Pease Provision in Fiscal Cliff Deal Doesn't Discourage Charitable Giving and Leaves Room for More Tax Expenditure Reform

The recent "fiscal cliff" deal reinstated a limit on itemized deductions for high-income taxpayers known as the "Pease" provision, which policymakers created as part of the 1990 bipartisan deficit-reduction package but which the Bush tax cuts phased out between 2006 and 2010. In recent days, some pundits and leaders of some charitable organizations have suggested that because Pease limits the total amount of itemized deductions that high-income filers can claim, it will reduce the incentive for taxpayers to donate to charity. That suggestion is incorrect, however, as a close look at Pease makes clear

Christmas tree recycling

Charles W. Marr and Robert I. Neier, Christmas Tree Recycling, Kansas State University, May 1995

Using wood chips as mulch

Charles W. Marr and Robert I. Neier, Using Wood Chips as Mulch, Kansas State University, May 1995

Grass recycling

Charles W. Marr and Robert I. Neier, Grass Recycling, Kansas State University, May 1995

Optimal Packages: A review of impact assessment approaches of bundled insurance, credit and inputs

The paper reviews 39 studies on impact assessment of insurance and bundled financial products (i.e. insurance plus credit) on agricultural productivity. It presents the latest research methodologies and the empirical results of their application in a large number of countries. The research findings are mixed in inconclusive, which calls for further research in the area

Adoption and impact of index-insurance and credit for smallholder farmers in developing countries: A systematic review

Farmers in most developing countries are mainly smallholders, with average farm size of 1-2 hectares. They tend to be constrained in investing in productivity-enhancing technologies because of limited household resources combined with lack of access to external finance on which they depend (Tadesse 2014). Smallholders often do not have access to credit provided by banks or special rural credit institutions. One of the constraints on such lending is the limited amount of collateral to securitize the repayment of the loan. This means that banks will have little recourse against defaulting borrowers. As a result, high-return economic cropping activities that typically require significant up-front investments (e.g. enhanced seeds and fertilizers) may be hampered by these credit constraints (Boucher et al., 2008). Provision of insurance can encourage higher supply of credit, both the implied demand for credit and supply thereof, and thus enhance agricultural inputs use. However, there is a lack of growth due to underdeveloped and imperfect markets for inputs, insurance and credit (Carter and Barrett, 2006; Cole et al., 2012) causing among others credit rationing. In the environment of underdeveloped and imperfect markets, a combined approach is needed (Alderman and Haque, 2007), as separate access to each of these is seriously restricted. More insight into the impact of linking insurance and credit is needed since there is limited information in the literature regarding the potential effect of bundling insurance and credit, for example on the extent to which insurance would reduce the cost of borrowing and make credit more accessible to the smallholder farmers (Tadesse et al., 2015). In this paper we review the most recent scientific literature on one specific form of insurance: index-insurance. As is well known; important advantages of index insurance are low administrative costs and the elimination of moral hazard. An important disadvantage is basis risk (see below). In this review paper we discuss the determinants of demand for index-insurance, the impact of index-insurance on smallholder livelihoods, and the existing links between index-insurance and credit. In this meta-analysis, we identify key discoveries on the potential of index-insurance in enhancing credit supply for smallholders and thus farm productivity. We focus on index-based insurance products since it offers a tentative potential for coping with losses in lower income countries (Skees, 2008)

Single-molecule fluorescence measurement of local polymer properties

The composite interphase is a vital region whose properties are notoriously difficult to measure. Fluorescent molecules can act as uniquely sensitive probes of their local environment, displaying changes in fluorescence lifetime, polarization anisotropy, and spectral shifts, all of which could provide useful information about this region. A prerequisite to making use of this information is the ability to determine the positions and orientations of single molecules accurately and precisely so that molecular behavior can be correlated with material structure. Here, we show the ability to determine the position and orientation of single molecules with an uncertainty of approximately 9 nm and a few degrees, respectively, allowing us to resolve features as small as 20 nm. Another challenge is to introduce probe fluorophores with a sufficient density to capture local material property variations in detail, but without perturbing the property of interest. We solve this problem by means of lithographically-fabricated test structures. These enable us to produce thousands of essentially identical replicas of a feature, the image data from which can be overlaid and integrated. In this way, a sparse fluorophore distribution can still yield a spatially-dense data set. Additional complications involve the interaction of fluorophore emission with variations in the local refractive index of the sample. We address these by fabricating and measuring nanoscale test structures that vary fluorophore environments in a precisely-controlled fashion. In this talk, I will describe our unique, wide-field, single-molecule fluorescence microscope, that allows us to measure the position, orientation, lifetime, and spectrum of fluorescent probes distributed within lithographically-fabricated analogs of real composite structures, and our progress in correlating single-molecule behavior with local material properties Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Does bundling crop insurance with certified seeds crowd-in investments? Experimental evidence from Kenya

We use a randomised experiment in Kenya to analyse how smallholder farmers respond to receiving a free hybrid crop insurance product, conditional on purchasing certified seeds. We find that farmers increase effort—increasing total investments and taking more land in production. In addition to adopting more certified seeds, they also invest more in complementary inputs such as fertilizer and hired-in farm-machinery and non-farm labour. We find limited evidence of a change in farming intensity. For example, there is no evidence of ‘crowding-out’ of effort or inputs on a per-hectare basis, even if the indemnity-based component of the insurance product potentially gives rise to asymmetric information problems (moral hazard). We also document that ex post willingness to pay for the insurance product has increased for the treatment group. This suggests that learning about the benefits of (subsidized) insurance outweighs any anchoring effects on the zero price during the pilot study

CSOM/PL: A Virtual Machine Product Line

CSOM/PL is a software product line (SPL) derived from applying multi-dimensional separation of concerns (MDSOC) techniques to the domain of high-level language virtual machine (VM) implementations. For CSOM/PL, we modularised CSOM, a Smalltalk VM implemented in C, using VMADL (virtual machine architecture description language). Several features of the original CSOM were encapsulated in VMADL modules and composed in various combinations. In an evaluation of our approach, we show that applying MDSOC and SPL principles to a domain as complex as that of VMs is not only feasible but beneficial, as it improves understandability, maintainability, and configurability of VM implementations without harming performance