A Conversation with Leo Goodman

Leo A. Goodman was born on August 7, 1928 in New York City. He received his A.B. degree, summa cum laude, in 1948 from Syracuse University, majoring in mathematics and sociology. He went on to pursue graduate studies in mathematics, with an emphasis on mathematical statistics, in the Mathematics Department at Princeton University, and in 1950 he was awarded the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. His statistics professors at Princeton were the late Sam Wilks and John Tukey. Goodman then began his academic career as a statistician, and also as a statistician bridging sociology and statistics, with an appointment in 1950 as assistant professor in the Statistics Department and the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, where he remained, except for various leaves, until 1987. He was promoted to associate professor in 1953, and to professor in 1955. Goodman was at Cambridge University in 1953--1954 and 1959--1960 as visiting professor at Clare College and in the Statistical Laboratory. And he spent 1960--1961 as a visiting professor of mathematical statistics and sociology at Columbia University. He was also a research associate in the University of Chicago Population Research Center from 1967 to 1987. In 1970 he was appointed the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, a title that he held until 1987. He spent 1984--1985 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford. In 1987 he was appointed the Class of 1938 Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Sociology Department and the Statistics Department. Goodman's numerous honors include honorary D.Sc. degrees from the University of Michigan and Syracuse University, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-STS276 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Self-employment in Britain: when, who and why?

This work explores self-employment in Britain across recent years with a particular focus on when individuals became self-employed, who is more or less likely to enter self-employment and why individuals choose to enter self-employment. It complements previous microeconomic studies that focus on transitions into and out of selfemployment and presents new evidence on the returns to selfemployment and how these compare to the returns to paid employment. Lifetime employment history data from the British Household Panel Survey suggest that the large increase in self-employment in the 1980’s was due to increases in the inflow rate, while an increase in the outflow rate in the early 1990’s has stopped this trend. Panel data from the same source indicate that gender, parents occupation, assets and considering the work itself, the use of initiative or hours of work to be the most important aspect of a job emerge as key determinants of self-employment entry. Gender, age, occupation and elapsed duration in self-employment emerge as important determinants of selfemployment exit. Our analysis reveals that, all else equal, the selfemployed report higher levels of job satisfaction with pay and with the work itself than employees, but lower levels of satisfaction with job security

Constraints on Gravitation from Causality and Quantum Consistency

We examine the role of consistency with causality and quantum mechanics in determining the properties of gravitation. We begin by examining two different classes of interacting theories of massless spin 2 particles -- gravitons. One involves coupling the graviton with the lowest number of derivatives to matter, the other involves coupling the graviton with higher derivatives to matter, making use of the linearized Riemann tensor. The first class requires an infinite tower of terms for consistency, which is known to lead uniquely to general relativity. The second class only requires a finite number of terms for consistency, which appears as another class of theories of massless spin 2. We recap the causal consistency of general relativity and show how this fails in the second class for the special case of coupling to photons, exploiting related calculations in the literature. In a companion paper [1] this result is generalized to a much broader set of theories. Then, as a causal modification of general relativity, we add light scalar particles and recap the generic violation of universal free-fall they introduce and its quantum resolution. This leads to a discussion of a special type of scalar-tensor theory; the $F(\mathcal{R})$ models. We show that, unlike general relativity, these models do not possess the requisite counterterms to be consistent quantum effective field theories. Together this helps to remove some of the central assumptions made in deriving general relativity.Comment: 6 pages in double column format. V2: Updated towards published versio

An Analysis of Where American Companies Report Profits: Indications of Profit Shifting

This report uses data on the operations of U.S. multinational companies (MNCs) to examine the extent to which, if any, MNCs are moving profits out of high-tax countries (or out of the U.S.) and into low-tax countries with little corresponding change in business operations, a practice known as “profit shifting.” To do this, the profits reported by American firms in two groups of countries are compared with measures of real economic activity in those locations. The first group consists of the five countries commonly identified as being “tax preferred” or “tax haven” countries, and includes Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The second group, which provides a baseline for comparison, consists of five more traditional economies. This group includes Australia, Canada, Germany, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. Consistent with the findings of existing research, the analysis presented here appear to show that significant shares of profits are being reported in tax preferred countries and that these shares are disproportionate to the location of the firm’s business activity as indicated by where they hire workers and make investments. For example, American companies reported earning 43% of overseas profits in Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland in 2008, while hiring 4% of their foreign workforce and making 7% of their foreign investments in those economies. In comparison, the traditional economies of Australia, Canada, Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom accounted for 14% of American MNCs overseas’ profits, but 40% of foreign hired labor and 34% of foreign investment. This report also shows that the discrepancy between where profits are reported and where hiring and investment occurs, as examples of business activity, has increased over time. Additional evidence that profit shifting has increased over time is found from a comparison of business profits with economic output (gross domestic product) in the two country groups. MNC profits as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) in the traditional economies averaged from 1% to 2% between 1999 and 2008, while their profits in the tax preferred countries profits averaged 33% of GDP in 2008, up from 27% in 1999. Individual countries within the tax preferred group displayed more dramatic increases in the ratio of profits to GDP. For example, profits reported in Bermuda have increased from 260% of that country’s GDP in 1999 to over 1000% in 2008. In Luxembourg, American business profits went from 19% of that country’s GDP in 1999 to 208% of GDP in 2008. This report may be of interest to Members of Congress for at least four reasons. First, profit shifting has been the specific target of recent Congressional action, including a September 2012 hearing held by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, as well as several bills introduced in the 112th Congress. Second, anti-abuse provisions have been included in general tax reform proposals in the 112th Congress. Third, most general tax reform proposals would lower the top corporate rate which would diminish the incentive to shift profits. And fourth, to the extent that profit shifting is reduced, federal tax revenues would increase which could assist in addressing the country’s debt and deficit problems

The socio-economic impacts of Singaporean cross-border tourism in Malaysia and Indonesia

Cross-border tourism is often proposed by governments as an incentive for economic growth, but critics have suggested that its impacts are, in fact, overplayed. This paper presents research in the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle. It presents a study of Singaporean cross-border tourism to its neighbours and discusses its economic impacts in two locations: Kukup, a traditional fishing village in Malaysia; and Bintan island in Indonesia. The project examined the broad economic impacts of cross-border tourism on local host communities and given the lack of substantive research on this, examined employment, local ownership and economic linkages and leakages. The study found that cross-border tourism generated income, employment and some local economic linkages. Kukup had clear economic benefits with increased income and employment, but benefits were unevenly distributed between ethnic groups. The Bintan enclave had some linkages to the island economy but was reliant on immigrant labour. In both cases cross-border ethnic ties, specifically Chinese, also played an important role in the growth of cross-border tourism in the Indonesia- Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle The paper shows that cross-border tourism can be a useful addition to more conventional forms of international tourism within national tourism planning and could lead to significant economic benefits for local communities

Stochastic quantization of the linearized gravitational field

Stochastic field equations for linearized gravity are presented. The theory is compared with the usual quantum field theory and questions of Lorentz covariance are discussed. The classical radiation approximation is also presented.Comment: 14 page

The Effective Field Theory of Dark Matter and Structure Formation: Semi-Analytical Results

Complimenting recent work on the effective field theory of cosmological large scale structures, here we present detailed approximate analytical results and further pedagogical understanding of the method. We start from the collisionless Boltzmann equation and integrate out short modes of a dark matter/dark energy dominated universe (LambdaCDM) whose matter is comprised of massive particles as used in cosmological simulations. This establishes a long distance effective fluid, valid for length scales larger than the non-linear scale ~ 10 Mpc, and provides the complete description of large scale structure formation. Extracting the time dependence, we derive recursion relations that encode the perturbative solution. This is exact for the matter dominated era and quite accurate in LambdaCDM also. The effective fluid is characterized by physical parameters, including sound speed and viscosity. These two fluid parameters play a degenerate role with each other and lead to a relative correction from standard perturbation theory of the form ~ 10^{-6}c^2k^2/H^2. Starting from the linear theory, we calculate corrections to cosmological observables, such as the baryon-acoustic-oscillation peak, which we compute semi-analytically at one-loop order. Due to the non-zero fluid parameters, the predictions of the effective field theory agree with observation much more accurately than standard perturbation theory and we explain why. We also discuss corrections from treating dark matter as interacting or wave-like and other issues.Comment: v1: 51 pages, 8 figures; v2: 53 pages, 9 figures, several minor improvements, added references; v3: Updated to resemble version published in PR