Tax Competition and Tax Co-operation in the EU: The Case of Savings Taxation

It took the EU 35 years to achieve a co-operative agreement on co-ordinated measures of savings taxation in a world with mobile capital. Political science has offered two explanations for this co-operation problem. First, co-operation is difficult as a result of the heterogeneity of governments' interests. Countries with a small domestic tax base favour tax competition, while countries with a large tax base prefer tax co-operation. Second, co-operation is difficult as a consequence of specific characteristics of the collective action problem involved. The actors face a prisoners' dilemma. Both explanations have their limits. The first approach is not very good in predicting actual policy preferences of governments, and the second approach dismisses the fact that the EU offers co-operative institutions that should be able to resolve a dilemma. The paper proposes a model which refines these explanations and fits better the positions of EU governments and their problems of finding an agreement.game theory; regulatory competition; tax policy; harmonisation; policy coordination; positive integration; financial markets; directives

'Managing scarcity'- a qualitative study on volunteer-based healthcare for chronically ill, uninsured migrants in Berlin, Germany

OBJECTIVES: In Germany, healthcare for people lacking legal residency status and European Union citizens without health insurance is often provided by non-governmental organisations. Scientific studies assessing the situation of the patients with chronic diseases in this context are scarce. We aimed to characterise medical care for chronically ill migrants without health insurance and outline its possibilities and limitations from the treating physicians' perspective. DESIGN: Qualitative semi-structured interviews; qualitative content analysis. SETTING: Organisations and facilities providing healthcare for uninsured migrants: free clinics, medical practices and public health services. PARTICIPANTS: 14 physicians working regularly in healthcare for uninsured migrants. RESULTS: Delayed contact to the healthcare system was frequently addressed in the interviews. Care was described as constrained by a scarcity of resources that often impedes adequate treatment for many conditions, most pronounced in the case of oncological diseases or chronic viral infections (HIV, hepatitis). For other chronic conditions such as cardiovascular diseases or diabetes, some diagnostics and basic medications were described as partially available, while management of complications or rehabilitative measures are frequently unfeasible. For the patients with mental health problems, attainability of psychotherapeutic treatment is reported as severely limited. Care is predominantly described as fragmented with limitations to information flow and continuity. Which level of care a patient receives appears to depend markedly on the respective non-governmental organisation and the individual commitment, subjective decisions and personal connections of the treating physician. CONCLUSIONS: Restrictions in medical care for uninsured migrants have even more impact on chronically ill patients. Volunteer-based care often constitutes an inadequate compensation for regular access to the healthcare system, as it is strongly influenced by the limitation of its resources and its arbitrariness

Subradiance in Multiply Excited States of Dipole-Coupled V-Type Atoms

We generalize the theoretical modeling of collective atomic super- and subradiance to the multilevel case including spontaneous emission from several excited states towards a common ground state. We show that in a closely packed ensemble of $N$ atoms with $N-1$ distinct excited states each, one can find a new class of non-radiating dark states,, which allows for long-term storage of $N-1$ photonic excitations. Via dipole-dipole coupling only a single atom in the ground state is sufficient in order to suppress the decay of all $N-1$ other atoms. By means of some generic geometric configurations, like a triangle of V-type atoms or a chain of atoms with a $J=0 \to J=1$ transition, we study such subradiance including dipole-dipole interactions and show that even at finite distances long lifetimes can be observed. While generally hard to prepare deterministically, we identify various possibilities for a probabilistic preparation via a phase controlled laser pump and decay.Comment: 6 pages, 10 figures, includes supplemen

Web-based multi-party computation with application to anonymous aggregate compensation analytics

We describe the definition, design, implementation, and deployment of a multi-party computation protocol and supporting web-based infrastructure. The protocol and infrastructure constitute a software application that allows groups of cooperating parties, such as companies or other organizations, to collect aggregate data for statistical analysis without revealing the data of individual participants. The application was developed specifically to support a Boston Women's Workforce Council (BWWC) study of the gender wage gap among employers within the Greater Boston Area. The application was deployed successfully to collect aggregate statistical data pertaining to compensation levels across genders and demographics at a number of participating organizations.We would like to acknowledge all the members of the Boston Women's Workforce Council (BWWC), and to thank in particular Christina M. Knowles and Katie A. Johnston, who led the effort to organize participants and deploy the protocol as part of the 100% Talent: The Boston Women's Compact effort [1, 2]. We would also like to acknowledge the Boston University Initiative on Cities, and in particular Executive Director Katherine Lusk, who brought this potential application of secure multi-party computation to our attention. Both the BWWC and the Initiative on Cities contributed funding to complete this work. We would also like to acknowledge the Hariri Institute at Boston University for contributing research and software development resources. Support was also provided in part by Smart-city Cloud-based Open Platform and Ecosystem (SCOPE), an NSF Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships PFI:BIC project under award #1430145, and by Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS), an NSF CISE CNS SaTC Frontier project under award #1414119