Redistribution and fiscal policy

This paper studies the optimal behavior of a democratic government in its use of fiscal policies to redistribute income. I present a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents to analyze (1) the differences between the effects on the optimal tax rate of permanent and nonpermanent perturbations and (2) the relationship between initial inequality and both steady-state levy and income distribution. In addition, the optimal fiscal policy for the transition is calculated. The analysis leads me to three main conclusions. First, there are no important differences between how taxes respond to a permanent or nonpermanent perturbation. Second, the initial inequality has a huge effect on both actual levy and actual income distribution. And finally, the Chari, Christiano, and Kehoe (1992) result, i.e., taxes on labor are roughly constant over the business cycle, holds only if the productivity ratio is constant. In addition, the model implies a positive correlation between inequality and tax rate, just as in the basic literature.Taxation ; Income distribution

VCD helps others in molecular aggregates

Molecular self-assembly is the driving force of a great number of physical, chemical and biological processes in Nature.1 The properties of the molecular aggregates are markedly dependent on the intermolecular forces which hold together the building blocks, but also on the chemical and structural features of these building blocks. The transference of properties from the individual molecules to the bulk aggregate can be summarized in three main behaviours: disappearance (dipole moment), direct sum (weight) and enhancement (resilience). A nice example of the last group is the optical activity. The presence of a chiral seed in the molecules modulates their folding by favouring one among the available macrostructures. As a consequence, new forms of supramolecular chirality are triggered, such as helical, spiral or chiral sheets, which usually give rise to a noticeable increasing of the chiral signal of the aggregates. Vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) is the chiral version of infrared spectroscopy. It combines the intramolecular view provided by the molecular vibrations with the selective capability of a chiral analysis. It is also a suitable technique to observe the aggregation-induced signal enhancement in any type of condensed phase (solid, liquid, gel, etc). Here we present a series of studies on supramolecular systems, Figure 1, in which VCD helps and improves the analysis obtained by other techniques of chiral analysis as electron microscopy (SEM, AFM), electronic circular dichroism (ECD), Raman optical activity (ROA) or circularly polarized luminescence (CPL). These studies are aimed to obtain structural information of the macromolecular scaffolding useful to control the features and applications of the aggregates.Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

El Sonido Numinoso. Música Ritual y Biología

La condición biológica y social del ser humano instrumenta su concreción en el propio cuerpo; por ello cualquier creación cultural pasa por su corporeidad, por lo que cobra vital importancia la bio-ritmicidad fisiológica, junto con las ritmicidades elaboradas socialmente; esto, a su vez, es el sustento del constructo de armonías, cadencias y ruidos en el plano de las relaciones sociales. Las cuales son simbolizadas en la música ritual como metáforas de otras ritmicidades. Éstas son pertinentes a la vida de los hom bres en la tierra: calendarios de cultivo y festivos en los que se entretejen sus relaciones sociales necesarias para subsistir

De la medicina tradicional en la obra de Noemí Quezada: la mirada en el espejo

Cruce del escrito antropológico y su autor como un observador-actor, me sirve de marco reflexivo existencial para mirarme en los reflejos de espejos retrospectivos que me ayudan a saldar un pendiente biográfico y profesional a la memoria de nuestra muy estimada Noemí Quezada Ramírez, y como un reconocimiento a su obra y su paso por la vida, entre los pasillos académicos y los andares antropológicos

Inflation persistence: how much can we explain?

Until recently most macroeconomic models in which monetary policy has real effects were based on the assumption that agents in the economy do not use all available information when making a decision. Critics of these models argue that this assumption implies that agents are not rational. ; In response to this criticism, a class of New Keynesian models has recently been proposed. These models combine "old" Keynesian elements with an environment in which agents form their expectations rationally. The simplest version of such models includes only one type of nominal rigidity, either sticky prices or sticky wages-that is, prices or wages that adjust only slowly to market shortages or surpluses. But these simple models have a drawback: They do not seem to be able to reproduce the persistence of inflation observed in the data. ; This article explores whether adding sticky wages to the baseline sticky-price model solves the persistence-of-inflation problem when plausible durations of price and wage contracts are assumed. ; The analysis confirms that the baseline sticky-price model cannot replicate the observed inflation persistence unless an implausible degree of either price stickiness or exogenous nominal interest rate persistence is assumed. The findings also show that a model with both sticky prices and sticky wages can replicate more closely the autocorrelation function of inflation, even with acceptable levels of both price and wage stickiness.Inflation (Finance) ; Econometric models