IS A TAX CUT ON CULTURAL GOODS CONSUMPTION ACTUALLY DESIRABLE?:A MICROSIMULATION ANALYSIS

Proposals for tax cuts on cultural goods represent an ongoing debate in cultural policy. The main aim of this paper is to shed some light on this debate using microsimulation tools. First, we have estimated an Almost Ideal Demand System for nineteen different groups of goods, including cultural goods. Expenditure and price elasticities have been obtained from this model. Using this information, three alternatives cuts in the V.A.T. rate on cultural goods have been microsimulated and evaluated in terms of revenue and welfare. These types of fiscal reforms will lead to welfare and efficiency gains that can be described as regressive.Microsimulation, tax reforms, cultural consumption, welfare

Positivity constraints on the low-energy constants of the chiral pion-nucleon Lagrangian

Positivity constraints on the pion-nucleon scattering amplitude are derived in this article with the help of general S-matrix arguments, such as analyticity, crossing symmetry and unitarity, in the upper part of Mandelstam triangle, R. Scanning inside the region R, the most stringent bounds on the chiral low energy constants of the pion-nucleon Lagrangian are determined. When just considering the central values of the fit results from covariant baryon chiral perturbation theory using extended-on-mass-shell scheme, it is found that these bounds are well respected numerically both at O(p^3) and O(p^4) level. Nevertheless, when taking the errors into account, only the O(p^4) bounds are obeyed in the full error interval, while the bounds on O(p^3) fits are slightly violated. If one disregards loop contributions, the bounds always fail in certain regions of R. Thus, at a given chiral order these terms are not numerically negligible and one needs to consider all possible contributions, i.e., both tree-level and loop diagrams. We have provided the constraints for special points in R where the bounds are nearly optimal in terms of just a few chiral couplings, which can be easily implemented and employed to constrain future analyses. Some issues about calculations with an explicit Delta(1232) resonance are also discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 13 eps figures, 2 table

Fingerprints of heavy scales in electroweak effective Lagrangians

The couplings of the electroweak effective theory contain information on the heavy-mass scales which are no-longer present in the low-energy Lagrangian. We build a general effective Lagrangian, implementing the electroweak chiral symmetry breaking $SU(2)_L\otimes SU(2)_R\to SU(2)_{L+R}$, which couples the known particle fields to heavier states with bosonic quantum numbers $J^P=0^\pm$ and $1^\pm$. We consider colour-singlet heavy fields that are in singlet or triplet representations of the electroweak group. Integrating out these heavy scales, we analyze the pattern of low-energy couplings among the light fields which are generated by the massive states. We adopt a generic non-linear realization of the electroweak symmetry breaking with a singlet Higgs, without making any assumption about its possible doublet structure. Special attention is given to the different possible descriptions of massive spin-1 fields and the differences arising from naive implementations of these formalisms, showing their full equivalence once a proper short-distance behaviour is required.Comment: 57 pages, 1 pdf figure. Version published at JHE

One-loop renormalization of the electroweak chiral Lagrangian with a light Higgs

We consider the general chiral effective action which parametrizes the nonlinear realization of the spontaneous breaking of the electroweak symmetry with a light Higgs, and compute the one-loop ultraviolet divergences coming from Higgs and electroweak Goldstone fluctuations using the background field method. The renormalization of the divergences is carried out through operators of next-to-leading order in the chiral counting, i.e. of O(p^4). Being of the same order in power counting, the logarithmic corrections linked to these divergences can be as important as the tree-level contributions from the O(p^4) operators, and must be accounted for in the phenomenological analysis of experimental data. Deviations in the O(p^2) (leading-order) couplings with respect to the Standard Model values, e.g., in the h->WW coupling, would generate contributions from the 1-loop chiral logarithms computed in this work to a vast variety of observables, which do not have a counterpart in the conventional electroweak effective theory with a linearly transforming Higgs complex doublet.Comment: 6 page

A few words about Resonances in the Electroweak Effective Lagrangian

Contrary to a widely spread believe, we have demonstrated that strongly coupled electroweak models including both a light Higgs-like boson and massive spin-1 resonances are not in conflict with experimental constraints on the oblique S and T parameters. We use an effective Lagrangian implementing the chiral symmetry breaking SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R -> SU(2)_{L+R} that contains the Standard Model gauge bosons coupled to the electroweak Goldstones, one Higgs-like scalar state h with mass m_h=126 GeV and the lightest vector and axial-vector resonance multiplets V and A. We have considered the one-loop calculation of S and T in order to study the viability of these strongly-coupled scenarios, being short-distance constraints and dispersive relations the main ingredients of the calculation. Once we have constrained the resonance parameters, we do a first approach to the determination of the low energy constants of the electroweak effective theory at low energies (without resonances). We show this determination in the case of the purely Higgsless bosonic Lagrangian.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. Talk given at XIth Quark Confinement and Hadron Spectrum, 8-12th September (2014), Saint Petersburg (Russia