Taxation and Excess Burden: A Life-Cycle Perspective

A lifetime perspective is appropriate in assessing the welfare implications of government tax policies. Although a number of attempts have been made to ex- amine the excess burden of taxation in life-cycle models, these have tended to ignore the role of human capital accumulation and/or the leisure-income choice. In this paper, we do numerical simulations with a model that takes both of these phenomena into account. We find that under reasonable assumptions, the failure to take into account distortions of human capital decisions produces substantial underestimates of the excess burden of income taxation. In addition, allowing for the endogeneity of human capital increases the efficiency of a personal consumption tax relative to that of an equal yield income tax.

Unemployment, Disequilibrium, and the Short Run Phillips Curve: An Econometric Approach

The paper specifies a disequilibrium model for the aggregate labor market consisting of demand and supply functions for labor, an adjustment equation for wages as well as for prices, a transactions equation and, finally, an equation that relates measured unemployment to vacancies and to excess demand. The model has a more sophisticated treatment of dynamics than earlier disequilibrium models, and uses measured unemployment as an endogenous variable. Two of the error terms are assumed to be serially correlated and the coefficients are estimated by maximum likelihood. The parameter estimates and the goodness-of-fit are satisfactory and the model's implications for the behavior of several important variables are sensible. Excess demand estimates computed in various ways are reasonable. The model is used to estimate the natural rate of unemployment as well as a short run Phillips curve. Finally, the stability properties ofthe model are analyzed by considering the eigenvalues of the system; they are found to have moduli less than one.

FARMER TRUST IN AGRICULTURAL COOPERATIVES: EVIDENCE FROM MISSOURI CORN AND SOYBEAN PRODUCERS

We examine whether cooperatives are characterized by greater trust than investor-owned firms. We survey 2000 Missouri corn and soybean farmers and find that trust and farmer perceptions of trustworthiness and competence are higher in cooperatives than in investor-owned firms and that trust is a significant factor explaining the choice of farmers to market to cooperatives rather than investor-owned firms. Interestingly, we find that trust is more significant in producers' decisions for marketing soybeans than for corn.Agribusiness,

Tension is Dimension

We propose a simple universal formula for the tension of a D-brane in terms of a regularized dimension of the associated conformal field theory statespace.Comment: 18 pages, harvmac (b), one ref added, one typo fixe

Farmer Trust in Producer- and Investor-owned Firms: Evidence from Missouri Corn and Soybean Producers

The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com.We examine whether cooperatives are characterized by greater trust than investor-owned firms. We survey 2000 Missouri corn and soybean farmers and find that trust and farmer perceptions of honesty and competence are higher in cooperatives than in investor-owned firms and that trust is a significant factor explaining the choice of farmers to market to cooperatives rather than investor-owned firms. Interestingly, we find that trust is more significant in producers' decisions for marketing soybeans than for corn

Markets, Contracts, or Integration? The Adoption, Diffusion, and Evolution of Organizational Form

The rise of contract farming and vertical integration is one of the most important changes in modern agriculture. Yet the adoption and diffusion of these new forms of organization has varied widely across regions, commodities, or farm types, however. Transaction cost theories and the like are not fully effective at explaining the variation of adoption rates of different organizational forms, in part because of their inherent static nature. In order to explain the adoption, diffusion and evolution of organizational form, a more dynamic framework is required. This paper lays out such a framework for understanding the evolution of organizational practices in U.S. agriculture by drawing on existing theories of economic organization, the diffusion of technological innovation, and organizational complementarities. Using recent trends as stylized facts we argue that the agrifood sector is characterized by strong complementarities among its constituent features and that these complementarities help explain the stylized facts. We also discuss several testable hypotheses concerning changes in organizational form in agriculture.contracting, vertical integration, organizational innovation, diffusion, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, L14, L22, Q13, O33,

Universal energy accuracy tradeoffs in nonequilibrium cellular sensing

We combine stochastic thermodynamics, large deviation theory, and information theory to derive fundamental limits on the accuracy with which single cell receptors can detect external concentrations. We show that if estimation is performed by an ideal observer of the entire trajectory of receptor states, then no energy consuming non-equilibrium receptor that can be divided into signaling and non-signaling states can outperform an equilibrium two-state receptor. Moreover, we derive an energy accuracy tradeoff for such general non-equilibrium receptors when the estimation is performed by a simple observer of the duration the receptor is in signaling states. This tradeoff reveals that the simple observer can only attain the performance of the ideal observer in the limit of large receptor energy consumption and size. Our results generalize the classic 1977 Berg-Purcell limit on cellular sensing along multiple dimensions, and yield a novel thermodynamic uncertainty relation for the time a physical system spends in a pool of states.Comment: For associated mp4 files, see https://github.com/ganguli-lab/Energy_Accuracy_Tradeoff_Cellular_Sensin

Electrometry Using Coherent Exchange Oscillations in a Singlet-Triplet-Qubit

Two level systems that can be reliably controlled and measured hold promise in both metrology and as qubits for quantum information science (QIS). When prepared in a superposition of two states and allowed to evolve freely, the state of the system precesses with a frequency proportional to the splitting between the states. In QIS,this precession forms the basis for universal control of the qubit,and in metrology the frequency of the precession provides a sensitive measurement of the splitting. However, on a timescale of the coherence time, $T_2$, the qubit loses its quantum information due to interactions with its noisy environment, causing qubit oscillations to decay and setting a limit on the fidelity of quantum control and the precision of qubit-based measurements. Understanding how the qubit couples to its environment and the dynamics of the noise in the environment are therefore key to effective QIS experiments and metrology. Here we show measurements of the level splitting and dephasing due to voltage noise of a GaAs singlet-triplet qubit during exchange oscillations. Using free evolution and Hahn echo experiments we probe the low frequency and high frequency environmental fluctuations, respectively. The measured fluctuations at high frequencies are small, allowing the qubit to be used as a charge sensor with a sensitivity of $2 \times 10^{-8} e/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$, two orders of magnitude better than the quantum limit for an RF single electron transistor (RF-SET). We find that the dephasing is due to non-Markovian voltage fluctuations in both regimes and exhibits an unexpected temperature dependence. Based on these measurements we provide recommendations for improving $T_2$ in future experiments, allowing for higher fidelity operations and improved charge sensitivity