Welfare, stabilization, or growth: a comparison of different fiscal objectives

An argument that stabilization produces welfare levels nearly identical to those of welfare maximation, and that both these policies yield large welfare gains and modest growth losses relative to growth maximization policies.Fiscal policy

Tax reform and public-sector expenditures

This paper evaluates the efficiency implications of various fundamental tax reforms in an infinite-horizon endogenous growth model with public-sector investment in human capital. A fully optimal reform requires the government to adjust its expenditures on education, training, or R&D, to take into account the tax incentives that are put in place to encourage private investment in these areas. So-called "revenue neutral" reforms (which address tax incentives but not public expenditures) can thus bring about a suboptimal mix of public and private investment in human capital. In quantitative simulation, we find that the appropriate size of government can be quite important for efficiency and that reforms which ignore this idea by maintaining public expenditures at pre-reform levels can miss out on a large portion of the available welfare gains from moving to a consumption-based tax system.Human capital ; Income tax ; Tax reform ; Fiscal policy

Growth effects of a flat tax.

A presentation of a quantitative general equilibrium model showing that a revenue-neutral flat tax can permanently boost per capita growth by 0.18 to 0.85 percentage point annually, and that the lower marginal tax rate and the full investment write-off are both important contributors to the increased growth.Flat-rate income tax ; Taxation ; Economic conditions - United States

Optimal fiscal policy, public capital, and the productivity slowdown

A presentation of a quantitative-theoretical model that can account for much of the behavior of the stock of public capital in the U.S. economy over the last 70 years, with an application to examining some possible causes of the slowdown in the growth of U.S. labor productivity.Capital ; Fiscal policy ; Labor productivity

Management can be creative, too

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JPL Energy Consumption Program (ECP) documentation: A computer model simulating heating, cooling and energy loads in buildings

The engineering manual provides a complete companion documentation about the structure of the main program and subroutines, the preparation of input data, the interpretation of output results, access and use of the program, and the detailed description of all the analytic, logical expressions and flow charts used in computations and program structure. A numerical example is provided and solved completely to show the sequence of computations followed. The program is carefully structured to reduce both user's time and costs without sacrificing accuracy. The user would expect a cost of CPU time of approximately $5.00 per building zone excluding printing costs. The accuracy, on the other hand, measured by deviation of simulated consumption from watt-hour meter readings, was found by many simulation tests not to exceed + or - 10 percent margin

Growth effects of shifting from a progressive tax system to a flat tax

This paper develops a quantitative general equilibrium model to assess the growth effects of adopting a flat tax plan similar to the one proposed by Hall and Rabushka (1995). Using parameters calibrated to match the progressivity of the U.S. tax schedule and other features of the U.S. economy, we compute the growth and level effects of adopting a revenue-neutral flat tax for both a human-capital based endogenous growth model and a standard neoclassical growth model. Growth effects are decomposed into the parts attributable to the flattening of the marginal tax schedule, the full expensing of physical-capital investment, and the elimination of double taxation of corporate dividends. We find that the most important element of the reform is the flattening of the marginal tax schedule. Without this element, the combined effects of the other parts of the reform can actually reduce long-run growth.Fiscal policy ; Flat-rate income tax ; Human capital

A 32-GHz phased array transmit feed for spacecraft telecommunications

A 21-element phased array transmit feed was demonstrated as part of an effort to develop and evaluate state-of-the-art transmitter and receiver components at 32 and 34 GHz for future deep-space missions. Antenna pattern measurements demonstrating electronic beam steering of the two-dimensional array are reported and compared with predictions based on measured performance of MMIC-based phase shifter and amplifier modules and Vivaldi slotline radiating elements

Climate Change Influenced Female Population Sizes through Time across the Indonesian Archipelago

Lying at the crossroads of Asia and the Pacific world, the Indonesian archipelago hosts one of the world’s richest accumulations of cultural, linguistic, and genetic variation. While the role of human migration into and around the archipelago is now known in some detail, other aspects of Indonesia’s complex history are less understood. Here, we focus on population size changes from the first settlement of Indonesia nearly 50 kya up to the historic era. We reconstructed the past effective population sizes of Indonesian women using mitochondrial DNA sequences from 2,104 individuals in 55 village communities on four islands spanning the Indonesian archipelago (Bali, Flores, Sumba, and Timor). We found little evidence for large fluctuations in effective population size. Most communities grew slowly during the late Pleistocene, peaked 15–20 kya, and subsequently declined slowly into the Holocene. This unexpected pattern may reflect population declines caused by the flooding of lowland hunter/gatherer habitat during sea-level rises following the last glacial maximum

A 32-GHz solid-state power amplifier for deep space communications

A 1.5-W solid-state power amplifier (SSPA) has been demonstrated as part of an effort to develop and evaluate state-of-the-art transmitter and receiver components at 32 and 35 GHz for future deep space missions. Output power and efficiency measurements for a monolithic millimeter-wave integrated circuit (MMIC)-based SSPA are reported. Technical design details for the various modules and a thermal analysis are discussed, as well as future plans