INFLATION, PROGRESSIVITY, AND STATE INCOME TAX REVENUES

The combination of progressive income tax structures and inflation has led to significant increases in state income tax revenues. While the federal government has de facto indexed the federal personal income tax, states have generated large relative and absolute increases in their income tax revenues. This paper shows that the ratio of income tax revenues to personal income has grown significantly more in states with progressive income tax structures than those with proportional tax structures. Almost half of such increases may be attributed to inflation. The increase in the relative share of income tax as a source of state revenues has recently run into resistance in some states which have installed income tax indexation measures. This may suggest that the marginal cost of raising revenue through inflation, relative to other means (taxes), is reaching its limits.     

MIGRATION AS A WAY TO DIVERSIFY: EVIDENCE FROM RURAL TO URBAN MIGRATION IN THE U.S.

This paper extends the utility maximization model of migration by introducing income and unemployment‐related uncertainties as determinants of utility, and analyzes the effects of the informational advantages of migrants. The paper maintains that migration would expand an individual's economic choices and opportunities and allow diversification. Consequently, diversification advantages influence the location decisions of migrants, an effect captured by the correlation of incomes at the origin and potential destinations. We use the discrete choice model based on random utility maximization as the framework for our empirical investigation of migration from the United States rural to urban counties. This paper takes advantage of an equivalent relation between the conditional logit model and Poisson regression to study the migration decisions using aggregate data among a large set of spatial alternatives. The results show that the diversification concerns have significant effects on location decisions of the rural‐urban migrants in the United States.     

Parametric Sensitivity of Ground Motion Pulse Filter for Response Control of Base-Isolated Buildings

Recently, the authors have proposed ground motion pulse filters for designing effective active and semi-active controllers for base-isolated structures subject to near-field earthquakes. The controller design is realized by augmenting the structural system equation with state-space model of the pulse filter. It has been observed that the resulting controllers are capable of simultaneously reducing peak values of base displacement, superstructure drift, and accelerations of the base and the superstructure simultaneously within practical range of control forces. Since the pulse model depends on ground pulse period, ground pulse decay factor, and the pulse shape factor, a parametric sensitivity analysis is carried out to find pulse parameters for a broad range of earthquakes. It is found that the performance of the controller doesn't vary significantly if the pulse period is underestimated by 50% or overestimated by 20% with respect to the actual ground pulse period, the ground decay factor is between 0.15 and 0.35 and the pulse shape factor is between 1 and 3.     

Rural business programs and business performance: The impact of the USDA's Business and Industry (B&I) Guaranteed Loan Program

The USDA's Rural Development (RD) has implemented several loan and grant programs to support businesses located in rural areas and the Business and Industry (B&I) Guaranteed Loan Program is the largest among them. The focus of the present study is to estimate the impact of B&I program participation and the amount of loans received on the probability of survival and employment growth of recipient businesses over the period of 1990–2013. Using administrative data on B&I loans from RD and business‐level data from the National Establishment Time‐Series (NETS), we utilize a matched difference‐in‐difference estimation strategy to assess the impact of the B&I program on establishment‐level outcomes. We find that the receipt of a B&I loan helps recipient businesses to reduce the risk of failure and grow slightly faster, compared with a similar control group of businesses. We also test if the impacts vary with the loan size and find that while increasing the size of loans has an increasing effect to reduce the risk of failure, it shows no statistically significant effect on employment growth.     

School quality and rural in-migration: Can better rural schools attract new residents?

Studies in the nonmetropolitan population change literature have largely focused on the role of natural amenities and economic restructuring, but few have focused on the role of public services. This paper addresses the question of whether public services in nonmetropolitan counties, specifically the outcomes of public schools, could attract migrants. We use a Poisson regression technique little-used in the migration literature to control for push and pull factors driving migration patterns and control for school quality. Results show that better schools can draw migrants to nonmetropolitan areas. Marginal effects are larger for nonmetropolitan counties not adjacent to metropolitan areas.     

Indian Objects,English Body: Utopian Yearnings in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

Focusing on the representation of Indian shawls and Indian tea in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, this article has two aims: first, it argues that the novel creates its ideology of domesticity and proper femininity through the creation of a readable object world. It is evident that one of the consequences of the empire was to Indianise its English subjects, thereby making them more cosmopolitan and making the English home a monument to imperial Britain’s success in the global system of commodity production, distribution, and consumption. These links then brought together the materiality of the empire and the Victorian preoccupation with material culture, constituting an imperial culture based on domestic interiority, visual and tactile pleasure, and political economy. Second, the article attempts to show how the ambiguities that enter the text along with these foreign objects unsettle the status quo established by the novel’s middle-class ideology and propose utopian alternatives to it through a mobile, boundary-crossing female body and a more porous domestic setting. These alternatives are entirely speculative, incomplete, and restrained, but significant nonetheless, precisely because they turn this ideology’s emphasis on the middle-class female body inside out, so as to recompose this body and its habitual spaces in new ways.     

Chronology of red dune aggradations of South India and its Palaeo-environmental significance

Red sand dunes occur in the coastal plains of south east and west of Tamil Nadu, India between the coordinates of 8°00′ to 9°30′ N; 77°18′ to 79° 00′ E. OSL dating of these sands indicated aggradations between ～16-9 ka and ～9-3 ka in the west and east coasts respectively. Dating results from inland red dunes at the foothills of Western Ghats show a break in deposition at ～6 ka and aggradation since ～2 ka. The sand aggradations in the west coast occurred during the transition period when SW monsoon in the area was reestablishing. The dunes attained their stability by 9 ka. In the coastal region, the aggradations were controlled by sea level changes and a local recycling of earlier dunes (in the east coast). In the inland areas, the dune building was controlled by sand supply from fluvial sources.