via the unique ways we talk in different social contexts. I then explore the repercussions of this type of mimesis on the church, concluding that the Christian linguistic enterprise is particularly susceptible to certain forms of self-deception. I argue that while engulfment in a uniquely Christian way of talking is unavoidable and the resulting self-deception is not intrinsically bad, widespread self-deception throughout the church has negative moral side-effects. I borrow Bruce Wilshire’s terminology and claim that an acute awareness of our relative ascendancy (a sort of who-engulfs-whom-and-why) within our community is the best way to ensure that our mimetic engulfment is benign. However, our mimetic engulfment undermines our ability to recognize relative ascendency, thus leading to rampant self-deception. I conclude that the only way to break this cycle is what I term unbendingness. The unbending individual is one who is able to recognize when others are engulfed in her and challenges those around her in a way that opens their eyes to their self-deceptive tendencies. This awareness allows one to break from the engulfment or gain an appreciation for the relative ascendency in the community, both of which eliminate self-deception

Essays in Tax Policy Evaluation

This dissertation contains a collection of new theories, empirical methodologies, and data analyses for the evaluation of tax policy. In the first chapter, I investigate the degree to which tax deductions respond to the tax rate, and the implications this has for tax policy. I define a new tax instrument, the 'deductibility rate', which specifies the proportion of eligible expenses a taxpayer may deduct when preparing her taxes. If the utilities of gross income and deductions are separable, then the deduction elasticity reflects the revenue leakage caused by greater deductibility. To identify this elasticity, I develop the first method to decompose bunching in taxable income into its constituent parts, exploiting the removal of a notch in the tax schedule. This setting also generates an observed counterfactual density, obviating the parametric assumptions routinely made in bunching studies. Applying this method to new administrative tax data from Australia, I find that while deductions account for just 5% of taxable income, they account for 35% of the response of taxable income to the tax rate. Based on an elasticity of taxable income of 0.06, the deduction elasticity is -0.45, and the gross-income elasticity is 0.04. Consistent with standard optimal-tax logic, the sensitivity of deductions to the tax rate suggests that restricting deductions could raise welfare. In the second chapter, I develop a new empirical method for addressing a common problem afflicting regression discontinuity (RD) designs. This design has gained wide popularity for its perceived credibility in identifying treatment effects. But there are common settings in which the necessary assumptions of the method are not satisfied. When units manipulate their value of the running variable across the treatment threshold, this can distort the average outcome near the threshold, invalidating the RD design. Some settings in which the design would otherwise be appropriate offer a comparison group for which the treatment status does not change at the threshold. In such settings, it's common to observe variables, such as lags of the outcome, that predict the outcome in the absence of manipulation. I devise a nonparametric propensity-score reweighting method that exploits these variables to correct for manipulation bias. The method relies on 'manipulation-on-observed-variables' and common-support assumptions akin to those used in standard matching and weighting exercises. In the third chapter, I develop a new theory of tax evasion under third-party reporting. When a tax authority requires reports from third parties about a taxable transaction, tax evasion is feasible only if the reporters underreport collusively. I develop a model of third-party reporting to investigate its limits as an enforcement tool. Under what conditions is a third-party reporting regime robust to collusion between reporters? The deterrence effect of third-party reporting increases with the number of reporters per transaction and with uncertainty about the other reports. Under certain conditions, third-party reporting can ensure full compliance when a common report is required across transactions. Compliance also improves with the number of related transactions in which there is underreporting, such that there is a maximum number of related transactions beyond which evasion is infeasible. These findings offer insights into the settings in which third-party reporting obligations are most effective in increasing compliance.PHDPublic Policy & EconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145818/1/steveham_1.pd