Designing a Work-Friendly Tax System

[Excerpt] Taxes tend to influence individual choices between labor and leisure, and high effective marginal tax rates on earned income tend to discourage work. In particular, the empirical evidence shows that high effective marginal tax rates tend to discourage work by low- and moderate-income individuals, especially those that are trying to work their way out of the welfare system. Unfortunately, the current federal tax system often imposes its highest effective marginal tax rates on just those individuals. The purpose of this paper is to suggest some simple ways to reduce those high effective marginal tax rates. One approach would be to replace the current earned income tax credit with a $2,000 per worker credit and a refundable$1,000 per child tax credit. A more comprehensive approach would be to integrate the individual income tax and Social Security tax systems into a single, comprehensive income tax system with refundable $2,000 per worker earned income tax credits and with$1,000 or $2,000 per person refundable personal tax credits or demogrants. In short, this paper considers how to make the federal tax system more work-friendly for low- and moderate-income workers

Natural Boundaries and Spectral Theory

We present and exploit an analogy between lack of absolutely continuous spectrum for Schroedinger operators and natural boundaries for power series. Among our new results are generalizations of Hecke's example and natural boundary examples for random power series where independence is not assumed

Survivor Funds

This Article explains how to create “survivor funds”—short-term investment funds that would pay more to those investors who live until the end of the fund’s term than to those who die before then. For example, instead of just investing in a ten-year bond and dividing the proceeds among the investors at the end of the bond term, a survivor fund would invest in that ten-year bond but divide the proceeds only among those who survived the full ten years. These survivor funds would be attractive investments because the survivors would get a greater return on their investments, while the decedents, for obvious reasons, would not care. Survivor funds would work like short-term tontines. Basically, a tontine is a financial product that combines features of an annuity and a lottery. In a simple tontine, a group of investors pools their money together to buy a portfolio of investments, and, as investors die, their shares are forfeited, often with the entire fund going to the last survivor. For example, imagine that ten 65-year-old men each contribute $1000 to a fund that buys a large diamond for$10,000 and that the men agree that the last “survivor will get the diamond. Accordingly, after the ninth man dies, the tenth man gets the diamond, and he can keep it or sell it. Of course, the survivor principle—that the share of each, at death, is enjoyed by the survivors—can be used to design financial products that would benefit multiple survivors, not just the last survivor. For example, elsewhere, we showed how tontines could be used to create so-called “tontine annuities” and “tontine pensions” that would benefit lots of retirees. In this Article, we show how the survivor principle can be used to create survivor funds that would only make payments to those who survive for a specified number of years

The Nevai Condition

We study Nevai's condition that for orthogonal polynomials on the real line, $K_n(x,x_0)^2 K_n(x_0,x_0)^{-1} d\rho (x)\to\delta_{x_0}$ where $K_n$ is the CD kernel. We prove that it holds for the Nevai class of a finite gap set uniformly on the spectrum and we provide an example of a regular measure on $[-2,2]$ where it fails on an interval

Toward an Ontology of Commercial Exchange

In this paper we propose an Ontology of Commercial Exchange (OCE) based on Basic Formal Ontology. OCE is designed for re-use in the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) and in other ontologies addressing different aspects of human social behavior involving purchasing, selling, marketing, and so forth. We first evaluate some of the design patterns used in the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) and Product Types Ontology (PTO). We then propose terms and definitions that we believe will improve the representation of contractual obligations, sales processes, and their associated documents. A commercial exchange, for instance, involves mutual agreement to reciprocate actions, such as transferring money, performing a service, or transferring goods

In the Child's Best Interest: The Consequences of Losing a Lawful Immigrant Parent to Deportation

Congress is considering a comprehensive overhaul of the nation's immigration laws more than a decade after the enactment of strict immigration measures. Lawmakers should take this opportunity to reaffirm the nation's historic commitment to family unity by addressing the discrete provisions that currently undermine it. Current U.S. immigration laws mandate deportation of lawful permanent resident (LPR) parents of thousands of U.S. citizen children, without providing these parents an opportunity to challenge their forced separations. Through a multi-disciplinary analysis, this policy brief examines the experiences of U.S. citizen children impacted by the forced deportation of their LPR parents and proposes ways to reform U.S. law consistent with domestic and international standards aimed to improve the lives of children.This report includes new, independent analysis of U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data. We estimate that more than 100,000 children have been affected by LPR parental deportation between 1997 and 2007, and that at least 88,000 of impacted children were U.S. citizens. Moreover, our analysis estimates that approximately 44,000 children were under the age of 5 when their parent was deported. In addition to these children, this analysis estimates that more than 217,000 others experienced the deportation of an immediate family member who was an LPR

Using philosophy to improve the coherence and interoperability of applications ontologies: A field report on the collaboration of IFOMIS and L&C

The collaboration of Language and Computing nv (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is guided by the hypothesis that quality constraints on ontologies for software ap-plication purposes closely parallel the constraints salient to the design of sound philosophical theories. The extent of this parallel has been poorly appreciated in the informatics community, and it turns out that importing the benefits of phi-losophical insight and methodology into application domains yields a variety of improvements. L&C’s LinKBase® is one of the world’s largest medical domain ontologies. Its current primary use pertains to natural language processing ap-plications, but it also supports intelligent navigation through a range of struc-tured medical and bioinformatics information resources, such as SNOMED-CT, Swiss-Prot, and the Gene Ontology (GO). In this report we discuss how and why philosophical methods improve both the internal coherence of LinKBase®, and its capacity to serve as a translation hub, improving the interoperability of the ontologies through which it navigates

Water Demand and the Welfare Effects of Connection: Empirical Evidence from Cambodia

Using cross-sectional household-level data from seven provincial Cambodian towns, we estimate a water demand equation for households connected to the network, and provide an empirical measurement of the economic value of tap water connection. The use of a two-step econometric procedure allows us to analyse issues relating to household access to water and to the volume of household water consumption. We estimate that the connection elasticity with respect to the one-off initial cost of connection is -0.39; the price elasticity of water demand for the connected households lies in a range between -0.4 and -0.5; and the welfare effects of water connection are approximately 17 percent of the actual expenditure of the poor unconnected households. Furthermore, providing a network connection to all households in the sample would have the distributional consequences of decreasing the estimated Gini coefficient by three percentage points and the poverty head-count ratio by six percentage points.