Entrepreneurship, agency frictions and redistributive capital taxation

Motivated by the observation that among OECD countries redistribution is negatively correlated with entrepreneurial activity, we examine the implications of entrepreneurial financial frictions for optimal linear capital taxation, in a setting where the government is concerned with redistribution. By including financial frictions, we emphasize the effect of a new channel affecting the equity-efficiency trade-off of redistribution: taxes affect the allocative efficiency of capital and, ultimately, total factor productivity. We find that high tax rates are optimal, provided that they are applied to wealth, rather than risky capital. Under plausible parameter values, we find that the optimal tax on risky capital is lower than that on wealth, and roughly in line with current U.S. levels. This suggests welfare gains from taxing only wealth at a higher rate.Othe

The clarity incentive for issue engagement in campaigns

Although parties focus disproportionately on favorable issues in their election campaigns, it is also the case that parties spend much of the ‘short campaign’ addressing the same issues – and especially salient issues. If able to influence the importance of issues for voters through their emphasis, it is puzzling that parties spend any time on unfavourable issue positions. We suggest that while parties prefer to emphasize popular issue positions, they also face an additional incentive to emphasize issues that are salient to voters: clarifying their positions on these issues for sympathetic voters. Leveraging the surprise general election victory of the British Conservative party in 2015—which brought about a hitherto unexpected referendum on EU membership—we show that, consistent with this hypothesis, voter uncertainty is especially costly for parties on salient issues. We formalize this argument using a model of party strategy with endogenous issue salience.Othe

Revealing flows in the local economy through visualisations:customers, clicks/cliques and clusters

It is well known by now, that the world has suffered an economic downturn. This has led many governments and organisations to invest resources into researching varying strategies to combat such problem. For some time now, governments have been promoting growth by encouraging local spending; we have witnessed this through ?shop local? campaigns and local currencies. We introduce BARTER a moBile sociAl netwoRking supporTing local Ethical tRading system to tackle this issue, at it?s core an information system that encompasses technology, social media and business analytics are brought together to engage customers, traders and citizens to spend locally by featuring the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of trading local. After situating BARTER at the heart of the community (with varying traders in and around Lancaster, UK) for some time, this paper is a follow on from a ?BARTER Visualisations? design concept, reporting on the progression and recent developments in the project. Whilst these systems are in place within the community, further research is being conducted to evaluate if revealing and transforming transaction data in a playful and informative manner will help citizens better understand the flow of money in the local economy

"Convince us'': an argument for the morality of persuasion

This paper explores the dierence between 'persuasion' and 'manipulation', both of which are instantiated in persuasive technologies to date. We present a case study of the system we are currently developing to foster local spending behavior by a community group | with sensitive implications for the community's sense of identity | and contrast our approach with what we would understand to be a manipulative approach. Our intention is to a) respond to anticipated critique that such a system could be interpreted as manipulative, b) present our argument for how persuasive technologies can be persuasive without being manipulative, and c) explain why, for this case study, its important that our approach be persuasive

A new hardware architecture for genomic and proteomic sequence alignment

Los Alamitos, US

Measurement of the scalar third-order electric polarizability of the Cs ground state using coherent-population-trapping spectroscopy in Ramsey geometry

The ac-Stark shift induced by blackbody radiation is a major source of systematic uncertainty in present-day cesium microwave frequency standards. The shift is parametrized in terms of a third-order electric polarizability α(3)0 that can be inferred from the static electric-field displacement of the clock transition resonance. In this paper, we report on an all-optical coherent-population-trapping pump-probe experiment measuring the differential polarizability Δα(3)0=α(3)0(F=4)−α(3)0(F=3) on a thermal Cs atomic beam, from which we infer α(3)0(F=4)=2.023(6)stat(9)systHz/(kV/cm)2, which corresponds to a scalar Stark shift parameter ks=−2.312(7)stat(10)systHz/(kV/cm)2. The result agrees within two standard deviations with a recent measurement in an atomic fountain, and rules out another recent result obtained in a Cs vapor cell

Analysis of clogging in constructed wetlands using magnetic resonance

In this work we demonstrate the potential of permanent magnet based magnetic resonance sensors to monitor and assess the extent of pore clogging in water filtration systems. The performance of the sensor was tested on artificially clogged gravel substrates and on gravel bed samples from constructed wetlands used to treat wastewater. Data indicate that the spin lattice relaxation time is linearly related to the hydraulic conductivity in such systems. In addition, within biologically active filters we demonstrate the ability to determine the relative ratio of biomass to abiotic solids, a measurement which is not possible using alternative techniques

DASH: localising dynamic programming for order of magnitude faster, accurate sequence alignment

Los Alamitos, US

Chiasma

Newspaper reporting on events at the Boston University School of Medicine in the 1960s