CROSS-BORDER SHOPPING: IMPLICATIONS FOR STATE FISCAL COMPETITION IN MULTIPLE TAX INSTRUMENTS

This dissertation investigates whether consumers’ cross-border shopping due to interstate commodity tax differentials influence counties’ economic activity and states’ strategic competition in multiple tax policies. First, I examine how own and the nearest neighboring states’ commodity tax rates affect counties’ retail activity. Particularly, in contrast to many previous studies, I examine whether the distance to the state border influences the responsiveness of counties’ retail activity to sales and excise taxes of own and the nearest neighboring states. Since the costs of avoiding state commodity taxes are presumably lower along borders, the impacts of state commodity taxes on retail activity may be different for counties closer and further away from the state border. Considering retail establishments and employment of industries that are most likely to be affected by consumers’ cross-border shopping activity, I find that that the impacts of domestic and the nearest neighboring states’ sales and excise tax rates on counties’ retail establishments and employment depend on the distance to the state border. However, contrary to what would be expected, the impacts tend not to be very robust. Second, I investigate whether consumers’ cross-border shopping to low commodity taxed states influence state governments to engage in strategic competition in multiple tax policies. Previous works on fiscal competition document that state governments engage in commodity tax competition to gain cross-border shoppers. Specifically, the empirical research find that changes in neighboring states’ one commodity tax rate influence changes in a home state’s same commodity tax rates. However, these studies do not address whether changes in neighboring states’ one commodity tax rate also induce the home state to adjust other taxes, either other commodity taxes or possible income taxes. Using a panel of the United States’ state-level data for the period 1977−2002, I estimate the reaction functions not for a single tax rate but multiple rates. In this framework, I find that states react to neighbors’ lower tax rates on one tax base by changing rates on either the same tax base or/and other tax bases, thereby suggesting that states engage in strategic competition in multiple tax rates to meet their revenue goals

Gandhi and Mao As Communicators: A Comparative Study of Practice and Theory

This study is a comparative analysis of the communication practice and theory of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Mao Tse Tung during the period in which they were the major leaders of the national liberation movements in India and China. In broadest terms, the problem dealt with is how they succeeded in communicating with hundreds of millions of illiterate peasants without the use of such modern means of communication as radio and television. If they had not solved the problem of communication, they would have been would-be leaders with very few followers and their movements would have been doomed to failure. The major method is that of content analysis in the context of the broader patterns of historical change in the countries involved. The first step, therefore, is a panoramic summary of the socio-economic and political situations in India and China during the period between World Wars I and II, the growth of the Indian and Chinese movements for independence from foreign control, and the detailed phases of national struggle during the critical war-time years of 1942 through 1944. The next step is a detailed content analysis of the major themes in almost all the recorded messages of Gandhi and Mao in the 1942-44 period. The quantitative analysis shows that, despite many differences with respect to other themes, the various themes relating to leadership style, received the greatest amount of attention from both. The qualitative analysis shows that, despite important differences, both Gandhi and Mao discussed leadership in terms that dealt not only specifically with channels of communication but also with goal values as alternatives to the perceived conditions of crisis, two broader themes that helped establish a sense of communality and understanding between the leaders and the led. The next step pulls together the communication theories of both Mao and Gandhi, a presentation based not only on the content analysis for the 1942-44 period but also on explicit statements over a longer period and tacit premises which are inferred from more general statements. It is suggested that the operational doctrines of both Gandhi and Mao have important implications for communication theory and that the more specific communication of each is a version of what, in Mao\u27s terminology, has been called the mass line. Finally, conclusions are reached concerning the multi-modal, multi-directional communication behavior of both Gandhi and Mao and their emphasis on the necessity that the communicator identify himself with the needs and even the life-styles of the recipients. These conclusions, it is suggested, have possible implications for future research on the vital connection between communication and development and particularly on the possibility of non-charismatic leadership in so-called developing countries

Pattern of dyslipidemia in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Punjab

Background: India leads the world with the largest number of diabetic patients. The risk of mortality is high with cardiovascular disease in patients of diabetes mellitus which in turn is well associated with dyslipidemia. Patients of type 2 diabetes mellitus are usually dyslipidemic, even when under relatively good glycaemic control. Diabetic dyslipidemia usually includes elevated plasma triglycerides (TG), elevated low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and decreased high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) levels but its pattern is also influenced by patient ethnicity. The objective of the study was to investigate the pattern of dyslipidemia in patients of type 2 diabetes mellitus attending a tertiary care hospital of Punjab.Methods: A cross sectional study was performed on the consecutive patients of type 2 diabetes mellitus attending the Medicine OPD of Punjab Institute of Medical Sciences, Jalandhar over 6 months period (March 2015 to August 2015). The study included 285 patients of type 2 diabetes mellitus and the variables recorded were demographic characteristics, weight, height and fasting lipid profile parameters i.e. total cholesterol (TC), TG, LDL-C and HDL-C. The collected data was analyzed statistically using SPSS version 20 software.Results: There were 55.1% male and 44.9% female with mean age 52.7 ± 11.43; 42.8% patients were urban and 57.2% rural. The mean body mass index (BMI) was 26.8 ± 5.48 (male: 25.4 ± 4.62 and female: 28 ± 5.31). Dyslipidemia was found in 81.8% patients. The most commonly elevated lipid was LDL-C (59.3%) followed by TG (57.2%) and TC (36.5%). The HDL-C was decreased in 34.4% patients. The distribution of dyslipidemia among the different age groups was almost similar: 82.6% in 60 years, the difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.998).Conclusions: Dyslipidemia is highly prevalent in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients in Punjab. The patients of all age groups are affected similarly. The patients of type 2 diabetes mellitus should be made aware of dyslipidemia and the consequent increased risk for cardiovascular diseases. The complete lipid profile should be evaluated and dyslipidemia should be treated. This would significantly reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality among the type 2 diabetes mellitus patients.

SMDDH: Singleton Mention detection using Deep Learning in Hindi Text

Mention detection is an important component of coreference resolution system, where mentions such as name, nominal, and pronominals are identified. These mentions can be purely coreferential mentions or singleton mentions (non-coreferential mentions). Coreferential mentions are those mentions in a text that refer to the same entities in a real world. Whereas, singleton mentions are mentioned only once in the text and do not participate in the coreference as they are not mentioned again in the following text. Filtering of these singleton mentions can substantially improve the performance of a coreference resolution process. This paper proposes a singleton mention detection module based on a fully connected network and a Convolutional neural network for Hindi text. This model utilizes a few hand-crafted features and context information, and word embedding for words. The coreference annotated Hindi dataset comprising of 3.6K sentences, and 78K tokens are used for the task. In terms of Precision, Recall, and F-measure, the experimental findings obtained are excellent

Infant oral health care in pediatric intensive care unit : Need for capacity building

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Pattern of Substance Abuse, Sexual Behavior and its Determinants among Unmarried Youth in India

This paper describes patterns of substance abuse sexual behaviour and its determinants among unmarried youth in India and also evaluates how these patterns are associated with each others Data come from the Youth in India Situation and Needs Study a sub-nationally representative survey conducted during 2006 2008 Logistic regression analysis binary and multinomial showed relationships between predictor variables and alcohol consumption and alcohol and sexual risk indicators as well as two of the sexual health indicators associated with premarital sex Substance use was significantly high among the age group of 20-24 years Factors such as substance use by caste tribe any member in family paid work and lower educational status were significantly associated with substance use by study subjects The prevalence of substance use was high among male youths as compared to female youths Male youth recognized more Premarital sexual behavoiur than the female youth Premarital sex were significantly higher among youths who had some disposable income in hand i e those belonging the paid work or both paid and unpaid work Youth is most important period of human life as they are easily influenced by habits and behavoiurs of their parents siblings or peers and initiate substance use as well as premarital sex Therefore improvement of educational and employment status of youths strongly needed Youths and their parents urgently need health education regarding the consequences of substance use and unsafe pre marital se

Effects of an Active Learning Approach on Students’ Motivation in an Engineering Course

Because there are many positive effects of active learning approaches on students’ motivation and achievement, some authors have recommended that these approaches be widely implemented. A research-intensive university located in the Mid-Atlantic US was interested in adopting this instructional technique, and therefore, experimented with it. The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to compare and contrast the effects of an active learning approach on the motivation of students in a treatment and control group. The results of multiple independent sample t-tests showed that there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups on several motivation constructs. We provide explanations for the lack of significant differences, as well as discuss limitations and future research

Coronal pulp cavity index as noble modality for age estimation : a digital image analysis

Funding Information: The financial support provided by UGC, New Delhi, in the form of “UGC-JRF Fellowship” (Letter No F.15-9 (JUNE 2014)/2014(NET), helped the author in preparation of this research article.Peer reviewe