12,404 research outputs found
Why Christians Should Not Be Kaneans about Freedom
Abstract: In this paper we argue that Robert Kane’s theory of free will cannot accommodate the
possibility of a sinless individual who faces morally significant choices because a sinless agent
cannot voluntarily accord value to an immoral desire, and we argue that Kane’s theory requires this. Since the Jesus of the historic Christian tradition is held to be sinless, we think Christians should reject Kane’s theory because it seems irreconcilable with historic Christian Christology. We consider two objections to our argument and argue that both fail
Bose-Hubbard model with attractive interactions
We consider the Bose-Hubbard model of atoms in an optical lattice potential
when the atom-atom interactions are attractive. If the lowest energy lattice
sites are degenerate (such as in the homogeneous case), then, at a critical
value of the interaction strength, a phase-coherent condensate becomes unstable
to a quantum superposition such that the number distribution of each of the
degenerate sites becomes double peaked. In the limit when the interaction
dominates, the superposition becomes macroscopic and has the form
, where
is the total number of atoms and the sum ranges over the energy-degenerate
sites.Comment: 4 pager, 5 figures, accepted for publication in PR
Income Shifting, Investment, and Tax Competition: Theory and Evidence from Provincial Taxation in Canada
We study corporate income tax competition when firms operating in multiple jurisdictions can shift income using financial planning strategies. Several such strategies, particularly intra-corporate lending, appear to be actively pursued by companies to reduce subnational corporate taxes in Canada. A simple theoretical model shows how interjurisdictional tax planning can give rise to asymmetries in jurisdictions’ tax policies, with one jurisdiction becoming a “tax haven” to attract taxable income through financial transactions, while others set higher statutory rates. Further, increased competition from tax havens may paradoxically lead to tax increases by high-tax jurisdictions. Analysis of data from administrative tax records suggests income shifting has pronounced effects on provincial tax bases in Canada. According to our preferred estimate, the elasticity of taxable income with respect to tax rates for "tax shifting" firms is 4.3, compared to 1.6 for other, comparable firms.
Limiting geodesics for first-passage percolation on subsets of
It is an open problem to show that in two-dimensional first-passage
percolation, the sequence of finite geodesics from any point to has a
limit in . In this paper, we consider this question for first-passage
percolation on a wide class of subgraphs of : those whose vertex
set is infinite and connected with an infinite connected complement. This
includes, for instance, slit planes, half-planes and sectors. Writing for
the sequence of boundary vertices, we show that the sequence of geodesics from
any point to has an almost sure limit assuming only existence of finite
geodesics. For all passage-time configurations, we show existence of a limiting
Busemann function. Specializing to the case of the half-plane, we prove that
the limiting geodesic graph has one topological end; that is, all its infinite
geodesics coalesce, and there are no backward infinite paths. To do this, we
prove in the Appendix existence of geodesics for all product measures in our
domains and remove the moment assumption of the Wehr-Woo theorem on absence of
bigeodesics in the half-plane.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AAP999 the Annals of
Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
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