13,386 research outputs found
DISTORTIONARY IMPACTS OF THE 1982 AND 1986 U.S. TAX CODES ON CAPITAL INVESTMENTS: A CASE STUDY OF INVESTMENT IN ORANGE GROVES
The 1980s have been a period of dramatic change for the income tax code in the United States. Although numerous modifications were considered in policy deliberations, two key goals, the reduction of the importance of tax considerations in investment decisions and tax simplification, emerged from the discussion and guided drafting of the 1986 Tax Reform Act. This study examines the importance of tax considerations in investment decisions under the provisions of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and its predecessor, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982. The study then compares the tax liability under these tax codes with a nondistortionary tax scheme. Results indicate that the Tax Reform Act of 1986 reduced the distortionary effects of the tax code on capital investment decisions. However, a large portion of the reduction can be attributed to the change in the average tax rate.Agricultural Finance,
Mean First Passage Time in Periodic Attractors
The properties of the mean first passage time in a system characterized by
multiple periodic attractors are studied. Using a transformation from a high
dimensional space to 1D, the problem is reduced to a stochastic process along
the path from the fixed point attractor to a saddle point located between two
neighboring attractors. It is found that the time to switch between attractors
depends on the effective size of the attractors, , the noise, ,
and the potential difference between the attractor and an adjacent saddle point
as: ; the
ratio between the sizes of the two attractors affects . The
result is obtained analytically for small and confirmed by numerical
simulations. Possible implications that may arise from the model and results
are discussed.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, submitted to journal of physics
Neoliberalism’s moment
There’s a lot of talk in early childhood education and care today about ‘outcomes’ and ‘quality’, ‘testing’ and ‘assessment’, ‘interventions’ and ‘programmes’, the ‘evidence-based’ and ‘best practice’, ‘investment’ and ‘human capital’, ‘preparation’ and ‘readiness’, ‘markets and marketing’. To propose a relationship between neoliberalism and education is not original; much has been written about the deep penetration of neoliberalism into this field. Most of the work, though, has focused on compulsory and higher education, neoliberalism in the school and the university. Competition, choice and calculation are central themes of neoliberalism, and these operate through the medium of the market and transactions in it between buyers and sellers. While it is too soon to comprehend the full impact and future consequences of Covid-19, people felt the need to acknowledge its significance to the narrative, so have added a last minute ‘pandemic postscript’
Now is the time! Confronting neo-liberalism in early childhood
© The Author(s) 2021. Over the last 30 years, neo-liberalism has permeated early childhood, as all other aspects of life. Having introduced what neo-liberalism is, the article looks at some of its effects on early childhood education and care, including markets, imaginaries and governance. It argues that though neo-liberalism is a powerful force, it is resistible and replaceable – and that now is the time to be developing alternatives to existing policies, grounding them in ideas that contest neo-liberalism
One loop effective potential in heterotic M-theory
We have calculated the one loop effective potential of the vector multiplets
arising from the compactification to five dimensions of heterotic M-theory on a
Calabi-Yau manifold with h^{1,1}>1. We find that extensive cancellations
between the fermionic and bosonic sectors of the theory cause the effective
potential to vanish, with the exception of a higher order curvature term of the
type which might arise from string corrections.Comment: Latex, 28 pages, 1 figur
Effective Actions for Heterotic M-Theory
We discuss the moduli space approximation for heterotic M-theory, both for
the minimal case of two boundary branes only, and when a bulk brane is
included. The resulting effective actions may be used to describe the
cosmological dynamics in the regime where the branes are moving slowly, away
from singularities. We make use of the recently derived colliding branes
solution to determine the global structure of moduli space, finding a boundary
at which the trajectories undergo a hard wall reflection. This has important
consequences for the allowed moduli space trajectories, and for the behaviour
of cosmological perturbations in the model.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures. References added and some discussions clarifie
‘We kind of try to merge our own experience with the objectivity of the criteria’: The role of connoisseurship and tacit practice in undergraduate fine art assessment
This article explores connoisseurship in the context of fine art undergraduate assessment practice. I interviewed twelve fine art lecturers in order to explore and unpack
the concept of connoisseurship in relation to subjectivity, objectivity and tacit practice.
Building on the work of Bourdieu (1973, 1977, 1986) and Shay (2003, 2005), both of whom problematize the view that subjectivity and objectivity are binary opposites, my
research illustrates the ways that connoisseurship is underpinned by informed professional judgements located in communities of practice. Within this particular conception
of connoisseurship, the lecturers’ expertise is co-constituted in communities of assessors through participation and engagement. Standards reside in communities of practice
Testing models of inflation with CMB non-gaussianity
Two different predictions for the primordial curvature fluctuation bispectrum
are compared through their effects on the Cosmic Microwave Background
temperature fluctuations. The first has a local form described by a single
parameter f_{NL}. The second is based on a prediction from the warm
inflationary scenario, with a different dependence on wavenumber and a
parameter f_{WI}. New expressions are obtained for the angular bispectra of the
temperature fluctuations and for the estimators used to determine and
f_{WI}. The standard deviation of the estimators in an ideal experiment is
roughly 5 times larger for f_{WI} than for f_{NL}. Using 3 year WMAP data gives
limits -375<f_{WI}<36.8, but there is a possibility of detecting a signal for
f_{WI} from the Planck satellite.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures in ReVTe
Cosmological Constraints on Dissipative Models of Inflation
(Abridged) We study dissipative inflation in the regime where the dissipative
term takes a specific form, \Gamma=\Gamma(\phi), analyzing two models in the
weak and strong dissipative regimes with a SUSY breaking potential. After
developing intuition about the predictions from these models through analytic
approximations, we compute the predicted cosmological observables through full
numerical evolution of the equations of motion, relating the mass scale and
scale of dissipation to the characteristic amplitude and shape of the
primordial power spectrum. We then use Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques to
constrain a subset of the models with cosmological data from the cosmic
microwave background (WMAP three-year data) and large scale structure (SDSS
Luminous Red Galaxy power spectrum). We find that the posterior distributions
of the dissipative parameters are highly non-Gaussian and their allowed ranges
agree well with the expectations obtained using analytic approximations. In the
weak regime, only the mass scale is tightly constrained; conversely, in the
strong regime, only the dissipative coefficient is tightly constrained. A lower
limit is seen on the inflation scale: a sub-Planckian inflaton is disfavoured
by the data. In both weak and strong regimes, we reconstruct the limits on the
primordial power spectrum and show that these models prefer a {\it red}
spectrum, with no significant running of the index. We calculate the reheat
temperature and show that the gravitino problem can be overcome with large
dissipation, which in turn leads to large levels of non-Gaussianity: if
dissipative inflation is to evade the gravitino problem, the predicted level of
non-Gaussianity might be seen by the Planck satellite.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, Accepted by JCAP without text changes,
References adde
Lakes - Classification & Monitoring: a strategy for the classification of lakes
This is the report on Lakes – Classification and Monitoring, a strategy for the classification of lakes by the National Rivers Authority.
This report describes a scheme for the assessment and monitoring of water and ecological quality in standing waters, greater than about 1ha in area, in England and Wales although it is generally relevant to Northwest Europe. Thirteen hydrological, chemical and biological variables are used to characterize the standing water body in any current sampling. Statistical testing on the chemical variables showed that at least six samples during a year would be needed to produce a representative sampling mean; but in this scheme the choice of variables minimizes logistic cost by not using boat sampling and time costs by not demanding extensive taxonomic work. Standing waters are classified in a state-changed system in which the contemporary values of the variables are compared with a reference baseline state and then placed in categories of percentage change from this baseline. The scheme is presently designed for use at about five year intervals on all lakes greater than 2ha area plus additional lakes of significant amenity or conservation interest
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