Modernity, mobility and the digital divides

The phrase ‘digital divide’ has been crucial over the last ten years in focusing attention and resources on the issues of access to and use of ICT, including e-learning, by a succession of excluded and marginal individuals and communities. This paper argues however that this is now a dangerously simplistic notion, especially in societies characterised by the postmodernity that has been catalysed by increasing mobility. The paper provides an introduction to some of the ideas and issues

Students and mobile devices: choosing which dream

There is a crisis looming and a paradox emerging. Many educators advocate, promote and encourage the dreams of agency, control, ownership and choice amongst students whilst educational institutions take the responsibility for provision, equity, access, participation and standards. The institutions traditionally procure, provide and control the technology for learning but now students are acquiring their own personal technologies for learning and institutions are challenged to keep pace. These allow students to produce, store, transmit and consume information, images and ideas; this potentially realises the educators’ dream but is for institutions potentially a nightmare, one of loss of control and loss of the quality, consistency, uniformity and stability that delivered the dreams of equity, access and participation. This paper traces the conflicting dreams and responsibilities

Learners - should we leave them to their own devices?

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring learner owned devices and their potential for edcuatio

Social Norms and Conditional Cooperative Taxpayers

This paper incorporates tax morale into the Allingham Sandmo (1972) model of income tax evasion. Tax morale is interpreted as a social norm for tax compliance. The norm strength, depending on the share of evaders in the society, is endogenously derived. Taxpayers act conditionally cooperative, as their evasion decision depends on the other agents' compliance. We characterize an equilibrium which accounts for this interdependence and study the impact of tax and deterrence policies on compliance. Our analysis is then extended to the case of a society which consists of heterogenous communities where individual evasion decisions are embedded in a complex social structure. In this scenario, behavior is crucially influenced by the norm compliance among morale reference groups. Within this framework, we discuss the role of belief management and belief leadership as alternative policy tools

Voting over Taxes: The Case of Tax Evasion

This paper studies majority voting on taxes when tax evasion is possible. We characterize the voting equilibrium where the agent with median taxed income is pivotal. Since the ranking of true incomes does not necessarily correspond to the ranking of taxed incomes, the decisive voter can differ from the median income receiver. In this case, we find unconventional patterns of redistribution, e.g. from the middle class to the poor and the rich. Furthermore, we show that majority voting can lead to an inefficiently low level of taxation – despite a right-skewed income distribution. Hence, the classical over-provision result might turn around, once tax evasion is taken into account

Psychopaths in the Courtroom: A Preliminary Report on Judicial Sentencing for Violent Offenses

Every day, judges are faced with making decisions about a defendant’s potential risk as it relates to setting bail, sentencing, and a variety of other contexts. In making these decisions, judges must balance issues of fairness and protection of the individual rights of the accused with protection of society from dangerous predators who may commit future acts of physical or sexual violence. As professionals who are not specifically trained in violence assessment, judges must rely on others, including probation agents, attorneys, and expert witnesses, for information to assist in their decision-making. Through expert witnesses and up-to-date training of criminal justice professionals, judges should have access to a significant body of knowledge regarding the risk factors that are known to be related to future violence, particularly risk factors such as psychopathy which has been found to be the single best predictor of future violence in a wide variety of populations. A preliminary study was carried out in western Michigan counties using transcripts from sentencing hearings of violent offenders convicted of rape, felonius assault, or homicide/attempted homicide to determine whether known risk factors influenced judges’ decisions regarding sentencing and whether such information impacted a judge’s decision to depart from the Michigan sentencing guidelines. Results suggest that risk factors are often not mentioned during the sentencing hearings and that when they are, they rarely appear to influence judicial decisions. In particular, no mention of the term psychopathy or of expert testimony related to risk or of the names of scientifically validated instruments for assessing violence risk was found in all transcripts reviewed. Implications of these results for professional training and improvement in judicial sentencing are discussed

Majority Voting and the Welfare Implications of Tax Avoidance

A benchmark result in the political economy of taxation is that majority voting over a linear income tax schedule will result in an ine±ciently high tax rate whenever the median voter has a below average income. The present paper examines the role of tax avoidance for this welfare assessment. We find that the inefficiency in the voting equilibrium is the lower, the higher the average level of tax avoidance in the economy, or equivalently, the lower the median voter's amount of avoidance. The result holds for endogenous avoidance and labor choice and, under certain conditions, for an endogenous enforcement policy.Tax avoidance, welfare analysis, majority voting, median voter equilibrium

Social Norms and Conditional Cooperative Taxpayers

This paper incorporates tax morale into the Allingham Sandmo (1972) model of income tax evasion. Tax morale is interpreted as a social norm for tax compliance. The norm strength, depending on the share of evaders in the society, is endogenously derived. Taxpayers act conditionally cooperative, as their evasion decision depends on the other agents' compliance. We characterize an equilibrium which accounts for this interdependence and study the impact of tax and deterrence policies on compliance. Our analysis is then extended to the case of a society which consists of heterogenous communities where individual evasion decisions are embedded in a complex social structure. In this scenario, behavior is crucially influenced by the norm compliance among morale reference groups. Within this framework, we discuss the role of belief management and belief leadership as alternative policy tools.Tax Evasion; Tax Morale; Social Norms; Conditional Cooperation

Voting over Taxes: The Case of Tax Evasion

This paper studies majority voting on taxes when tax evasion is possible. We characterize the voting equilibrium where the agent with median taxed income is pivotal. Since the ranking of true incomes does not necessarily correspond to the ranking of taxed incomes, the decisive voter can differ from the median income receiver. In this case, we find unconventional patterns of redistribution, e.g. from the middle class to the poor and the rich. Furthermore, we show that majority voting can lead to an inefficiently low level of taxation – despite a right-skewed income distribution. Hence, the classical over-provision result might turn around, once tax evasion is taken into account.Majority Voting; Tax Evasion; Welfare Analysis; Redistribution