Irving Fisher's Spendings (Consumption) Tax in Retrospect

A bstract .   Irving Fisher wrote a significant number of papers towards the end of his career on the design of the U.S. tax system. These writings culminated in a book that he wrote with his brother Herbert in 1942. Fisher thought that the double taxation of saving under an income tax was extremely harmful to the economy and he therefore proposed a "spendings" tax or what he referred to as a "real income" tax. Even though he disliked the terminology, he advocated what today would be referred to as a progressive consumption tax. Fisher's analysis was both theoretical and practical. His 1942 book contained a proposed tax return that implemented his ideas. His analysis is surprisingly modern and relevant today. This paper presents the Fisher proposal and examines the current U.S. tax system in light of his tax views. We argue that Fisher would find that the U.S. tax system lacks intellectual coherence, is economically inefficient, and unnecessarily complex.     

Doing Least Squares: Perspectives from Gauss and Yule

Gauss introduced a procedure for calculating least squares estimates and their precisions. Yule introduced a new system of notation adapted to correlation analysis. This paper describes these formalisms and compares them with the matrix and vector space formalisms used in modern regression analysis.     

Endogenizing the provision of money: Costs of commodity and fiat monies in relation to the value of trade

We consider the problem of including the costs and value of the institutions that define money and support trade, within the framework of economic optimization. We compare monetary systems mediated by durable commodity monies, versus pure fiat monies, in order to understand the separation and eventual independence of the institutionally-created value of money from the values of underlying traded goods. We treat the emergence of monetary function as a problem in mechanism design, modeled by minimal strategic market games that overcome a generalized Jevons failure when agents must commit ahead of time to specialist resource production. We consider in particular the problem of defining closures with respect to both money flows and labor-allocation and trading decisions, and show that minimal models require many of the fundamental institutions of banking and contract enforcement found in real economies, in order to define a self-policing system. We define costs, value, and the efficiencies of the institutions that support trade in terms of a natural money-metric welfare function, and compare the characteristics of commodity and fiat monies by these measures. Through careful treatment of the stock/flow distinction in repeated-game settings, we find that commodity money, even when its value derives heavily from its institutional role, remains defined by its flow characteristics, in contrast to fiat money, for which the control function is defined inherently in terms of stock variables. Our notation is somewhat nonconventional for economics but to do justice to econo-physics concepts such as scaling and dimensional analysis and to stress the distinction between stocks and flows, we believe this notation is justified. We provide a full listing of notation in Appendix A.     

Comments on John Geanakoplos's "The Ideal Inflation-Indexed Bond and Irving Fisher's Impatience Theory of Interest with Overlapping Generations"

A bstract    A comment on the article by John Geanakoplos in this volume.
It is refreshing to hear an account of Irving Fisher's views on risk and indexation juxtaposed with an account of our modern concerns with the same issues. It is interesting for me to hear this, partly since it shows that many of the issues we worry about today were concerns 70 or more years ago, and thus perhaps that these issues are indeed as deep and fundamental as we now think they are. But I found this history-of-thought presentation most interesting because it clarifies, by starting with simple notions that were on Irving Fisher's mind and moving forward, some of the critical issues concerning the innovations of indexation and Social Security reform.     

Fisher's "Inverse Probability" of 1930

In 1930 R. A. Fisher put forward the fiducial argument. This paper discusses the argument and its origins in Fisher's earlier work. It also emphasises the contribution of Mordecal Ezekiel to the 1930 publication.     

Three Corrected Score Tests for Generalized Linear Models with Dispersion Covariates

We develop three corrected score tests for generalized linear models with dispersion covariates, thus generalizing the results of Cordeiro , Ferrari and Paula (1993) and Cribari-Neto and Ferrari (1995) . We present, in matrix notation, general formulae for the coefficients which define the corrected statistics. The formulae only require simple operations on matrices and can be used to obtain analytically closed-form corrections for score test statistics in a variety of special generalized linear models with dispersion covariates. They also have advantages for numerical purposes since our formulae are readily computable using a language supporting numerical linear algebra. Two examples, namely, iid sampling without covariates on the mean or dispersion parameter oand one-way classification models, are given. We also present some simulations where the three corrected tests perform better than the usual score test, the likelihood ratio test and its Bartlett corrected version. Finally, we present a numerical example for a data set discussed by Simonoff and Tsai (1994) .     

De bewerking van de resultaten van veldproeven door herleiding van de opbrengstcijfers in beide richtingen van het proefveld

Summary  (The treatment of the results of field experiments by reducing the yields in two directions)
Ir J. J. Dijkveld Stol has shown that good results have been obtained by reducing the yields of field experiments both in columns and in rows.
The mathematical foundation of this method is discussed in the preceding article and it is shown, that the method gives good results if the same supposition may be made as necessary for the application of the methods of Fisher, Knut Vik and the method of the differences.
The variance of Dijkveld Stol's method is identical with Fisher's error variance.     

"Breed Out the Unfit and Breed In the Fit"

A bstract    Fisher's virulent positions on such themes as "race degeneration", the necessity of sterilization measures for certain categories of the American population, and his urgent call for the control of the genetic quality of new immigrants are hardly consistent with the opalescent subtlety of academic disputes over the nature of capital and interest. Although Fisher repeats it often: in his work, this question of the nature of capital and interest is directly linked to eugenic assumptions and analysis. This second body of Fisherian work illuminates the strong epistemological and theoretical references in Fisher's work as an economist. This paper addresses this question through three major themes: the constant denunciation of a «racial decay>> of the American population and its corollary: the project of setting up a «scientific humaniculture>>; the plea against the eugenic effects of World War I, and the then haunting question of the closing of the «Golden Door>>.     

Economists and the Shadow of "The Other" Before 1914

A bstract    This paper examines how economists from David Hume to Irving Fisher have struggled with the applicability of their analyses to those who differed from them in gender, ethnicity, class, or race. Particular attention is paid to how Fisher's discussion of racial and ethnic differences in capital accumulation and time preference changed between The Rate of Interest (1907 ) and The Theory of Interest (1930 ), and how it drew on earlier work by John Rae (to whom Fisher dedicated both those books).     

At the Edge of Longitudinal Analysis. Welfare Institutions and Social Assistance Dynamics

The main aim of this contribution is to present and discuss critically some of the results from the longitudinal analysis carried out in eight cities in five European countries within the general framework of the ESOPO project. In particular I will use these results in order to understand what longitudinal analysis can tell us as soon as we compare different citizenship systems using process-produced data from social assistance schemes as a relevant indicator. The contribution is divided into three sections. The first section will address some methodological issues and illustrate the driving hypothesis. The second section will present some main results from the longitudinal analysis carried out in the ESOPO project. The third section will highlight the institutional dimension and its role in shaping clients' recipiency dynamics, paying particular attention to the development of an interpretative framework.     

Graphical Tools for Detecting Departures from Linear Mixed Model Assumptions and Some Remedial Measures

We review some results on the analysis of longitudinal data or, more generally, of repeated measures via linear mixed models starting with some exploratory statistical tools that may be employed to specify a tentative model. We follow with a summary of inferential procedures under a Gaussian set‐up and then discuss different diagnostic methods focusing on residual analysis but also addressing global and local influence. Based on the interpretation of diagnostic plots related to three types of residuals (marginal, conditional and predicted random effects) as well as on other tools, we proceed to identify remedial measures for possible violations of the proposed model assumptions, ranging from fine‐tuning of the model to the use of elliptically symmetric or skew‐elliptical linear mixed models as well as of robust estimation methods. We specify many results available in the literature in a unified notation and highlight those with greater practical appeal. In each case, we discuss the availability of model diagnostics as well as of software and give general guidelines for model selection. We conclude with analyses of three practical examples and suggest further directions for research.     

Registration of longitudinal data by means of musical notation

There is a lack of good registration methods for complex longitudinal data. Cumulating longitudinal data into cross-sections, even repeated ones, in order to allow for statistical analysis means considerable distortion of data; if they interact with each other, this is not possible to observe directly and the time factor is not taken into account to its full value, if at all. In this context, music may be defined as a complicated development in the course of time. Music is usually represented by musical notation which, if not ideal, means that we already possess a high precision registration method for complicated temporal developments. Musical notation used for registration of other longitudinal variables than musical ones allows for a multitude of qualitative variables being taken into account simultaneously and a high precision regarding the time factor. It should be no more difficult to analyse statistically a longitudinal pattern than a surface pattern.     

Musical Notation of Non-Musical Courses

Good graphic representations are a great help to directly see patterns in research results.Courses are no exception. However, a course means that time has to be a component in the representation. If the components are few, it is easy to draw conventional graphic representations over a time axis.However, if there are more than, say, 12–15 components under study the result becomes unreadable. If, instead, we use musical notation we can notate hundreds of components with the time given according to the time scale that suits the data. Readability is kept. The method is developed for two special cases; courses, where the duration of components is known, and courses where the order of components is known but not their duration. Information is shown on one or several staves as something resembling a musical score. As a by-product a modified musical notation is shown to be useful also for complicated cross-sections. These are working methods facilitating final analysis in making directly readable what should otherwise be exceeding the range of vision.     

An investigation of social media data during a product recall scandal

As social media has become an important part of modern daily life, users often share product opinions online and these tend to spike when large companies undergo crises. This paper investigates customer online responses to a large company crisis by uncovering hidden insights in social media comments and presents a framework for handling social media data and crisis management. Analysis of textual Facebook data from users responding to the 2013 horsemeat scandal is presented. In this study, we used a novel comprehensive data analysis framework alongside a text-mining framework to objectively classify and understand customer perceptions during this horsemeat scandal. This framework provides an effective approach for investigating customer perception during a company crisis and measures the effectiveness of crisis management practices which the company has adopted. Our analyses show that social media can provide important insights into customer behaviour during crisis communications.     

Numerical Tools for the Bayesian Analysis of Stochastic Frontier Models

In this paper we describe the use of modern numerical integration methods for making posterior inferences in composed error stochastic frontier models for panel data or individual cross- sections. Two Monte Carlo methods have been used in practical applications. We survey these two methods in some detail and argue that Gibbs sampling methods can greatly reduce the computational difficulties involved in analyzing such models.     

西安市群众健身路径使用现状及需求发展趋向研究

群众体育的开展状况对于人们体育理念和体育健身价值的理解具有重要的意义,所以笔者就西安市群众健身的手段、方式、方法及在健身需求方面的一些存在的问题进行全面的调查和分析,并针对存在的问题,谈谈自己对解决问题的措施和办法。     

基于商业智能构建高校智能体系的现状分析和研究技术

随着现代高等教育竞争地日趋激烈,大学的管理和决策变的更加错综复杂。如何从成千上万地数据中迅速快捷的提炼和挖掘出有用地信息和知识;如何通过纵横向比较研究认识了解和预测高校地发展优势、遇到的问题;如何增强应对社会经济,特别是现代高等教育市场发展变化地敏感能力;如何构建强大集数据储存、集成、挖掘、分析和报表为一体的知识信息系统是当前院校研究普遍关注的问题。     

Small‐sample testing inference in symmetric and log‐symmetric linear regression models

This paper deals with the issue of testing hypotheses in symmetric and log‐symmetric linear regression models in small and moderate‐sized samples. We focus on four tests, namely, the Wald, likelihood ratio, score, and gradient tests. These tests rely on asymptotic results and are unreliable when the sample size is not large enough to guarantee a good agreement between the exact distribution of the test statistic and the corresponding chi‐squared asymptotic distribution. Bartlett and Bartlett‐type corrections typically attenuate the size distortion of the tests. These corrections are available in the literature for the likelihood ratio and score tests in symmetric linear regression models. Here, we derive a Bartlett‐type correction for the gradient test. We show that the corrections are also valid for the log‐symmetric linear regression models. We numerically compare the various tests and bootstrapped tests, through simulations. Our results suggest that the corrected and bootstrapped tests exhibit type I probability error closer to the chosen nominal level with virtually no power loss. The analytically corrected tests as well as the bootstrapped tests, including the Bartlett‐corrected gradient test derived in this paper, perform with the advantage of not requiring computationally intensive calculations. We present a real data application to illustrate the usefulness of the modified tests.     

Information and Economics in Fisher's Design of Experiments

In 1951 R. A. Fisher described what had been achieved in the 20th century so far: “we have learnt (i) To conserve in its statistical reduction the scientific information latent in any body of observations. (ii) To conduct experimental and observational inquiries so as to maximise the information obtained for a given expenditure.” This paper asks what Fisher meant and, in particular, how he saw his work on experimental design as contributing to the objective of maximizing information for a given expenditure. The material examined ranges from detailed work on issues like “the information lost in measurement of error” to polemics against decision theory .