INCOME TAXES AND INVESTMENT DECISIONS: THE LONG-LIFE APPRECIATING ASSET CASE

In this paper a neoclasical tax incidence model is used to analyze the effects of alternative methods of taxing income derived from products whose production process is long-lived. Forestry is selected as a classic case. Compared with a "neutral" income tax, two other types of income tax, which approximate those currently applying to the forestry sectors in Australia and the United States, respectively, bias production toward longer growth periods, increase land (site) values, and depress timber prices.     

SMOOTHING MACHINES AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY

I ask the reader to imagine society as a production of‘smoothing machines’. Smoothing machines mark the surfaces of bodies, and in the social sense, they are markings of the body that indicate status, generally in terms of purity or perfection. The socius, Deleuze and Guattari write, is a coding machine, and codes smooth social relations of power. Elias Canetti, in his work on crowds, discovers an internal connection between smoothness, social power, and the body for him the first aspect of power is the smoothness of the teeth, and he traces modern forms of social control and violence to eating and incorporation. In his darkest vision, ‘everything is going smoothly’ comes to mean that everything is in our power, and power is equated with paranoia and the naked will to survive. Many contemporary disciplinary technologies take the form of smoothing the body, understood as‘fitting’ the body to a model of subjectivity and a functional regime. Not all smoothing machines facilitate social control, however. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, many also generate lines of flight or escape. For every smoothing machine that forms a Subject and submits it to power, there are others that set it free.     

TIME PREFERENCE AND THE DISTRIBUTIONS OF WEALTH AND INCOME

This paper examines the connection between time preference heterogeneity and economic inequality in a deterministic environment. Specifically, we extend the standard neoclassical growth model to allow for (1) heterogeneity in consumers' discount rates, (2) direct preferences for wealth, and (3) human capital formation. The second feature prevents the wealth distribution from collapsing into a degenerate distribution. The third feature generates a strong positive correlation between earnings and capital income across consumers. A calibrated version of the model is able to generate patterns of wealth and income inequality that are very similar to those observed in the United States. (JEL D31, E21, O15)     

SELF-CONTROL,POLITICAL IDEOLOGY,AND MISBEHAVIOR: UNPACKING THE EFFECTS OF CONSERVATIVE IDENTITY

Survey data collected from a southwestern metropolitan area indicate that self-defined politically conservative individuals are less inclined to commit criminal or deviant acts than their liberal or moderate counterparts; however, results from multivariate analyses indicate that measures of self-control and pressure to conform all reduce the effects of political conservatism to nonsignificance. In general, the relationship between political ideology and misbehavior appears to be partly spurious and partly indirectly attributable to the effects of other social and situational factors. Moreover, responsiveness to pressures to conform is not due to self-control. The results provide some challenge to traditional interpretations of misbehavior but they also confirm an important part played by structural/contextual variables.     

INCOME INEQUALITY: THE IMPLICATIONS OF ECONOMIC STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS

During the past few decades income inequality has been increasing in the United States and other developed nations, and is having major social consequences. In this study county-level data for the United States was analyzed to test the relative importance of three alternative approaches for explaining increased levels of inequality. These three approaches include economic structure, social conditions, and a model that maintains that both social conditions and inequality are a function of economic structure. The results revealed that social conditions were much more strongly related to inequality than economic structure and little support was found for the theoretical model. The two social conditions most strongly related to inequality included female employment and the percent of female-headed households. Counties with high levels of female employment tended to have low levels of inequality, while counties with high proportions of female-headed households tend to have high levels of inequality. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

CONSPICUOUS SPENDING AND THE INCOME DISTRIBUTION OF SOCIAL GROUPS

Using South African household expenditure data, we analyze how the spending of a household on visible goods, such as jewelry and clothes, depends on the distribution of income within its social group. We find that this spending is positively correlated with the share of peers who possess a similar income level to the household, what we dub the “local income share.” Moreover, we find that the spending of a household on visible goods is positively correlated with the average income of peers that are poorer than this household. We interpret this as evidence for cascade effects through which income changes among the poorest in the social group can trigger adjustments in the visible spending patterns of the wealthy. In line with previous research (Charles et al. 2009), we also find that visible spending of a household is negatively correlated with the average income of its social group. We present a simple model of status competition based on Hopkins and Kornienko (2004) that synthesizes these effects and can account for our results. (JEL D12, D31, O12)     

NEW EVIDENCE ON INCOME AND THE VELOCITY OF MONEY

Time series and cross-country empirical results suggest that cash holding as a proportion of income rises, or equivalently that velocity falls, as income increases. Numerous cross sectional findings at many points in time, in several countries conclude oppositely. It is argued here that the former findings suffer from omitted variable bias by ignoring sociodemographic variables affecting the demand for cash balances. When one incorporates such demand shifters into the analysis the time series and cross-country findings are seen as consistent with the critically reexamined cross sectional result that velocity increases with income.     

DECENTERED MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF THE STRUCTURAL AND PRECEPTUAL VERSATILITY OF THE RASTAFARI

Since the modus operandi of social movements varies across different social settings, their survival mechanism is not universally the same. All social movements, among other things, do not depend on formal organization. Whether a social movement adopts formal organization also depends on the metaphysics to which it adheres. An egalitarian movement, for instance, could be opposed to formal organization, as it amounts to replicating the structure of the establishment in which flat hierarchy is absent. Such movements, which rely on informal networks and provide greater interpretative leverage to their members, fall under the category of decentered movements. The study is intended to demonstrate the need and relevance of this alternative concept. The movement selected for this purpose is the Rastafari, the language of resistance of Jamaicans of African descent. This political religious protest movement, currently with dense cultural manifestations and despite structural and preceptual versatility that characterizes it has significantly exerted its influence not only in its place of origin, Jamaica, but also in other parts of the world. On the basis of the experience of the Rastafari, this article details the advantages of decenteredness over social movement organization for movements that find less accommodation in their respective societies. Data are derived from primary and secondary sources, including the writings of the movement articulators facilitators of the Rastafari.     

STATE TRADING AND THE QUESTION OF DISCRIMINATION: THE YUGOSLAV CASE

This paper determines the terms of trade between Yugoslavia and members of COMECON between 1966–1968 and Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union between 1957–1969. The results, based on prices prevailing in Yugoslavia's trade with Western Europe, show that Yugoslavia consistently paid lower prices and received higher prices in Bloc trade. The measured price deviations are then used to test two hypotheses, both related to the effect of dependence on measures of discrimination. The results indicated that as Yugoslavia became more integrated into Western markets (less dependent on COMECON trade), her discriminatory power increased.     

ECONOMIC GROWTH AND THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: THE FRENCH CASE

This article provides a test of the secularization hypothesis, which argues that economic growth, industrialization, increased literacy, and low fertility decrease religiosity. It focuses on the elections of the secular politicians who voted in favor of the separation between Church and State in the French Parliament in 1905. If the secularization hypothesis is correct, these secular politicians should have been elected in the most developed areas of France at the turn of the twentieth century. Contrary to the predictions of the secularization hypothesis, we find that the support for secular politicians originated in the rural areas of France. (JEL Z12, D72, N43)