3,267 research outputs found
Proprietary Public Finance, Political Competition, and Reputation
Although tax policy in most historical cases has been barely distinguishable from legalized theft, why have tax and spending policies in a few unusually fortunate communities, such as some of the modern democracies, apparently been, if not welfare maximizing, at least relatively benevolent? We address this question within a general positive analysis of tax and spending policy that focuses on the effects of political competition and its interaction with other constraints on policy choices, especially the constraint that equilibrium policies must be time consistent. The framework for this analysis is a theory of a proprietary fiscal authority whose objective is to extract rents for the political establishment, the proprietor of sovereign power. The analysis shows that, if the political system is sufficiently stable, then a positive amount of political competition can induce the proprietary fiscal authority to behave more like a hypothetically benevolent fiscal authority. But, political competition can lower the equilibrium tax rate only until the time-consistency constraint becomes binding. Moreover, in a reputational equilibrium, the minimum time-consistent tax rate is lower the more concern that the policymaker has for future political rents. Accordingly, because this concern for the future increases with more political stability, the beneficial effect of political competition also increases with the stability of the political system.
Dr. Gloria Mitchell: Modeling Excellence in Educational Leadership from the Inside Out.
Ed.D. Thesis. University of HawaiÊ»i at MÄnoa 2017
Spin Coulomb drag in the two-dimensional electron liquid
We calculate the spin-drag transresistivity
in a two-dimensional electron gas at temperature in the random phase
approximation. In the low-temperature regime we show that, at variance with the
three-dimensional low-temperature result [], the spin transresistivity of a two-dimensional {\it spin unpolarized}
electron gas has the form . In the
spin-polarized case the familiar form is
recovered, but the constant of proportionality diverges logarithmically as
the spin-polarization tends to zero. In the high-temperature regime we obtain
(where
is the effective Rydberg energy) {\it independent} of the density.
Again, this differs from the three-dimensional result, which has a logarithmic
dependence on the density. Two important differences between the spin-drag
transresistivity and the ordinary Coulomb drag transresistivity are pointed
out: (i) The singularity at low temperature is smaller, in the Coulomb
drag case, by a factor where is the Fermi wave vector and
is the separation between the layers. (ii) The collective mode contribution
to the spin-drag transresistivity is negligible at all temperatures. Moreover
the spin drag effect is, for comparable parameters, larger than the ordinary
Coulomb drag effect.Comment: 6 figures; various changes; version accepted for publicatio
Compounds affecting cholesterol absorption
A class of novel compounds is described for use in affecting lymphatic absorption of cholesterol. Compounds of particular interest are defined by Formula I: ##STR1## or a pharmaceutically acceptable salt thereof
TESS: A Relativistic Hydrodynamics Code on a Moving Voronoi Mesh
We have generalized a method for the numerical solution of hyperbolic systems
of equations using a dynamic Voronoi tessellation of the computational domain.
The Voronoi tessellation is used to generate moving computational meshes for
the solution of multi-dimensional systems of conservation laws in finite-volume
form. The mesh generating points are free to move with arbitrary velocity, with
the choice of zero velocity resulting in an Eulerian formulation. Moving the
points at the local fluid velocity makes the formulation effectively
Lagrangian. We have written the TESS code to solve the equations of
compressible hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics for both relativistic and
non-relativistic fluids on a dynamic Voronoi mesh. When run in Lagrangian mode,
TESS is significantly less diffusive than fixed mesh codes and thus preserves
contact discontinuities to high precision while also accurately capturing
strong shock waves. TESS is written for Cartesian, spherical and cylindrical
coordinates and is modular so that auxilliary physics solvers are readily
integrated into the TESS framework and so that the TESS framework can be
readily adapted to solve general systems of equations. We present results from
a series of test problems to demonstrate the performance of TESS and to
highlight some of the advantages of the dynamic tessellation method for solving
challenging problems in astrophysical fluid dynamics.Comment: ApJS, 197, 1
Load distribution in weighted complex networks
We study the load distribution in weighted networks by measuring the
effective number of optimal paths passing through a given vertex. The optimal
path, along which the total cost is minimum, crucially depend on the cost
distribution function . In the strong disorder limit, where , the load distribution follows a power law both in the
Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi (ER) random graphs and in the scale-free (SF) networks, and
its characteristics are determined by the structure of the minimum spanning
tree. The distribution of loads at vertices with a given vertex degree also
follows the SF nature similar to the whole load distribution, implying that the
global transport property is not correlated to the local structural
information. Finally, we measure the effect of disorder by the correlation
coefficient between vertex degree and load, finding that it is larger for ER
networks than for SF networks.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, final version published in PR
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