Advances

(Advances gives a glimpse of the many significant research projects at the university. Tell us about your discoveries by e-mailing: wisweek@news.wisc.edu.)

A new tax system for the 21st century?
A university economist has proposed a new tax system for the 21st century that would replace the welter of income, sales, excise, capital gains, import, export, gift and estate taxes with something simple: a flat tax not on income, but on all transactions.

Edgar Feige, professor emeritus of economics, has proposed the Automated Payment Transaction tax. It is automatically assessed and collected when transactions are settled through the electronic technology of banking and payments systems. That eliminates the need to file any tax or information returns. And unlike flat taxes on income, APT is progressive, because the wealthy carry out a disproportionate share of total transactions.

Feige says that the automated recording of all APT tax payments by firms and individuals creates a degree of transparency and perceived fairness that induces greater tax compliance. The APT tax also drastically lowers the administrative and compliance costs of taxation.

Feige has written a paper on APT that will be published in the October issue of Economic Policy. A PDF draft version can be downloaded at: http://ijf.hr/apt.pdf

The trees we don’t cut reveal how we value forests
In survey responses, many private woodland owners say that scenery, wildlife habitat and recreational opportunities are more important to them than timber harvests. Now a university researcher has come up with a method to estimate just how valuable those non-market goods are.

Although the results are preliminary, they show that the non-timber value of forests can easily exceed timber revenues, especially on public forest lands. The results indicate that the non-timber value of a single major forest type in Wisconsin can be several tens of millions of dollars each year.

“We are willing to pay a lot for these non-timber values,” says Joseph Buongiorno, a forest economist in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Recently appointed the John N. McGovern Professor of Forest Ecology and Management, Buongiorno directed the study, which appeared in the Journal of Forest Economics.

Buongiorno believes it is important to understand the value we place on timber and the other benefits from national, state, county, private and industrial forests. His method measures how much timber income owners are willing to give up to enjoy other benefits of the forest.

Teaching to the test? No
For good or ill, most teachers don’t seem to be “teaching to the test” in states with state-administered performance exams for students.

In an 11-state study of math and science instruction by 600 teachers in grades four and eight, university researchers find that there may be little overlap between what state assessments test and what teachers teach. The highest overlap in a single state was 46 percent in 4th-grade science, while the lowest, 5 percent, was in 8th-grade math.

In fact, instruction in any one of the 11 states was no more aligned to that state’s test than to the tests of other states in the study.

“This suggests that standards-based reform has not yet brought instruction into alignment with state tests,” says Andrew Porter, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation through a subcontract with the Council of Chief State School Officers.