Telling Miller’s Tale: A Reply to David Yassky

A recent article by Professor David Yassky suggests that there is a segment of legal academia that dissents from the Standard model and has started to generate alternatives to the Standard Model. Denning and Reynolds critique that part of Yassky\u27s theory dismissing United States v. Miller as providing the basis for an individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment

Informal but not Insignificant: Unregistered Workers in North Cyprus

The size of the informal labour force and its contribution to the national income of North Cyprus has been an issue of considerable controversy and political significance. Because of the relatively free movement of labour between Turkey and North Cyprus, a significant body of unregistered workers have accumulated in North Cyprus. The findings are that from 1996 to 2000 the informal employment is between 35 to 40 per cent of the total labour force. Because not all the informal sectors production is excluded from the official national income statistics, the understatement of the official statistics is estimated to be between 12 to 17 percent of GNP. The fiscal losses are estimated to be about 9 percent of total tax revenues and a loss of social security revenues is approximately 38 per cent of the total annual contributions.Cyprus, informal sector, informal labour force, fiscal losses, unrecorded income, underground economy

Regulation and Taxation of Casinos under State-Monopoly, Private Monopoly and Casino Association Regimes

This paper considers alternative forms of regulation and taxation of the casino sector. The model considers the situation of a typical tourist destination country that is using casinos to attract and entertain foreign tourists. The objective is to invest in the sector efficiently while maximizing the amount of government revenue or profits accruing to the country. The regulator must determine how the price of gambling will be set, how many casinos will be allowed to enter the industry and the form and rates of taxation. Four alternative forms of regulation are considered: price regulation, state-owned monopoly, private monopoly and casino association regulation. Turnover taxes on the amount of funds gambled and also annual taxation of the fixed costs of the casinos are evaluated. Applications of the models are carried out for North Cyprus. The conclusion is that the economic efficiency costs and the revenue losses from the absence of effective regulation in these tourist destinations can be very substantial with welfare costs equal to the approximately 75 percent of the tax revenue generated by this sector. Furthermore it shows that while a tax on turnover can be efficient in the case of a competitive industry or a cartel association form of regulation, it will be distortunary if a private monopoly is controlling the sector. In contrast a tax on fixed costs will lead to an efficient result in the case of a competitive or private monopoly cases, but it will lead to allocate inefficiencies if the sector is regulated by a casino association that can only control the number of casino entering the sector.Casino regulation, taxation, state-monopoly, welfare cost

The Economics of Casino Taxation

In this paper, a model of the costs of a casino is developed that focuses on the implications for economic welfare of different taxation schemes for casinos. The situation being considered is in a country where casinos cater exclusively to foreign tourists. The goal of the country is to determine the maximum amount of taxes that can be extracted from the activities of this sector under different systems of taxation. When the price of gambling is set by regulation above its competitive level, the economic losses created by excessive investment in the sector can be reduced by taxation. A turnover tax on the amount gambled can maximize both tax revenue and the economic welfare of the country. Due administrative constraints, a number of countries rely on the taxation of the casinos’ fixed assets or a combination of a turnover tax and a tax on fixed costs. The model is applied to the situation in North Cyprus. The annual economic efficiency loss from its poorly designed tax policies on casino gambling is estimated to be about 0.5 percent of GDP.Casino, taxation, gambling, tourism, economic benefit

The Giant Branches of Open and Globular Clusters in the Infrared as Metallicity Indicators: A Comparison with Theory

We apply the giant branch slope-[Fe/H] relation derived by Kuchinski et al. [AJ, 109, 1131 (1995)] to a sample of open clusters. We find that the slope of the giant branch in K vs. (J-K) color-magnitude diagrams correlates with [Fe/H] for open clusters as it does for metal-rich globular clusters but that the open cluster data are systematically shifted to less negative values of giant branch slope, at constant [Fe/H]. We use isochrone models to examine the theoretical basis for this relationship and find that for a given value of [Fe/H], the slope of the relationship remains constant with decreasing population age but the relation shifts to less negative values of giant branch slope with decreasing age. Both of these theoretical predictions agree with the trends found in the data. Finally, we derive new coefficients for the giant branch slope-[Fe/H] relation for specific members of 3 populations, metal-rich globular clusters, bulge stars and open clusters.Comment: 16 pages including 3 figures (AASTEX), AJ Accepted, also available at http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~martini/pubs.htm

Scaling laws for convection and jet speeds in the giant planets

Three-dimensional studies of convection in deep spherical shells have been used to test the hypothesis that the strong jet streams on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune result from convection throughout the molecular envelopes. Due to computational limitations, these simulations must adopt viscosities and heat fluxes many orders of magnitude larger than the planetary values. Several numerical investigations have identified trends for how the mean jet speed varies with heat flux and viscosity, but no previous theories have been advanced to explain these trends. Here, we show using simple arguments that if convective release of potential energy pumps the jets and viscosity damps them, the mean jet speeds split into two regimes. When the convection is weakly nonlinear, the equilibrated jet speeds should scale approximately with F/nu, where F is the convective heat flux and nu is the viscosity. When the convection is strongly nonlinear, the jet speeds are faster and should scale approximately as (F/nu)^{1/2}. We demonstrate how this regime shift can naturally result from a shift in the behavior of the jet-pumping efficiency with heat flux and viscosity. Moreover, the simulations hint at a third regime where, at sufficiently small viscosities, the jet speed becomes independent of the viscosity. We show based on mixing-length estimates that if such a regime exists, mean jet speeds should scale as heat flux to the 1/4 power. Our scalings provide a good match to the mean jet speeds obtained in previous Boussinesq and anelastic, three-dimensional simulations of convection within giant planets over a broad range of parameters. When extrapolated to the real heat fluxes, these scalings suggest that the mass-weighted jet speeds in the molecular envelopes of the giant planets are much weaker--by an order of magnitude or more--than the speeds measured at cloud level.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, in press at Icaru

Taxing Multinationals

This paper analyzes the effects of tax policy on the strategic choices of a domestic multinational company competing with a foreign multinational company in a third country. We demonstrate the role of the effective average tax rate and the effective marginal tax rate on the company's choices. We consider the impact on national welfare of alternative tax policies for outbound investment. Our results differ from existing models. In contrast to Feldstein and Hartman (1979), in our model, taxing foreign source income on accrual with a deduction for foreign taxes is not generally optimal. However, unlike Mintz and Tulkens (1996), the optimal policy for domestic and outbound investment is linked through the strategic choices of the multinational.