Corrective Taxation, Leverage and Compensation in a Bloated Financial Sector

The financial crisis of 2007-2009 reinvigorated academic and policymaking interest in the design of prudential regulatory regimes governing the financial sector as a policy instrument intended to moderate financial instability. The crisis also motivated interest in the role of taxation as a complement to these regimes. In practice, however, the use of tax instruments has been modest. This paper considers three tax instruments that could serve this complementary role. Political economy considerations aside, it is suggested that the use of bank leverage taxes as the tax instrument of choice is unsurprising. But as recognized in the literature, a corrective taxation case can be made for an increase in the rate of such taxes as an instrument to eliminate the availability of cheap debt for systemically important institutions. Although returns to risk taking is a potentially robust tax base, the weak behavioral properties of this tax instrument have apparently diminished its appeal for policymakers, while a revenue-raising imperative that might otherwise motivate its adoption is muted considerably by the adoption of a bank leverage tax. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the tax literature does not consider the case for an excise tax on bonus and performance-based compensation as an instrument to alter the structure of compensation. This may be attributable, in part at least, to redundancy where regulatory regimes can be used to impose constraints with similar intended effects

Using the Income Tax System as Your Hedge Counterparty

A strain of the academic literature on taxation and risk taking emphasizes the income effect and consequent transfer of risk to government through the income tax system in the presence of scaling of risky positions. The policy implications of this literature have been explored in considerable detail, although the practical significance for tax policymakers is ambiguous given the tax and non-tax constraints on scaling under the personal income tax. In contrast, fragmentary transactional evidence suggests that scaling of risky positions may have its most practical application in the context of corporate hedging transactions where many of the same tax and non-tax constraints do not apply. In fact, risk-transfer transactions in this very different context have been the subject of some recent attention by tax policymakers and tax administrators. This paper explores the case for, and design of, a targeted loss limitation intended to address the transfer of risk to government that otherwise is the result of hedged positions that are scaled to provide imperfectly offsetting pre-tax cash flows but perfectly (or near perfectly) offsetting after-tax cash flows. Although the case for such a limitation extends broadly to the entire range of such transactions, perceptions of costliness associated with the identification exercise, as well as perceptions of a negative impact on the decision to hedge, may lead to a more narrowly focused loss limitation patterned on legislation recently adopted by UK Inland Revenue. For the much more limited subset of risk-transfer transactions that are entered into for the purpose of providing a tax benefit, narrowly construed, general anti-tax-avoidance rules and/or doctrines can provide an effective response. An example of this type of transaction is the asymmetric swap that is the subject of a taxation determination recently released by the Australian Taxation Office (\u27ATO\u27)

Perfect interferenceless absorption at infrared frequencies by a van der Waals crystal

Citation: Baranov, D. G., Edgar, J. H., Hoffman, T., Bassim, N., & Caldwell, J. D. (2015). Perfect interferenceless absorption at infrared frequencies by a van der Waals crystal. Physical Review B, 92(20), 6. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.92.201405Traditionally, efforts to achieve perfect absorption have required the use of complicated metamaterial-based structures as well as relying on destructive interference to eliminate back reflections. Here, we have demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally that such perfect absorption can be achieved using a naturally occurring material, hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) due to its high optical anisotropy without the requirement of interference effects to absorb the incident field. This effect was observed for p-polarized light within the mid-infrared spectral range, and we provide the full theory describing the origin of the perfect absorption as well as the methodology for achieving this effect with other materials. Furthermore, while this is reported for the uniaxial crystal hBN, this is equally applicable to biaxial crystals and more complicated crystal structures. Interferenceless absorption is of fundamental interest to the field of optics; moreover, such materials may provide additional layers of flexibility in the design of frequency selective surfaces, absorbing coatings, and sensing devices operating in the infrared

BOSS-LDG: A Novel Computational Framework that Brings Together Blue Waters, Open Science Grid, Shifter and the LIGO Data Grid to Accelerate Gravitational Wave Discovery

We present a novel computational framework that connects Blue Waters, the NSF-supported, leadership-class supercomputer operated by NCSA, to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Data Grid via Open Science Grid technology. To enable this computational infrastructure, we configured, for the first time, a LIGO Data Grid Tier-1 Center that can submit heterogeneous LIGO workflows using Open Science Grid facilities. In order to enable a seamless connection between the LIGO Data Grid and Blue Waters via Open Science Grid, we utilize Shifter to containerize LIGO's workflow software. This work represents the first time Open Science Grid, Shifter, and Blue Waters are unified to tackle a scientific problem and, in particular, it is the first time a framework of this nature is used in the context of large scale gravitational wave data analysis. This new framework has been used in the last several weeks of LIGO's second discovery campaign to run the most computationally demanding gravitational wave search workflows on Blue Waters, and accelerate discovery in the emergent field of gravitational wave astrophysics. We discuss the implications of this novel framework for a wider ecosystem of Higher Performance Computing users.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures. Accepted as a Full Research Paper to the 13th IEEE International Conference on eScienc

Does Africa have the toolkit to combat the next zoonotic pandemic?

The emergence of new zoonotic diseases remains virtually impossible to predict, but exposure to wildlife, abundant animal populations and the increasing destruction of natural habitats make them certain. Should a zoonotic outbreak emerge in Africa with pandemic potential, what are the continent’s strategies to prepare itself and the world? The first post in a new series explores the networks strengthening communication and trust between governments, local communities, health workers and scientists

The wave of wood : forestry's economic contribution to South Carolina's economy in 2018

The purpose of this study is to update the economic contribution of forestry to South Carolina's economy for 2018 and to show the relative magnitude of forestry's major sectors. This study includes business sectors that have a direct and logical connection to the state's forest resource

Characterization of bulk hexagonal boron nitride single crystals grown by the metal flux technique

The optical and physical properties of hexagonal boron nitride single crystals grown from a molten metal solution are reported. The hBN crystals were grown by precipitation from a nickel-chromium flux with a boron nitride source, by slowly cooling from 1500 °C at 2-4°C/h under a nitrogen flow at atmospheric pressure. The hBN crystals formed on the surface of the flux with an apparent crystal size up to 1 to 2 mm in diameter. Individual grains were as large as 100-200 µm across. Typically, the flakes removed from the metal were 6 to 20 µm thick. Optical absorption measurements suggest a bandgap of 5.8 eV by neglecting the binding energy of excitons in hBN. The highest energy photoluminescence peak was at 5.75 eV at room temperature. The hBN crystals typically had a pit density of 5 x 10⁶ cm⁻² after etching in a molten eutectic mixture of potassium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide. The quality of these crystals suggests they are suitable as substrates for two dimensional materials such as graphene and gallium nitride based devices