Digital Commons Network^™

On The Future Of Tax Salience Scholarship: Operative Mechanisms And Limiting Factors, David Gamage

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Essay — written for Florida State University’s symposium on the 100th anniversary of the U.S. federal income tax — evaluates how the literature on tax salience should be advanced in order for it to better guide tax policy over the coming decades. The literature on tax salience analyzes how taxpayers account for the costs imposed by taxation when the taxpayers make decisions or judgments, both in the taxpayers’ roles as voters and as market participants. This Essay evaluates both possible operative mechanisms that might underlie observed tax salience effects and limiting factors that might prevent tax salience effects from …

A Potential Game Changer In E-Commerce Taxation, David Gamage, Andrew J. Haile, Darien Shanske

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In this essay, we evaluate recent legislative proposals for Congress to authorize state taxation of e-commerce. We argue that these proposals contain a potential game-changing innovation — the requirement that states provide remote sellers with “adequate software” for calculating use tax due within the state. Properly implemented, we explain how this innovation could force states to internalize the compliance costs of levying tax collection obligations on remote sellers, thereby incentivizing the states to simplify their sales and use tax statutes and resolving concerns about states overburdening interstate commerce.

The Case For A State-Level Debt-Financing Authority, David Gamage, Darien Shanske

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In this essay, we argue for the adoption of state-level debt-financing authorities as part of a broader package for reforming local government borrowing.

Interdisciplinary Psychology And Law Training In Family And Child Mediation: An Empirical Study Of The Effects On Law Student Mediators, Amy Applegate, Amy Holtzworth-Munroe, Brittany N. Rudd, Ann Freeman, Brian D'Onofrio

Articles by Maurer Faculty

There is growing interest in interdisciplinary training programs for law students. The goal of these programs is to prepare law students for the real world interdisciplinary settings they will face in their careers. However, there exists little research to provide evidence of the utility of such training. This study examined the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary psychology and law training program on law students using a multi-method approach (i.e., knowledge tests and focus group discussion). Findings suggest that interdisciplinary training of law students increased law students’ knowledge of law and psychology, was enjoyed by law students, and had a beneficial impact …

"Mi Mamá Es Cuatro Pies" : A Study Of The Use Of Calques In Hondurans And Salvadorans In Southern Louisiana, Alexandria Janine Bivin

LSU Master's Theses

“Mi mamá es cuatro pies”: A study of the use of calques in Hondurans and Salvadorans in Southern Louisiana Keywords: calques, language proficiency, bilingual, lexical borrowing, arrival age In this study, I explored calques among Hondurans and Salvadorans in Southern Louisiana. The study has a total of twenty-four Spanish-English bilinguals separated into three groups based upon their age of arrival to the United States. Similar to but modified from that of Silva-Corvalán (1996), group I, is comprised of participants who arrived to the United States after the age nineteen. The participants in group II immigrated to the United States between …

Toward An Ideal Of Moral And Democratic Education: Afro-Creoles And Straight University In Reconstruction New Orleans, 1862-1896, Dana C. Hart

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Straight University emerged as an integrated higher education institution in New Orleans in 1870 and promoted education and training for young men and women, irrespective of race, gender, or ethnicity. Named after its generous patron, Seymour Straight, the university emerged as a space for community and egalitarianism at a time when the assertion of emancipation and civil rights redefined how people lived together in reconstructing a “New South.” Education represented an archetype to shape the future direction of Southern society in a meaningful and tangible way, and Straight University represented this ideal at its founding. The university also became a …

A Performance Guide To Jean-Yves Malmasson's Opus 6 : Trois Poémes De Charles Baudelaire And Opus 30: Les Fleurs Du Désir, Zuly Elizabeth Inirio

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This document is a performance guide of Jean-Yves Malmasson’s Opus 6: Trois poèmes de Charles Baudelaire for medium voice and piano and Opus 30: Les fleurs du désir, a chamber cantata for soprano, violin, cello and piano. Chapter 1 discusses the life and solo vocal works of Jean-Yves Malmasson. It contains biographical information as well as a discussion of Malmasson’s general compositional approach, his influences and his treatment of text, an analysis of the text that the composer wrote for Opus 30. Charles Baudelaire and selections from his volume of poems, Les fleurs du mal, is the focus of Chapter …

The Individual Mandate's Due Process Legality: A Kantian Explanation, And Why It Matters, Peter Brandon Bayer

Scholarly Works

In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, one of the most controversial decisions of this young century, an intensely divided Supreme Court upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's most provocative feature-the Individual Mandate-under Congress's taxing power. In so doing, the Court rejected what appeared to be the Individual Mandate's more applicable constitutional premise-Congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce. Yet, neither the Constitution's Taxing Clause nor its Commerce Clause provide the ultimate answer as to whether Congress may regulate the multi-billion dollar healthcare market by compelling unwilling persons to buy private health insurance. The final determination of the …

Through The Eyes Of Jurors: The Use Of Schemas In The Application Of "Plain-Language" Jury Instructions, Sara Gordon

Scholarly Works

"Through the Eyes of Jurors" is the first law journal article to consider all of the major cognitive psychology studies that examine how "schemas," or the preexisting notions jurors have about the law, shape jurors' use of jury instructions, even when those jurors are given "plain-language" instructions. This Article examines the social science research on schema theory in order to advance our understanding of how schemas continue to influence jurors' use of jury instructions, even when those jurors are given "plain language" instructions.

A significant body of legal literature has examined jurors' use and understanding of jury instructions, and many …

Dubious Deference: Reassessing Appellate Standards Of Review In Immigration Appeals, Michael Kagan

Scholarly Works

The long-standing doctrine of deferential review by appellate courts of findings of fact by administrative agencies is seriously flawed for two main reasons. First, the most prominent justification for deference relies on the empirical assumption that first-instance adjudicators are best able to determine the truth because they can directly view witness demeanor. Decades of social science research has proven this assumption about the value of demeanor false. Second, in principle, the deference rule applies to all types of administrative adjudication, with no attention to the relative gravity of interests at stake in different types of cases or to the varying …

Nonprofit Organizations In The Making Of Civic Community : Exploring How The Structure Of Nonprofit Sectors Matters For Community Wellbeing, Sarah Prater Walsh

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, through the lens of the civic community perspective, I examine the role of nonprofit organizations in enhancing community wellbeing. The primary contribution of this dissertation to existing literature on civic communities is the theoretical development of the concept of civically engaging institutions. I take a multifaceted approach to the understanding and investigation of civically engaged institutions, in which I expand the concept beyond civic congregations and associations, to include all organizations categorized as nonprofit. Synthesizing literatures on nonprofit organizations and civic communities, I argue that nonprofits can be considered locally oriented and civically engaged as they are …

Molecular Dynamics Of Interfacial Phenomena At Air/Ice, Air/Water, And Air/Salt Water Interfaces, Thilanga Prabhash Liyana Arachchi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to investigate the adsorption of organic contaminants, namely polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and green leaf volatiles (GLVs), as well as their interactions with reactive oxygen species (ROSs) on atmospheric air/water and air/ice interfaces. In another series of projects, we studied several intermediate and semi-volatile organic compounds from oil (IVOCs and SVOCs, e.g., alkanes with 17-31 carbon atoms), surfactants and dispersants at air/salt water interfaces. These simulations are relevant to understand the fate of these compounds during the recent 2010 Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill. The adsorption of gas-phase aromatics (benzene, naphthalene and phenanthrene), ROSs …

A Hybrid Procedure For Classifying Synoptic Weather Types For Louisiana With An Application To Precipitation Variability, Amanda Michelle Billiot

LSU Master's Theses

An automated synoptic weather classification system, based on the weather types devised by Robert Muller for Louisiana, is presented in this thesis and an application of the classification system to precipitation variability in Louisiana is demonstrated. The automated classification presented here is a hybrid classification system that uses sea level pressure composites for each Muller weather type as seeds in a correlation procedure to classify daily NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis sea level pressure patterns. The resulting hybrid classification is automated, objective, and has value in describing the surface weather variability in Louisiana. In the second part of this research project, the newly …

Approximate Sequence Alignment, Xuanting Cai

LSU Master's Theses

Given a collection of strings and a query string, the goal of the approximate string matching is to efficiently find the strings in the collection, which are similar to the query string. In this paper, we focus on edit distance as a measure to quantify the similarity between two strings. Existing q-gram based methods use inverted lists to index the q-grams of the given string collection. These methods begin with generating the q-grams of the query string, disjoint or overlapping, and then merge the inverted lists of these q-grams. Several filtering techniques have been proposed to segment inverted lists in …

Silver Nanoparticles As Drug Delivery Systems, Ammar Tahseen Qureshi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this project is to study the potential applications of silver nanoparticles (SNPs) in the medical device and pharmaceutical industries. Bone cements have been used in the orthopedic surgeries for many years to anchor prosthetics while filling up the spaces between the prostheses and bone. Antibiotics are an active component of bone cements but the increasing bacterial resistance to these antibiotics and difficulty of shaping and molding the bone cements increases the need for new antimicrobial biomaterials. Adult stem cell based regenerative therapies have been one of the most widely researched areas of tissue engineering. This is due …

The Origin Of The High Centralization Of Tax Legislative Power, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

The high degree of centralization of tax legislative power in China has produced frequent controversies in practice, and is also fundamentally inconsistent with certain basic principles of public finance and the rule of law. However, this arrangement is commonly assumed as a given for the contemporary Chinese policy. This article challenges this prevalent view. It argues that the centralization of tax legislative power began only in 1977, and was by no means a fixed institution before that time. Moreover, such centralization strengthened between 1977 and 1993, which was a period regarded as the golden age of fiscal decentralization. Thus there …

An Analysis Of Cardiovascular And Respiratory Admission Rates As A Function Of Air Pollutants In The Baton Rouge Five-Parish Area, Heather Elizabeth Spindel

LSU Master's Theses

In past years, the Baton Rouge Air Quality Control Region has struggled with compliance of ozone standards. In June of 2003, the Baton Rouge Five-Parish Ozone Non-Attainment Area was classified as severe under the 1-hour ozone standard. In July of 2012, the EPA classified the area as marginal non-attainment for ozone. Although this is an improvement from its severe classification, studies have shown that health effects of air pollution can be detected at concentrations lower than the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Additionally, clinical and epidemiological studies have shown that a majority of the criteria pollutants negatively affect cardiovascular and …

Magnetic Deflections Of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays From Centaurus A, Azadeh Keivani

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The origin and mass composition of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) are among the mysteries of particle astrophysics. Since UHECRs are mostly or entirely charged particles, they will be deflected in cosmic magnetic fields on their way to Earth. UHECR deflections in the Galactic magnetic fields (GMF) should be considered to identify their origin and nature.

The calculated Galactic magnetic deflections of UHECRs from a source strongly depend on the GMF model. I use the recent GMF model of Jansson and Farrar (JF12), a 35-parameter model which includes coherent, striated and random components and is constrained by WMAP7 Galactic synchrotron …

Cognitive Case Studies Of Chinese In Discourse Analysis And Classroom Teaching, Yanqiu Yang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the first case study, a piece of recent BBC news reported on Chinese netizens leaving random but funny comments on a Western website attracted people’s attention. A closer look at those comments reveals that understanding the Chinese netizens’ comments requires metaphorical and cultural knowledge. This study starts with theoretical explanations on metaphor from different perspectives and then presents cultural variations in Western and Eastern metaphors. With theories and cultures grounded, a detailed analysis was done to show people without Chinese cultural background how to understand the Chinese Internet metaphors that drew people’s attention. The second case study takes a …

Community Violence Exposure Among Underprivileged Adolescents : What Are The Buffering Effects Of Family Qualities On Negative Outcomes?, Katherine Marie Harrison

LSU Master's Theses

Crime and violence are common in impoverished neighborhoods. Consequently, many youth are at risk for victimization and witnessing violent acts. Extensive research has established the presence of significant associations between violence exposure and aggression and posttraumatic stress symptoms among youth. Research has confirmed the protective role of several family characteristics against these negative outcomes despite adversity. However, the literature investigating the buffering effects of family in the relationship between community violence exposure and aggressive behavior and posttraumatic stress symptoms is limited. The current study examined the moderating effect of family factors such as household structure, social support, and parenting techniques …

Amplifying Conjugated Polymers For Fluorescent Chemosensing, Deepa Pangeni

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Chemo- and biosensors based on fluorescent conjugated polymers benefit from greater detection sensitivity due to amplification of the electronic perturbations produced by analyte binding. This amplification stems from the exciton-transporting properties of conjugated polymers. In the conventional sensor design paradigm, excitons migrate from the bulk of the polymer to the analyte binding sites which can be either fluorescence quenching sites (turn-off sensors) or lower energy fluorophores (turn-on sensors). In this dissertation, we proposed an alternative design paradigm when analyte binding creates a higher energy gap site in the polymer backbone. In the case of isolated polymer chains in dilute solution, …

A Metaheuristic-Based Simulation Optimization Framework For Supply Chain Inventory Management Under Uncertainty, Qinglin Duan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The need for inventory control models for practical real-world applications is growing with the global expansion of supply chains. The widely used traditional optimization procedures usually require an explicit mathematical model formulated based on some assumptions. The validity of such models and approaches for real world applications depend greatly upon whether the assumptions made match closely with the reality. The use of meta-heuristics, as opposed to a traditional method, does not require such assumptions and has allowed more realistic modeling of the inventory control system and its solution. In this dissertation, a metaheuristic-based simulation optimization framework is developed for supply …

Sites Of Indigenous Language Practice : Geography Of American Indian Language Policy, Thomas Pierre-Yves Brasdefer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

For over 1.9 million indigenous people in the United States, speaking their native language has become a rare opportunity. There are several obstacles standing in their way, from geographically separated communities to hundreds of years of contrarian policies and sometimes a collective lack of interest. Today, indigenous language use has become an integral part of self-determination and political sovereignty, sometimes more so than a communicative activity. This dissertation examines the political steps taken by American Indian communities around the United States to ensure that their languages can still be spoken into the twenty-first century, and analyzes the complex implications of …

The Laws Of Verse : The Poetry Of Alice Meynell And Its Literary Contexts, 1875-1923, Jared Hromadka

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Like other poets who came to prominence in the nineteenth century but continued to publish well into the twentieth, Alice Meynell’s work has come gradually to be occluded by the work of her younger contemporaries, among them T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The available scholarship records this process of occlusion in the form of an almost complete absence of serious discourse on Meynell’s work following her death in 1922 until the beginnings of a modest revival of interest in her writing beginning in the 1980s. This study aims to address that gap by giving a more complete account of …

Voices From The Coolest Corner Of Hell: A Content Analysis Of Slave Narratives In The Study Of Creolization In The Education Of 19th Century African American Slaves, Gina M. Rizzuto

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The general argument made by Southern historian, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips in 1918, is that the plantation functioned as a type of school for the slave. Similarly, in 1976, Anthony Gerald Albanese examined the plantation system as an institution that conditioned the behaviors of both slaves and slave owners. I maintain that the plantation system was not only an educative agency that conditioned behaviors, but also a conduit for the creolization process. The focus of this study is creolization in the education of African American slaves in the nineteenth century. This is a mixed methods content analysis of African American slave …

Thermal, Compositional, And Salinity Effects On Wettability And Oil Recovery In A Dolomite Reservoir, Azadeh Kafili Kasmaei

LSU Master's Theses

Low salinity and composition effects in improving oil recovery in sandstone reservoirs are known. However, these effects have not been thoroughly studied for the carbonate reservoirs. Because of the lack of the clay minerals in the carbonate rocks, the mechanisms for the improved oil recovery with low salinity, brine composition, and temperature may not be the same as those for sandstones. This experimental study attempts to investigate the effects of low salinity, brine composition, and temperature on wettability and oil recovery in a dolomite reservoir. Also, it is attempted to confirm that wettability alteration is the main mechanism for improvement …

Improving Routines : Self-Monitoring By Adolescents Diagnosed With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Meghan Ann Geary

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), though commonly diagnosed in childhood, continues to present with problematic symptoms through adolescence and adulthood (Barkley, Fischer, Edelbrock, & Smallish, 1990; Young & Amarasinghe, 2010). Despite the number of adolescents suffering from ADHD and the detrimental effects the symptoms can have on their lives, there is a paucity of research in interventions tailored to this population (Young & Amarasinghe, 2010). Additionally, an even smaller portion of this research addresses daily routines for adolescents, despite findings that maintaining routines are often very difficult for adolescents with ADHD (Bloomquist, 2005; Coghill et al., 2008; Pfiffner et al. 2007; Robin, …

Quality Of Care: Analyzing The Relationship Between Hospital Quality Score And Total Hospital Costs, Jordan Andrew Newell

LSU Master's Theses

As healthcare costs and premiums have increased in the recent past, hospitals are forced to try to provide healthcare on tight budgets. In many cases, quality is often sacrificed in an effort to manage patient wait-times and costs. This research attempted to add to the existing body of knowledge of quality of care by defining a relationship between quality of care provided and total hospital costs. This study used the 2006 American Hospital Association’s Annual Survey Database and the 2006 Hospital Compare dataset to meet the data requirements for the study. A log-log, as well as a translog, cost function …

Explaining Strategic Firm Responsiveness To Institutional Processes In The Evolution Of Corporate Governance Systems : The Reform Of Director Remuneration Reporting In Germany, Mario Krenn

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Due to economic and social globalization processes, the boundaries of national systems of corporate governance have become more permeable for the transfer of ideas and practices from other institutional contexts. I derive hypotheses from a multitheoretical framework to explain strategic firm responsiveness to national level pressures for corporate governance reform. This framework integrates institutional, resource dependence, social network, upper echelon, and organizational learning perspectives and portrays corporate governance reform as institutional change. I test hypotheses derived from this framework in the context of the issuance of the German corporate governance code. The code provision of interest recommends that German firms …

Final Coastal Lakes Aquatic Plant Survey Report, Mary Pfauth, Mark Sytsma

Center for Lakes and Reservoirs Publications and Presentations

Invasive, non-indigenous plants can degrade water quality and fish habitat when they invade lakes, ponds, and streams. Changes in plant community architecture in lakes due to invasion by canopy-forming invasive aquatic plants can result in loss of native plant biodiversity and reduction of the structural complexity of the underwater habitat.