43,656 research outputs found
The macroeconomic consequences of Scottish fiscal autonomy: inverted haavelemo effects in a general equilibrium analysis of the tartan tax
In 1997 the Scottish people voted both for the creation of a legislative Parliament and to endow the Parliament with tax-varying powers. The establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 2000 heralded the most radical innovation in the regional fiscal system in modern U.K. history. This development has been the subject of considerable controversy, however, especially in respect of the decision to afford the Parliament the power to alter the basic rate of income tax by up to 3p in either direction. The fact that Scotland, at least according to official data, receives a substantial net fiscal transfer from the rest of the UK, and has traditionally had higher public expenditure per capita than England, leads most commentators to believe that the power to change the standard rate will, in practice, be restricted to the power to increase it (Blow et al, 1996; McGregor et al 1997). Accordingly, while the Parliament allows the use of the power to generate a balancedbudget contraction in expenditure, we focus here on the impact of a balanced-budget fiscal expansion. While Labour, SNP and the Liberal Democrats in Scotland all supported the introduction of a Parliament with tax-raising powers, the Conservatives labelled this scheme the âtartan taxâ and claim that its use would be detrimental to Scotland, leading to a reduction in Scottish employment and to net out-migration. This political controversy, together with the national Labour Partyâs desire to shed its reputation as a Party of high taxation, in part accounted for the Scottish Labour Partyâs commitment not to exercise the tax-varying power during the lifetime of the first Scottish Parliament, despite the fact that others have meanwhile been vigorously arguing the case for full fiscal autonomy. In this paper we focus primarily on the consequences for the Scottish economy if the Parliament chooses to exercise the degree of fiscal autonomy that it already possesses. However, the factors that govern the likely macroeconomic impact of a balanced budget change also prove critical to the analysis of any region-specific tax or expenditure change, whether generated as a consequence of, for example, rigorous adherence to the Barnett formula (that, at least in principle, governs the allocation of government expenditure to the devolved authorities in the UK, et al 2003, 2007) or movement towards greater fiscal autonomy. Accordingly, we also identify the implications of our analysis for the wider debate on regional fiscal issues in general and greater fiscal autonomy in particular
Technology, investment and trade: empirical evidence for five Asia-Pacific countries
Traditional models of international trade flows find that prices explain significant growth in export market shares. In the new international trade theory non-price factors are seen to be of great importance for the explanation of trade. Following Magnier and Toujas-Bernate (1994), this study introduces non-price factors, namely gross fixed investment and technology (number of patents accepted), into the export market share equation. Empirical estimation is carried out on five Asia-Pacific countries for the period 1978 to 1993. Results are similar to those of Magnier and Toujas-Bernate (1994) for the OECD, which show that non-price factors have played an important role in determining export market share during the last decade.
U(1)-decoupling, KK and BCJ relations in SYM
We proved the color reflection relation, U(1)-decoupling, Kleiss-Kuijf and
Bern-Carrasco-Johansson relation for color-ordered Super
Yang-Mills theory using SYM version BCFW recursion relation,
which depends only on the general properties of super-amplitudes. This verified
the conjectured matter fields BCJ relation. We also show that color reflection
relation and U(1)-decoupling relation are special cases of KK relation, if we
consider the KK relation as a general relation, then the former two relations
come out naturally as the special cases.Comment: 17 page
Inverted Haavelmo Effects in a General Equilibrium Analysis of the Impact of Implementing the Scottish Variable Rate of Income Tax.
The Scottish Parliament has the authority to make a balanced-budget expansion or contraction in public expenditure, funded by corresponding local changes in the basic rate of income tax of up to 3p in the pound. This fiscal adjustment is known as the Scottish Variable Rate of income tax, though it has never, as yet, been used. In this paper we attempt to identify the impact on aggregate economic activity in Scotland of implementing these devolved fiscal powers. This is achieved through theoretical analysis and simulation using a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model for Scotland. This analysis generalises the conventional Keynesian model so that negative balanced-budget multipliers values are possible, reflecting a regional âinverted Haavelmo effectâ. Key parameters determining the aggregate economic impact are the extent to which the Scottish Government create local amenities valuable to the Scottish population and the extent to which this is incorporated into local wage bargaining.Fiscal federalism, devolution, regional wage bargaining and migration, Scotland, regional computable general equilibrium analysis.
Incentivizing High Quality Crowdwork
We study the causal effects of financial incentives on the quality of
crowdwork. We focus on performance-based payments (PBPs), bonus payments
awarded to workers for producing high quality work. We design and run
randomized behavioral experiments on the popular crowdsourcing platform Amazon
Mechanical Turk with the goal of understanding when, where, and why PBPs help,
identifying properties of the payment, payment structure, and the task itself
that make them most effective. We provide examples of tasks for which PBPs do
improve quality. For such tasks, the effectiveness of PBPs is not too sensitive
to the threshold for quality required to receive the bonus, while the magnitude
of the bonus must be large enough to make the reward salient. We also present
examples of tasks for which PBPs do not improve quality. Our results suggest
that for PBPs to improve quality, the task must be effort-responsive: the task
must allow workers to produce higher quality work by exerting more effort. We
also give a simple method to determine if a task is effort-responsive a priori.
Furthermore, our experiments suggest that all payments on Mechanical Turk are,
to some degree, implicitly performance-based in that workers believe their work
may be rejected if their performance is sufficiently poor. Finally, we propose
a new model of worker behavior that extends the standard principal-agent model
from economics to include a worker's subjective beliefs about his likelihood of
being paid, and show that the predictions of this model are in line with our
experimental findings. This model may be useful as a foundation for theoretical
studies of incentives in crowdsourcing markets.Comment: This is a preprint of an Article accepted for publication in WWW
\c{opyright} 2015 International World Wide Web Conference Committe
A Computable General Equilibrium Approach to the Ex Post Evaluation of Regional Development Agency Policies
Universal Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid phases in one-dimensional strongly attractive SU(N) fermionic cold atoms
A simple set of algebraic equations is derived for the exact low-temperature
thermodynamics of one-dimensional multi-component strongly attractive fermionic
atoms with enlarged SU(N) spin symmetry and Zeeman splitting. Universal
multi-component Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) phases are thus determined. For
linear Zeeman splitting, the physics of the gapless phase at low temperatures
belongs to the universality class of a two-component asymmetric TLL
corresponding to spin-neutral N-atom composites and spin-(N-1)/2 single atoms.
The equation of states is also obtained to open up the study of multi-component
TLL phases in 1D systems of N-component Fermi gases with population imbalance.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure
Scaling Theory of Polyelectrolyte Adsorption on Repulsive Charged Surface
We studied polyelectrolyte adsorption on a repulsive charged surface by
scaling analysis. At low ionic strength and low surface charge density in which
a single polyelectrolyte is able to be adsorbed onto the surface, different
regimes in the phase diagram are identified. The possibility of multi-layer
structure formed by polyelectrolytes of like charge is also investigated.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
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