Division and the Giambelli Identity

Given two polynomials f(x) and g(x), we extend the formula expressing the remainder in terms of the roots of these two polynomials to the case where f(x) is a Laurent polynomial. This allows us to give new expressions of a Schur function, which generalize the Giambelli identity.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur

Dynamic Scoring: Alternative Financing Schemes

Neoclassical growth models predict that reductions in capital or labor tax rates are expansionary when lump-sum transfers are used to balance the government budget. This paper explores the consequences of bond-financed tax reductions that bring forth a range of possible offsetting policies, including future government consumption, capital tax rates, or labor tax rates. Through the resulting intertemporal distortions, current tax cuts can be contractionary. The paper also finds that more aggressive responses of offsetting policies to debt engender less debt accumulation and less costly tax cuts.Revenue feedback, capital tax, labor tax, debt management

Dynamic Scoring: Alternative Financing Schemes

Neoclassical growth models predict that reductions in capital or labor tax rates are expansionary when lump-sum transfers are used to balance the government budget. This paper explores the consequences of bond-financed tax reductions that bring forth a range of possible offsetting policies, including future government consumption, capital tax rates, or labor tax rates. Through the resulting intertemporal distortions, current tax cuts can be contractionary. The paper also finds that more aggressive responses of offsetting policies to debt engender less debt accumulation and less costly tax cuts.

Summary of Two Dissertation Recitals and Pedagogy Workshop

Two dissertation recitals and a pedagogy workshop were given in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts (Music: Performance) at the University of Michigan. The repertoire performed spanned over two centuries of solo piano works, covering a variety of periods and styles. The workshop, accompanied by a paper, surveyed the integration of musicianship skills in three different piano curricula. The first recital was given in Britton Recital Hall on December 3, 2018. The program consisted of J. S. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903; Franz Schubert’s Four Impromptus, D. 899/Op. 90; and Franz Liszt’s Totentanz: Paraphrase on Dies irae, S. 525. The second recital, given in Stamps Auditorium on March 31, 2018, was a lecture recital entitled “Doorways: Half-Remembered Music,” which focused on connections between compositions written by composers of different eras. The program consisted of four pairings of miniature pieces: Johannes Brahms’s Intermezzo in E minor from Fantasien, Op. 116 paired with the first movement of Anton Webern’s Variationen, Op. 27; No. 5 from Béla Bartók’s Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm paired with Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo à la Turk”; Claude Debussy’s “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” from Children’s Corner, L. 113, paired with George Crumb’s “Golliwog Revisited” from Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik; and Frédéric Chopin’s Mazurka in A minor, Op. 17, No. 4 paired with William Albright’s “Fantasy-Mazurka” from Five Chromatic Dances. The pedagogy workshop, held in Watkins Lecture Hall on April 20, 2018, was entitled “A Comparative Study on the Integration of Musicianship Skills in Three Piano Curricula.” Often musicianship skills are neglected during piano lessons, and students’ performance skills can surpass their theory and musicianship skills. The three chosen piano curricula are widely used throughout the United States. The research surveys how each curriculum introduces and teaches musicianship skills to ensure that students develop into well-rounded musicians.AMUMusic: PerformanceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145823/1/yangsz_1.pd

FISCAL FORESIGHT AND INFORMATION FLOWS

Fiscal foresight---the phenomenon that legislative and implementation lags ensure that private agents receive clear signals about the tax rates they face in the future---is intrinsic to the tax policy process. This paper develops an analytical framework to study the econometric implications of fiscal foresight. Simple theoretical examples show that foresight produces equilibrium time series with nonfundamental representations, which misalign the agents' and the econometrician's information sets. Economically meaningful shocks to taxes, therefore, cannot generally be extracted from statistical innovations in conventional ways. Econometric analyses that fail to align agents' and the econometrician's information sets can produce distorted inferences about the effects of tax policies. The paper documents the sensitivity of econometric inferences of tax effects to details about how tax information flows into the economy. We show that alternative assumptions about the information flows that give rise to fiscal foresight can reconcile the diverse empirical findings in the literature on anticipated tax changes.

A Chronology Of Postwar U.S. Federal Income Tax Policy

This note provides a chronology of major tax events that involved changes in federal taxes on individual and corporate income from 1948 to 2006. For each event, the note provides background and policy motivation, major provisions, legislative timeline, and estimated revenue changes. As most tax changes were preceded by extensive legislative delays, this chronology suggests that people were likely to have foreknowledge about tax policy. It also finds that postwar income tax policy was typically motivated by one of three rationales: 1) balancing the budget or reducing deficits, 2) controlling inflation, and 3) stimulating economic activity or promoting growth

The effects of EITC payment expansion on maternal smoking

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the largest anti-poverty program in the U.S. In 1993, the EITC benefit levels were changed significantly based on the number of children in the family such that families with two or more children experienced an exogenous expansion in their incomes. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort, we employ a triple differences plus Fixed-Effects framework to examine the effect of this change on the probability of smoking among low-educated mothers. We find that the probability of smoking for white and Hispanic low-educated mothers of two or more children decreased statistically significantly relative to those with only one child, and the results are robust to various specification tests. These results provide new evidence on the protective effect of income on health through changes in health behaviors, and therefore have important policy implications

Identifying the Causal Effect of Alcohol Abuse on the Perpetration of Intimate Partner Violence by Men Using a Natural Experiment

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is widespread among women, with substantial and long-lasting negative consequences. Researchers have documented a strong positive correlation between alcohol abuse and IPV. Yet prior researchers have struggled with the problem of the potential endogeneity of alcohol abuse. In this paper, we deal with this problem by exploring a unique instrumental variable - the September 11 terrorist attack (9/11) - in Wave III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. 9/11 was found in our data to lead to a significant increase in the frequency of alcohol abuse for respondents interviewed just after 9/11 compared to those interviewed before. Our OLS results indeed confirm earlier research of a strong positive correlation between alcohol abuse and IPV. However, the 2SLS results show no statistically significant effect of alcohol abuse on IPV. These results indicate that alcohol abuse might not have causal effects on IPV, and therefore have important policy implications