The peer group effect and the optimality properties of head and income taxes

This paper studies a Tiebout model with two school districts, housing markets and peer effects to re-evaluate the optimality properties of the allocation of households to districts induced by head and income taxes. The main novel results reveal that head taxes are not superior to income taxes and that the indirect redistribution implied by income taxation is not necessarily at odds with location optimality or associated to welfare losses. Many combinations of head taxes differentiated by household type can sustain the optimal outcome as an equilibrium. While this may not be possible using differentiated income taxes, a combination of non-differentiated ones and differentiated head taxes levied on the residents of the rich district can lead to the optimal outcome and effect significant local redistribution. In turn, non-differentiated head taxes are suboptimal (unless optimality requires one of the districts to be type-homogeneous) and a combination of uniform income taxes and head taxes levied on the rich district's population can do as well as them. Moreover, non-differentiated income taxes may generate smaller welfare losses than their lump-sum counterpart, a result which clashes with the benefit view of head taxes.Tiebout; peer effects; head tax, income tax; optimality

Income Stratification Across Public and Private Education: The Multi-community Case

This paper analyses the question of which households opt out of public education in a multi-community economy with local school finance and housing markets. In particular, the objective is to investigate whether perfect income stratification across public and private educational sectors predicted by single jurisdiction models and by multiple jurisdiction ones without housing markets holds in this setting. Nechyba (1999) has shown that the existence of a fixed stock of heterogeneous houses can prevent perfect income stratification from arising in equilibrium. Here we demonstrate that, even with homogeneous housing, perfect income stratification is not assured. On the contrary, it is possible to find equilibria in which households from intermediate income intervals use private schools, while richer ones prefer to send their youths to a local public school of higher quality. The emergence of very high quality public schools that attract students from the best-off households and survive the competition of private schools is therefore possible. The paper identifies a new way whereby housing markets affect how the market for education works.

On the utility representation of asymmetric single-peaked preferences*

We introduce two natural types of asymmetric single-peaked preferences, which we name biased-above and biased-below, depending on whether the asymmetry (or preference-bias) favors alternatives above or below the peak. We de.ne a rich family of utility functions, the generalized distance-metric utility functions, that can represent preferences biased-above or biased-below, besides accommodating any degree of asymmetry. We also identify restrictions on differentiable utility representations that guarantee the underlying preferences to be biased-above or below, and allow to compare degrees of asymmetry. Finally, we consider a specific application -agents preferences over government size- to illustrate the role of factors such as risk aversion and tax distortions in shaping asymmetric preferences.Single-peaked preferences; asymmetric preferences; quadratic preferences; risk aversion; prudence

Expression pattern determines regulatory logic

Large amounts of effort have been invested in trying to understand how a single genome is able to specify the identity of hundreds of cell types. Inspired by some aspects of Caenorhabditis elegans biology, we implemented an in silico evolutionary strategy to produce gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that drive cell-specific gene expression patterns, mimicking the process of terminal cell differentiation. Dynamics of the gene regulatory networks are governed by a thermodynamic model of gene expression, which uses DNA sequences and transcription factor degenerate position weight matrixes as input. In a version of the model, we included chromatin accessibility. Experimentally, it has been determined that cell-specific and broadly expressed genes are regulated differently. In our in silico evolved GRNs, broadly expressed genes are regulated very redundantly and the architecture of their cis-regulatory modules is different, in accordance to what has been found in C. elegans and also in other systems. Finally, we found differences in topological positions in GRNs between these two classes of genes, which help to explain why broadly expressed genes are so resilient to mutations. Overall, our results offer an explanatory hypothesis on why broadly expressed genes are regulated so redundantly compared to cell-specific genes, which can be extrapolated to phenomena such as ChIP-seq HOT regions.Peer reviewe

Fronteras internas, cuerpos marcados y experiencia de fuera de lugar : las migraciones internacionales bajo las actuales lógicas de explotación y exclusión del capitalismo global

La noción de frontera es útil para la comprensión de las lógicas de discriminación, explotación e inclusión/exclusión que se dan en el marco de la globalización capitalista actual. En el contexto de los actuales procesos migratorios, las fronteras que se constituyen tanto en el campo geopolítico como en el ámbito de los imaginarios, generan categorías de nosotros y ellos, referidas a la pertenencia o no a una nación. La noción de fronteras internas alude a las maneras en las que estas construcciones geopolíticas e imaginarias se imprimen en la experiencia cotidiana de las personas inmigradas, a través de la configuración semiótico material de los cuerpos en los países receptores. En el marco de las políticas securitarias presentes en la Europa fortaleza, que construyen al sujeto inmigrante como una amenaza, estas categorizaciones dan lugar a la emergencia y actualización de las fronteras internas y su correlato: la experiencia de fuera de lugar, para aquellos cuerpos marcados como inadecuados.Global capitalism's logic of discrimination, exploitation and exclusion can helpfully be illuminated by the concept of 'the frontier'. Frontiers are a necessary feature of migration and inevitably generate an "us" and a "them". The concept of an "internal frontier" carries this geopolitical boundary-making over into the everday experience of immigrants, experienced in their very bodily being. "Fortress Europe" constructs the immigrant as a threat; the result is the immigrant's experience of being marked out as ill-fitting, inappropriate and out of place

Complex dynamics emerging in Rule 30 with majority memory

In cellular automata with memory, the unchanged maps of the conventional cellular automata are applied to cells endowed with memory of their past states in some specified interval. We implement Rule 30 automata with a majority memory and show that using the memory function we can transform quasi-chaotic dynamics of classical Rule 30 into domains of travelling structures with predictable behaviour. We analyse morphological complexity of the automata and classify dynamics of gliders (particles, self-localizations) in memory-enriched Rule 30. We provide formal ways of encoding and classifying glider dynamics using de Bruijn diagrams, soliton reactions and quasi-chemical representations

Tracking pupils may reduce social segregation in residential neighborhoods and schools

Perhaps the most common critique of tracking in schools is that it reinforces pre-existing inequalities by segregating pupils from privileged backgrounds away from the rest of the student body. However, in their new research Gianni De Fraja and Francisco Martinez-Mora find evidence that tracking may actually reduce neighborhood segregation, as it provides parents with an incentive to keep their children in schools in disadvantaged areas if it means their children will be placed into a top track

On the Political Economy of University Admission Standards

We study the political determination of the proportion of students attending university when access to higher education is rationed by admission tests. Parents differ in income and in the ability of their unique child. They vote over the minimum ability level required to attend public universities, which are tuition-free and financed by proportional income taxation. University graduates become high skilled, while the other children attend vocational school and become low skilled. Even though individual preferences are neither single-peaked nor single-crossing, we obtain a unique majority voting equilibrium, which can be either classical (with 50% of the population attending university) or ends-against- the-middle, with less than 50% attending university (and parents of low and high ability children favoring a smaller university system). The majority chosen university size is smaller than the Pareto efficient level in an ends-against-the-middle equilibrium. Higher income inequality decreases the majority chosen size of the university. A larger positive correlation between parents income and childs ability leads to a larger university populated by a larger fraction of rich students, in line with the so-called participation gap. Our results are robust to the introduction of private schooling alternatives, financed with fees