In many economies, the monetary policy instrument is the level of short-term nominal interest rates, but the monetary policy stance might be better characterised by the ex ante real interest rate that this nominal rate implies, relative to some “neutral” or “natural” real rate of interest. In this paper, we estimate the natural rate of interest and the real interest rate gap the difference betw...

OBJECTIVE The current research examined the association between state disfavoured tax on soda (i.e. the difference between soda sales tax and the tax on food products generally) and a summary score representing the strength of state laws governing competitive beverages (beverages that compete with the beverages in the federally funded school lunch programme) in US schools. DESIGN The Classifi...

Intracellular Ca(2+) regulates numerous proteins and cellular functions and can vary substantially over submicron and submillisecond scales, so precisely localized fast detection is desirable. We have created a approximately 1-kDa biarsenical Ca(2+) indicator, called Calcium Green FlAsH (CaGF, 1), to probe [Ca(2+)] surrounding genetically targeted proteins. CaGF attached to a tetracysteine moti...

In the absence of strict complementarity, Monteiro and Wright 7] proved that the convergence rate for a class of Newton interior-point methods for linear complementarity problems is at best linear. They also established an upper bound of 1=4 for the Q 1-factor of the duality gap sequence when the steplengths converge to one. In the current paper, we prove that the Q 1 factor of the duality gap ...

While offering tax incentives to attract foreign direct investment has become a global phenomenon and part of economic globalization in the 1990s, it also is political and controversial. But the political determinants of tax incentive policies have rarely been analyzed. This article fills this gap by making two contributions. First, I offer a theory that explains how political regime type influ...

INTRODUCTION A number of recent studies document the proportion of all cigarette packs that are 'contraband' using discarded packs to measure tax avoidance and evasion, which we call tax non-compliance. To date, academic studies using discarded packs focused on relatively small geographical areas such as a city or a neighbourhood. METHODS We visited 160 communities across 38 US states in 2012...