Untaxed and Taxed Entities in the Market for Commercial Real Estate

This paper is a theoretical examination of untaxed and taxed entities that invest in real estate. The standard advice to real estate investors is to avoid using entities that are subject to taxation (such as C corporations in the U.S.) and employ entities that are not subject to taxation (such as limited liability companies, S corporations, and real estate investment trusts in the U.S.) in order to avoid double taxation of income. This paper shows that, in most situations, untaxed entities place a greater value of a given real estate property than does a taxed entity, which implies that taxed entities are at a distinct disadvantage at competing in the market for property. However, this conclusion is reversed if untaxed entities use a large amount of financial leverage compared to taxed entities and the borrowing rate for both is greater than the risk-free rate.Financial leverage; Asset valuation; Taxation

Selling Prices/sq.ft. of Office Buildings in Downtown Chicago – How Much Is It Worth to Be an Old But Class A Building?

This paper examines office building sales in downtown Chicago for the period 1996 to 2007. Our analysis provides a conventional OLS approach and an exploration of spatial dependence. We find some evidence of spatial lag and spatial autocorrelation in our dataset but the results are similar to the OLS approach. The results indicate that high occupancy is a statistically significant factor only for Class B properties, suggesting that a low occupancy rate is a negative sign for these buildings of lower quality. Class A property receives a 44% price/ sq. ft. boost due to the premium classification. This increase becomes more pronounced (90%) for floor plate efficient, neoclassical/ revival fac¸ade and/or famous Class A properties built before 1972 when the comparison is with Class B properties of the same age.

A declining population and city revenues meant that Detroit’s bankruptcy could not have been avoided

Last July, the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy, the largest municipality to do so in U.S. history. But was this action avoidable? With this in mind, John F. McDonald takes an in-depth look at the city’s history. He argues that the seeds of Detroit’s problems can be traced back to the 1950s, and the subsequent slow decline of the automotive industry, the city’s population, employment and revenues, together with rising public liabilities, made bankruptcy all but inevitable

Affordable Housing: An Economic Perspective

The economist's approach to social problems has two interrelated parts, consistent measurement and use of a cost-benefit test to assess alternative policies. This essay examines both parts of the economist's method, primarily in the context of the United States but with attention paid to the United Kingdom also. It will seek to demonstrate that the problem of affordable housing can be measured and is large, even in the U. S. Furthermore, it will suggest that the problem primarily is one of poverty. , the alleviation of which, is a very long-run project. In this context, it will suggest that programs to improve the housing conditions of the poor in the meantime are justified. Written by an economist, it will outline that economists favor a voucher program that subsidizes rents for poor households who rent in the private housing market and that they generally advocate preventing restrictions on housing supply and institutional change in nations that do not have well defined property rights. It will suggest that if poor households have purchasing power that is to be spent on housing and if a standard for acceptable housing is set, then the private market can respond. However, it will also argue that if the supply response from the private market is judged to be insufficient, then an increase in the value of the housing vouchers can be considered

Gold Nanoparticles and Its Potential Applications in Cancer Research

2009 Spring Meeting of the NANOFANS Forum. Presented on May 1, 2009 from 11 am-2 pm in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building (Rooms 1116-1118) on the Georgia Tech campus.Cancer Nanotechnology: New Opportunities in Engineering and Medicine / Shuming Nie, Director, Center of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, Emory and Georgia Tech -- Magnetic Nanoparticles and Ovarian Cancer: A Potential New Direction in Therapeutic Intervention / John McDonald, Director, Ovarian Cancer Institute and Chair of the School of Biology at Georgia Tech -- Gold Nanoparticles and Its Potential Applications in Cancer Research / Mostafa El-Sayed, Director, Laser Dynamics Laboratory at the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry at Georgia Tech.Shuming Nie is the Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Chair Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interest is broadly in biomolecular engineering and nanotechnology. John McDonald is taking an integrated systems approach to the study of cancer. This means that he views cancer not as a defect in any particular gene or protein, but as a de-regulated cellular/ inter-cellular process. Mostafa El-Sayed is the Julius Brown Chair and Regents Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech. He researches Nanoscience and also investigates how Nanoparticles can be used in Nanomedicine, Nano Catalysis, and Nanophotonics

Gauge singlet scalar as inflaton and thermal relic dark matter

We show that, by adding a gauge singlet scalar S to the standard model which is nonminimally coupled to gravity, S can act both as the inflaton and as thermal relic dark matter. We obtain the allowed region of the (m_s, m_h) parameter space which gives a spectral index in agreement with observational bounds and also produces the observed dark matter density while not violating vacuum stability or nonperturbativity constraints. We show that, in contrast to the case of Higgs inflation, once quantum corrections are included the spectral index is significantly larger than the classical value (n = 0.966 for N = 60) for all allowed values of the Higgs mass m_h. The range of Higgs mass compatible with the constraints is 145 GeV < m_h < 170 GeV. The S mass lies in the range 45 GeV < ms < 1 TeV for the case of a real S scalar with large quartic self-coupling lambdas, with a smaller upper bound for smaller lambdas. A region of the parameter space is accessible to direct searches at the LHC via h-->SS, while future direct dark matter searches should be able to significantly constrain the model.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures. Published versio

New Q-ball Solutions in Gauge-Mediation, Affleck-Dine Baryogenesis and Gravitino Dark Matter

Affleck-Dine (AD) baryogenesis along a d=6 flat direction in gauge-mediated supersymmetry-breaking (GMSB) models can produce unstable Q-balls which naturally have field strength similar to the messenger scale. In this case a new kind of Q-ball is formed, intermediate between gravity-mediated and gauge-mediated type. We study in detail these new Q-ball solutions, showing how their properties interpolate between standard gravity-mediated and gauge-mediated Q-balls as the AD field becomes larger than the messenger scale. It is shown that E/Q for the Q-balls can be greater than the nucleon mass but less than the MSSM-LSP mass, leading to Q-ball decay directly to Standard Model fermions with no MSSM-LSP production. More significantly, if E/Q is greater than the MSSM-LSP mass, decaying Q-balls can provide a natural source of non-thermal MSSM-LSPs, which can subsequently decay to gravitino dark matter without violating nucleosynthesis constraints. The model therefore provides a minimal scenario for baryogenesis and gravitino dark matter in the gauge-mediated MSSM, requiring no new fields.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures. Some corrections and additional discussion. Version published in JCA

Long terminal repeat retrotransposons of Mus musculus

BACKGROUND: Long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposons make up a large fraction of the typical mammalian genome. They comprise about 8% of the human genome and approximately 10% of the mouse genome. On account of their abundance, LTR retrotransposons are believed to hold major significance for genome structure and function. Recent advances in genome sequencing of a variety of model organisms has provided an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate better the diversity of LTR retrotransposons resident in eukaryotic genomes. RESULTS: Using a new data-mining program, LTR_STRUC, in conjunction with conventional techniques, we have mined the GenBank mouse (Mus musculus) database and the more complete Ensembl mouse dataset for LTR retrotransposons. We report here that the M. musculus genome contains at least 21 separate families of LTR retrotransposons; 13 of these families are described here for the first time. CONCLUSIONS: All families of mouse LTR retrotransposons are members of the gypsy-like superfamily of retroviral-like elements. Several different families of unrelated non-autonomous elements were identified, suggesting that the evolution of non-autonomy may be a common event. High sequence similarity between several LTR retrotransposons identified in this study and those found in distantly-related species suggests that horizontal transfer has been a significant factor in the evolution of mouse LTR retrotransposons

L1 and HERV-W retrotransposons are hypomethylated in human ovarian carcinomas

Wide-spread hypomethylation of CpG dinucleotides is characteristic of many cancers. Retrotransposons have been identified as potential targets of hypomethylation during cellular transformation. We report the results of an preliminary examination of the methylation status of CpG dinucleotides associated with the L1 and HERV-W retrotransposons in benign and malignant human ovarian tumors. We find a reduction in the methylation of CpG dinucleotides within the promoter regions of these retroelements in malignant relative to non-malignant ovarian tissues. Consistent with these results, we find that relative L1 and HERV-W expression levels are elevated in representative samples of malignant vs. non-malignant ovarian tissues