Tax penalties on fluctuating incomes: estimates from longitudinal data

Progressive personal income taxes can cause individuals with fluctuating incomes to pay more taxes over time than individuals with constant incomes of the same average value. The implicit tax penalty violates principles of equity and may harm efficiency by discouraging risk-taking activities, such as entrepreneurship. This paper uses longitudinal data to estimate the tax penalties in six panels of Canadian data from 1993 to 2010. The effects of various income averaging policies for mitigating tax penalties are then examined.     

Bank net interest margins,the yield curve,and the 2007–2009 financial crisis

Using quarterly call report data from 2000 to 2016, we reexamine the relationship between net interest margins (NIM) and the yield curve for more than 5,500 U.S. commercial banks. In the full sample, yield curve and RGDP growth have positive effects on NIM, while inflation and deposit‐to‐loan ratios (D/L) have negative effects. Splitting the sample around the 2007–2009 crisis, we show the impact of yield curve and RGDP growth on NIM increasing during the “recovery” (2009Q3 to 2016Q4), and inflation and D/L changing signs. Positive effects of yield curve on profits vary with bank size and change over time.     

Are financial constraints of corporate activist investors perceived negatively?

This paper shows that financial constraints of corporate activist investors are negatively perceived by the market. By conducting an event study on a sample of 561 Schedule 13(D) filings disclosed by US corporations in the years 1996–2016, abnormal share price reactions in the [?10, \(+\)3] event window are about 10.8% lower for targets of financially constrained corporate investors. The average abnormal return for all targets is equal to 13.4%. This positive market response suggests that activism results in actual value improvement for the target. Yet, our analyses show that value improvements crucially depend on the investor’s access to external financing.     

Creation of models for calculation of coefficients of terrain passability

Quality & Quantity - The content of this article is a paper about a complex mathematical model of terrain passability which respects geographical and meteorological conditions in terrain and...     

A probabilistic ghost in the experimental machine

This paper focuses on the opposition between two contemporary research programs in economics: behavioral economics (BE) and experimental market economics (EME). Our claim is that the arguments of this opposition can be clarified through the lens of another opposition in the philosophy of probability and in probability theory, between Bayesianism and frequentism. We show how this probabilistic opposition has indirectly shaped a controversy in psychology that opposes two research programs – Heuristics and Biases and Ecological Rationality – which play respective roles in the foundations of individual rationality in BE and EME. To understand these theoretical interrelationships, we investigate the 1996 controversy between Kahneman, Tversky, and Gigerenzer. Those psychologists held different views on how probabilistic representations influence the context-dependency of rationality. This provides a rationale to suggest that a probabilistic ghost may be haunting the experimental machine in economics, and explains how and why the oppositions between BE and EME are structured around the interplay between the norms of rationality and the context in which rationality is exercised.     

Inference of the Russian drug community from one of the largest social networks in the Russian Federation

The criminal nature of narcotics complicates the direct assessment of a drug community, while having a good understanding of the type of people drawn or currently using drugs is vital for finding effective intervening strategies. Especially for the Russian Federation this is of immediate concern given the dramatic increase it has seen in drug abuse since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early nineties. Using unique data from the Russian social network ‘LiveJournal’ with over 39 million registered users worldwide, we were able for the first time to identify the on-line drug community by context sensitive text mining of the users’ blogs using a dictionary of known drug-related official and ‘slang’ terminology. By comparing the interests of the users that most actively spread information on narcotics over the network with the interests of the individuals outside the on-line drug community, we found that the ‘average’ drug user in the Russian Federation is generally mostly interested in topics such as Russian rock, non-traditional medicine, UFOs, Buddhism, yoga and the occult. We identify three distinct scale-free sub-networks of users which can be uniquely classified as being either ‘infectious’, ‘susceptible’ or ‘immune’.     

Multi-product capacitated facility location problem with general production and building costs

This research introduces the multi-product capacitated facility location problem with general production and building costs (MP-CFLPGC). The MP-CFLPGC extends previous problems found in the literature by including multiple products and general production and building cost functions that allow the modeling of different behaviors like economies of scale and congestion. The MP-CFLPGC is formulated as a mixed integer linear program (MILP). To evaluate the performance of the proposed formulation we analyze the results of a commercial optimizer on a set of 288 randomly generated test instances that resemble the Colombian cement industry supply chain. After one hour the optimizer achieved an optimality gap of 1.0 % or less in 55 % out of the 288 test instances. On average the optimality gap was 3.57 %. Additionally, we propose a randomized mathematical-programming-based heuristic for the test instances where the MILP formulation presents significantly high optimality gaps.     

Projections of Russia’s agricultural development under the conditions of climate change

This paper analyzes the possible impact of irrigation on the development of agriculture in the Volga River Basin and Black Sea Basin. Scenarios of the development of agriculture in Russia up to 2030 under the conditions of the expansion of irrigation and persistence of the current situation with irrigation have been calculated and analyzed based on the IMPACT-3 econometric partial equilibrium model.