Promises, Promises: The States' Experience With Income Tax Indexing

The paper discusses five early approaches to the price (and quantity) index number problem. The five approaches are: (1) the fixed basket approach; (ii) the statistical approach; (iii) the test or axiomatic approach; (iv) the Divisia approach and (v) the economic approach. The economic approach makes use of the assumption of optimizing behavior under constraint and the approach is discussed under four subtopics: (i) basic theoretical definitions; (ii) the theory of bounds; (iii) exact index numbers and (iv) econometric estimation of preferences. The paper also discusses several topics raised by Jack Triplett in a recent paper, including: (i) the merits of the test approach to index number theory, (ii) the chain principle and alternatives to it; (iii) the substitution bias and (iv) the new good bias. Although the paper is for the most part an extensive historical survey, there are a few new results in section 8 on multilateral alternatives to the chain principle. Also in section 6.3, it is shown that the Paasche, Laspeyres and all superlative indexes will satisfy the circularity test to the first order.

State Personal Income and Sales Taxes: 1977-1983

The two main workhorses of state tax systems are levies on sales and individual incomes. In this paper we develop and implement a coherent methodology for characterizing these systems. The measures thus generated are used to show how the various systems differ across states, and how they evolved over the seven year period 1977-1983. We consider the systems' revenue elasticities with respect to income, average and marginal tax rates at various income levels, and several other issues as well.

The Deductibility of State and Local Taxes: Impact Effects by State and Income Class

This paper provides careful estimates of the impact of removing the deductibility of state and local taxes by state andby income class. We show how deductibility affects marginal and average tax rates for both state and federal tax systems. One striking result is that combined federal income tax and state tax burdens would generally fall under the President's tax reform proposal, even for high income people in high tax states.

Tax Structure and Public Sector Growth

It has been hypothesized that a jurisdiction's tax structure exerts an independent effect upon the growth of its public sector. We test this hypothesis by examining the relationship between the growth of state general expenditure and the elasticity of tax revenues with respect to income. The work takes advantage of a very careful set of income elasticities for the personal income and sales tax systems for each state, for every year from 1978 to 1983. The main conclusion is that the data do not support the notion that the form of the tax structure exerts an independent effect on public sector growth.

Recent Developments in the Marriage Tax

The new tax law increases tax rates of high income individuals, and expands the earned income tax credit for low income individuals. We use a sample of actual tax returns to compute estimates of the 'marriage tax' - the change in couples joint tax upon marriage - under this new law. We predict that in 1994 52 percent of American couples will pay a marriage tax, with an average of about $1,244; 38 percent will receive a subsidy averaging about$1,399. These aggregate figures mask a considerable amount of dispersion in the population. Under the new law, the marriage tax for certain low-income families can exceed $3,000 annually; for certain very high income families it can exceed$10,000 annually.

Contributions of temporal encodings of voicing, voicelessness, fundamental frequency, and amplitude variation to audiovisual and auditory speech perception

Auditory and audio-visual speech perception was investigated using auditory signals of invariant spectral envelope that temporally encoded the presence of voiced and voiceless excitation, variations in amplitude envelope and F-0. In experiment 1, the contribution of the timing of voicing was compared in consonant identification to the additional effects of variations in F-0 and the amplitude of voiced speech. In audio-visual conditions only, amplitude variation slightly increased accuracy globally and for manner features. F-0 variation slightly increased overall accuracy and manner perception in auditory and audio-visual conditions. Experiment 2 examined consonant information derived from the presence and amplitude variation of voiceless speech in addition to that from voicing, F-0, and voiced speech amplitude. Binary indication of voiceless excitation improved accuracy overall and for voicing and manner. The amplitude variation of voiceless speech produced only a small increment in place of articulation scores. A final experiment examined audio-visual sentence perception using encodings of voiceless excitation and amplitude variation added to a signal representing voicing and F-0. There was a contribution of amplitude variation to sentence perception, but not of voiceless excitation. The timing of voiced and voiceless excitation appears to be the major temporal cues to consonant identity. (C) 1999 Acoustical Society of America. [S0001-4966(99)01410-1]

X-ray Light Curves and Accretion Disk Structure of EX Hydrae

We present X-ray light curves for the cataclysmic variable EX Hydrae obtained with the Chandra High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer and the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer Deep Survey photometer. We confirm earlier results on the shape and amplitude of the binary light curve and discuss a new feature: the phase of the minimum in the binary light curve, associated with absorption by the bulge on the accretion disk, increases with wavelength. We discuss several scenarios that could account for this trend and conclude that, most likely, the ionization state of the bulge gas is not constant, but rather decreases with binary phase. We also conclude that photoionization of the bulge by radiation originating from the white dwarf is not the main source of ionization, but that it is heated by shocks originating from the interaction between the inflowing material from the companion and the accretion disk. The findings in this paper provide a strong test for accretion disk models in close binary systems.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in the Ap

A Pulsational Model for the Orthogonal Polarization Modes in Radio Pulsars

In an earlier paper, we introduced a model for pulsars in which non-radial oscillations of high spherical degree (\el) aligned to the magnetic axis of a spinning neutron star were able to reproduce subpulses like those observed in single-pulse measurements of pulsar intensity. The model did not address polarization, which is an integral part of pulsar emission. Observations show that many pulsars emit radio waves that appear to be the superposition of two linearly polarized emission modes with orthogonal polarization angles. In this paper, we extend our model to incorporate linear polarization. As before, we propose that pulsational displacements of stellar material modulate the pulsar emission, but now we apply this modulation to a linearly-polarized mode of emission, as might be produced by curvature radiation. We further introduce a second polarization mode, orthogonal to the first, that is modulated by pulsational velocities. We combine these modes in superposition to model the observed Stokes parameters in radio pulsars.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures accepted Ap