Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science

The website of the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science provides a lot of information on spatial analysis.

http://csiss.org/

Data handling in SAS

Substring function with Index (separating a full name into first and last names):

DATA FIRST_LAST_NAME;
SET FULL_NAMES;
FORMAT FIRST_NAME $15. LAST_NAME $15.;
FIRST_NAME=SUBSTR(FULL_NAME,1,INDEX(FULL_NAME," "));
LAST_NAME=SUBSTR(FULL_NAME,INDEX(FULL_NAME," "));
RUN;

Public Administration - SSCI Journals

Some SSCI public administration journals:

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY
JOURNAL OF POLICY ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT
AMERICAN REVIEW OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT

NATIONAL TAX JOURNAL
PUBLIC CHOICE

Public Management Review
PUBLIC MONEY & MANAGEMENT
PUBLIC PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT
CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
CANADIAN PUBLIC POLICY

China & World Economy
CHINA ECONOMIC REVIEW
CHINA JOURNAL
CHINA QUARTERLY
China Review-An Interdisciplinary Journal on Greater China
CHINESE EDUCATION AND SOCIETY
Journal of Contemporary China
MODERN CHINA
International Public Management Journal
Asia Pacific Journal of Management
Asia Pacific Viewpoint
Asian Survey

SSCI-Education journals

Some educational journals that might be of interest:

ECONOMICS OF EDUCATION REVIEW
EDUCATIONAL EVALUATION AND POLICY ANALYSIS
AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH JOURNAL
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION
EDUCATIONAL POLICY
JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL AND BEHAVIORAL STATISTICS
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
EDUCATIONAL REVIEW
KEDI Journal of Educational Policy
New Educational Review
REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
REVIEW OF RESEARCH IN EDUCATION
EDUCATIONAL STUDIES
HARVARD EDUCATIONAL REVIEW
EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION QUARTERLY
Asia Pacific Education Review
Asia Pacific Journal of Education
Asia-Pacific Education Researcher
CHINESE EDUCATION AND SOCIETY
COMPARATIVE EDUCATION REVIEW
COMPARATIVE EDUCATION

South Carolina's property tax swap

http://www.charleston.net/news/2009/jan/14/s_c_paying_piper_act_tax_cuts68293/

The Act 388 property tax reductions for homes were indeed popular, but an analysis by The Post and Courier found that they have made the state's budget crisis worse in several ways.

An $81 million shortfall in the sales tax collections that were supposed to fund property tax relief will account for about 15 percent of the gap anticipated in the next state budget. That means the state will have to cut spending elsewhere to pay for property tax breaks. That was not supposed to happen.

A growing shortfall

When Act 388 exempted owner-occupied homes from the property taxes that fund school operations, the law also increased the statewide sales tax to 6 cents on the dollar.

The Post and Courier

The sales tax increase was supposed to raise the roughly half-billion dollars schools used to collect from homes, and state economists predicted that the sales tax would raise enough to fund extra property tax relief.

Instead, there's been a growing shortfall every year, totalling $143 million since Act 388 was approved in 2006.

"If it hadn't been for the economy, there would have been more than enough," Read said. "They need to increase the sales tax if they need more money."

The Office of State Budget projects that sales taxes will rise enough to cover the tax shift in 2010, before falling short again in 2011. Unlike property taxes, sales tax collections tend to rise and fall with the economy, which nose-dived last year.

"We traded the most unpopular but most stable tax, the property tax, for the least unpopular but most unstable tax, the sales tax," state Board of Economic Advisors Chairman John Rainey said. "It's all snowballing."

House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham, R-Cayce, said it's appropriate to reduce taxes on basic needs such as homes, and the sales tax is preferred by voters.
For more information

"It's how people prefer to be taxed," he said. "They don't like their home being taxed."

The property tax law requires the state to give school districts at least the amount of money they would have collected in property tax from exempted homes, with annual adjustments for population and inflation. However, the state can, and has, reduced other sources of funding to schools.

The Department of Education budget was cut by $253 million in the current state budget.

Stata codes for Gini and Theil decomposition

ineqdeco does a good job in the decomposition of Theil index, which corresponds to "GE(1)" in ineqdeco's parlance. The by() option defines the subgroups for analysis.

descogini decomposes the Gini coefficient by income source and allows the calculation of the impact that a marginal change in a particular income source will have on inequality. descogini can be used with bootstrap to obtain standard errors and confidence intervals.

Lerman and Yitzhaki (1985) show that the Gini coefficient for total income inequality, G, can be represented as G = sigma(Sk*Gk*Rk), where Sk represents the share of source k in total income, Gk is the source Gini corresponding to the distribution of income from source k, and Rk is the Gini correlation of income from source k with the distribution of total income. The influence of any income component upon total income inequality depends on:

• how important the income source is with respect to total income (Sk);
• how equally or unequally distributed the income source is (Gk); and
• how the income source and the distribution of total income are correlated (Rk).

The product of Gk and Rk is the pseudo Gini for each income source.

Be greedy when others are fearful

http://www.cnbc.com/id/27231171/
Buy American. I am.
By Warren E. Buffett
The financial world is a mess, both in the United States and abroad. Its problems, moreover, have been leaking into the general economy, and the leaks are now turning into a gusher. In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary.

So ... I’ve been buying American stocks. This is my personal account I’m talking about, in which I previously owned nothing but United States government bonds. (This description leaves aside my Berkshire Hathaway holdings, which are all committed to philanthropy.) If prices keep looking attractive, my non-Berkshire net worth will soon be 100 percent in United States equities.

Why?
A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now.

Let me be clear on one point: I can’t predict the short-term movements of the stock market. I haven’t the faintest idea as to whether stocks will be higher or lower a month — or a year — from now. What is likely, however, is that the market will move higher, perhaps substantially so, well before either sentiment or the economy turns up. So if you wait for the robins, spring will be over.

A little history here: During the Depression, the Dow hit its low, 41, on July 8, 1932. Economic conditions, though, kept deteriorating until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By that time, the market had already advanced 30 percent. Or think back to the early days of World War II, when things were going badly for the United States in Europe and the Pacific. The market hit bottom in April 1942, well before Allied fortunes turned. Again, in the early 1980s, the time to buy stocks was when inflation raged and the economy was in the tank. In short, bad news is an investor’s best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price.

Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

You might think it would have been impossible for an investor to lose money during a century marked by such an extraordinary gain. But some investors did. The hapless ones bought stocks only when they felt comfort in doing so and then proceeded to sell when the headlines made them queasy.

Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts.

Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”

I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasize that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I’ll follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: “Put your mouth where your money was.” Today my money and my mouth both say equities .