Undergraduate Education Abroad in Community Settings: Pedagogical Opportunities for Librarians

As undergraduate possibilities for study and service abroad increase and develop strategically to address local community needs in settings in the Global South, there is greater opportunity for academic librarians to contribute expertise in supporting and facilitating student learning and engagement with research and information concepts and processes. Education abroad experiences are considered high-impact educational practices and, as such, provide excellent vantage points from which to consider contextualizing engagement with the expanded construct of information literacy as described in ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Utilizing a case study of a pilot project, this chapter focuses on initial work to incorporate critical information literacy concepts into international applied learning settings. The setting for this case study is the Monteverde Institute (MVI) in Costa Rica, a Costa Rican non-profit organization that provides a teaching and learning setting and essential infrastructure for North American education abroad programs

Ab initio analysis of all income society classes in the European Union

We found a unified formula for description of the household incomes of all society classes, for instance, of those of the European Union in year 2007. This formula is a stationary solution of the threshold Fokker-Planck equation (derived from the threshold nonlinear Langevin one). The formula is more general than the well known that of Yakovenko et al. because it satisfactorily describes not only household incomes of low- and medium-income society classes but also the household incomes of the high-income society class.Comment: Accepted for publication in Acta Physica Polonica A. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1301.207

Seek Ways to Minimize the Mushrooming Alternative Minimum Tax

The alternative minimum tax (AMT) is reaching a broader segment of individuals. Yet, many of these taxpayers are not aware of the implications of this tax. Even worse, some of their tax advisors are not as informed as they should be. By identifying items that trigger the individual AMT, taxpayers and their advisors have greater opportunities to develop strategies to avoid the special tax. The AMT is essentially a parallel tax system that involves a separate tax calculation from the regular income tax. The AMT calculation is then compared to the income tax figured under the normal manner. The taxpayer pays the higher of the two amounts. With proper planning, many individuals can avoid or at least reduce their AMT liability. For best results, these individuals should enlist the aid of a tax professional to perform pro forma calculations throughout the year and identify the AMT potential of transactions sufficiently in advance for the taxpayer to plan accordingly. In instances where the AMT-producing transaction is still worthwhile, the taxpayer can take steps to raise the necessary cash to pay the tax

(WP 2012-01) Territorial Tax System Reform and Corporate Financial Policies

We examine the effect of a permanent change to a country income repatriation tax system on a set of corporate financial policies. In 2009 Japan and UK switched from a worldwide system to a territorial system for the taxation of earnings repatriated by their multinational firms. Due to the relatively high corporate tax rate in Japan and UK, the new system effectively reduced the tax liabilities of most multinational firms when repatriating earnings. We find that after the change Japanese and UK firms accumulate less cash, pay out larger amounts to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases, and invest less abroad. We do not find that the tax system change has significantly affected corporate domestic investments