Proprietary Public Finance, Political Competition, and Reputation

Although tax policy in most historical cases has been barely distinguishable from legalized theft, why have tax and spending policies in a few unusually fortunate communities, such as some of the modern democracies, apparently been, if not welfare maximizing, at least relatively benevolent? We address this question within a general positive analysis of tax and spending policy that focuses on the effects of political competition and its interaction with other constraints on policy choices, especially the constraint that equilibrium policies must be time consistent. The framework for this analysis is a theory of a proprietary fiscal authority whose objective is to extract rents for the political establishment, the proprietor of sovereign power. The analysis shows that, if the political system is sufficiently stable, then a positive amount of political competition can induce the proprietary fiscal authority to behave more like a hypothetically benevolent fiscal authority. But, political competition can lower the equilibrium tax rate only until the time-consistency constraint becomes binding. Moreover, in a reputational equilibrium, the minimum time-consistent tax rate is lower the more concern that the policymaker has for future political rents. Accordingly, because this concern for the future increases with more political stability, the beneficial effect of political competition also increases with the stability of the political system.

Dr. Gloria Mitchell: Modeling Excellence in Educational Leadership from the Inside Out.

Ed.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Spin Coulomb drag in the two-dimensional electron liquid

We calculate the spin-drag transresistivity $\rho_{\uparrow \downarrow}(T)$ in a two-dimensional electron gas at temperature $T$ in the random phase approximation. In the low-temperature regime we show that, at variance with the three-dimensional low-temperature result [$\rho_{\uparrow\downarrow}(T) \sim T^2$], the spin transresistivity of a two-dimensional {\it spin unpolarized} electron gas has the form $\rho_{\uparrow\downarrow}(T) \sim T^2 \ln T$. In the spin-polarized case the familiar form $\rho_{\uparrow\downarrow}(T) =A T^2$ is recovered, but the constant of proportionality $A$ diverges logarithmically as the spin-polarization tends to zero. In the high-temperature regime we obtain $\rho_{\uparrow \downarrow}(T) = -(\hbar / e^2) (\pi^2 Ry^* /k_B T)$ (where $Ry^*$ is the effective Rydberg energy) {\it independent} of the density. Again, this differs from the three-dimensional result, which has a logarithmic dependence on the density. Two important differences between the spin-drag transresistivity and the ordinary Coulomb drag transresistivity are pointed out: (i) The $\ln T$ singularity at low temperature is smaller, in the Coulomb drag case, by a factor $e^{-4 k_Fd}$ where $k_F$ is the Fermi wave vector and $d$ is the separation between the layers. (ii) The collective mode contribution to the spin-drag transresistivity is negligible at all temperatures. Moreover the spin drag effect is, for comparable parameters, larger than the ordinary Coulomb drag effect.Comment: 6 figures; various changes; version accepted for publicatio

Compounds affecting cholesterol absorption

A class of novel compounds is described for use in affecting lymphatic absorption of cholesterol. Compounds of particular interest are defined by Formula I: ##STR1## or a pharmaceutically acceptable salt thereof

TESS: A Relativistic Hydrodynamics Code on a Moving Voronoi Mesh

We have generalized a method for the numerical solution of hyperbolic systems of equations using a dynamic Voronoi tessellation of the computational domain. The Voronoi tessellation is used to generate moving computational meshes for the solution of multi-dimensional systems of conservation laws in finite-volume form. The mesh generating points are free to move with arbitrary velocity, with the choice of zero velocity resulting in an Eulerian formulation. Moving the points at the local fluid velocity makes the formulation effectively Lagrangian. We have written the TESS code to solve the equations of compressible hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics for both relativistic and non-relativistic fluids on a dynamic Voronoi mesh. When run in Lagrangian mode, TESS is significantly less diffusive than fixed mesh codes and thus preserves contact discontinuities to high precision while also accurately capturing strong shock waves. TESS is written for Cartesian, spherical and cylindrical coordinates and is modular so that auxilliary physics solvers are readily integrated into the TESS framework and so that the TESS framework can be readily adapted to solve general systems of equations. We present results from a series of test problems to demonstrate the performance of TESS and to highlight some of the advantages of the dynamic tessellation method for solving challenging problems in astrophysical fluid dynamics.Comment: ApJS, 197, 1

Load distribution in weighted complex networks

We study the load distribution in weighted networks by measuring the effective number of optimal paths passing through a given vertex. The optimal path, along which the total cost is minimum, crucially depend on the cost distribution function $p_c(c)$. In the strong disorder limit, where $p_c(c)\sim c^{-1}$, the load distribution follows a power law both in the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi (ER) random graphs and in the scale-free (SF) networks, and its characteristics are determined by the structure of the minimum spanning tree. The distribution of loads at vertices with a given vertex degree also follows the SF nature similar to the whole load distribution, implying that the global transport property is not correlated to the local structural information. Finally, we measure the effect of disorder by the correlation coefficient between vertex degree and load, finding that it is larger for ER networks than for SF networks.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, final version published in PR