Does Crown Financial Portfolio Composition Matter?

This paper considers Crown financial portfolio composition from a welfare perspective. It argues that a broad definition of the Crown’s portfolio is required for analysing the welfare implications of portfolio composition. In practice, this means incorporating the present discounted value of tax and expenditure flows as well as traditional measures of assets and liabilities. Financial portfolio composition affects welfare for a number of reasons: imperfect and incomplete markets; distortionary taxes; externalities; and agency problems. There is unlikely to be a single policy objective for choosing the preferred portfolio composition that integrates all of those factors. However, it is argued that the Crown should be risk averse and aim to eliminate all diversifiable risk in its portfolio. There is a reasonable case for adopting a low-risk Crown portfolio. Importantly, that does not necessarily require a low-volatility financial portfolio.Public Finance, Portfolio Management

Population Ageing and the Efficiency of Fiscal Policy in New Zealand

New Zealand’s ageing population is expected to have a significant impact on long-term government expenditure, particularly in the areas of health and superannuation. Recent projections from Treasury’s Long-Term Fiscal Model suggest that, under current policy settings, government expenditure (excluding financing costs) will increase by approximately seven percentage points of GDP by 2050. From the perspective of economic efficiency, we consider several methods for financing that expenditure. We find that tax smoothing is significantly more efficient, from a welfare perspective, than balancing the budget. This result is primarily due to our assumption that the assets accumulated under tax smoothing earn an average return over the government’s cost of borrowing. This excess return is not without risk. By modelling asset returns and economic growth in a stochastic manner we find that tax smoothing with a diversified portfolio of financial instruments may also reduce year-on-year tax rate volatility. Introducing practical considerations, in particular expenditure creep (where additional government spending is triggered by an improving balance sheet position), tips the scales in favour of a balanced budget approach. Hence, strong fiscal institutions are a prerequisite for achieving the welfare gains from tax smoothing.Public Finance; Tax Smoothing; Balanced Budget; Demographics; and Deadweight Loss

Klipsun Magazine, 1995, Volume 32, Issue 02 - January

Welcome to the first issue of Klipsun for 1995. Unfortunately for me, this happens to be my last issue as editor-in-chief, but hey, what an issue to go out on! Both the writing and editorial staffs worked hard to produce this magazine and I think the quality definitely represents their level of commitment. Klipsun is reaching new levels. With the writing staff digging deep for excellent stories and the editors endlessly tapping their creative juices, the magazine is only get­ ting better. I can only dream of where it can go in the fu­ture. The capabilities are there somewhere within the dark recesses of College Hall. The cover story for this issue has been an amazing process for us. Haidee Jezek came to us with a story idea about Brian Basset, the mind and pen be­hind the nationally syndicated comic strip “Adam” and former political cartoonist for The Seattle Times. During the groundwork for the story, not only did he graciously agree to the interviews, he also agreed to produce an original piece of art to adorn the cover of Klipsun. We can’t begin to express our gratitude for his efforts. The cover art is incredible. This issue of Klipsun is full of great stories probing serious issues, shedding light on the dark mind of Trent Reznor and offering an alternative way to combat college stress. Again, I think you’ll find there’s something for everybody. As you read this, Klipsun is being served by a new editor, Ryan McMenamin. I wish him, and all of his staff, the best of luck with the challenge ahead. I know I’m going to miss it.https://cedar.wwu.edu/klipsun_magazine/1158/thumbnail.jp

Variance in cortical depth across the brain surface: Implications for transcranial stimulation of the brain

The distance between the surface of the scalp and the surface of the grey matter of the brain is a key factor in determining the effective dose of non‐invasive brain stimulation for an individual person. The highly folded nature of the cortical surface means that the depth of a particular brain area is likely to vary between individuals. The question addressed here is: what is the variability of this measure of cortical depth? 94 anatomical MRI images were taken from the OASIS database. For each image, the minimum distance from each point in the grey matter to the scalp surface was determined. Transforming these estimates into standard space meant that the coefficient of variation could be determined across the sample. The results indicated that depth variability is high across the cortical surface, even when taking sulcal depth into account. This was true even for the primary visual and motor areas, which are often used in setting TMS dosage. The correlation of the depth of these areas and the depth of other brain areas was low. The results suggest that dose‐setting of TMS based on visual or evoked potentials may offer poor reliability, and that individual brain images should be used when targeting non‐primary brain areas

Descriptive temporal template features for visual motion recognition

In this paper, a human action recognition system is proposed. The system is based on new, descriptive `temporal template' features in order to achieve high-speed recognition in real-time, embedded applications. The limitations of the well known `Motion History Image' (MHI) temporal template are addressed and a new `Motion History Histogram' (MHH) feature is proposed to capture more motion information in the video. MHH not only provides rich motion information, but also remains computationally inexpensive. To further improve classification performance, we combine both MHI and MHH into a low dimensional feature vector which is processed by a support vector machine (SVM). Experimental results show that our new representation can achieve a significant improvement in the performance of human action recognition over existing comparable methods, which use 2D temporal template based representations