ALBERT

All Library Books, journals and Electronic Records Telegrafenberg

Your email was sent successfully. Check your inbox.

An error occurred while sending the email. Please try again.

Proceed reservation?

Export
Filter
  • Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
  • 2005-2009  (1,537)
Collection
Years
Year
  • 1
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 7.2008, 1, art1 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: Based on previous studies related to the yeast cell cycle, it is well known that the underlying cellular network in yeast consists of many interactions between genes that have periodic expression patterns during the cell division cycle. In this study, it is proposed that cell cycle-specific gene expression can be understood as a phenomenon of collective synchronization or, in other words, an ensemble of non-identical oscillating response signals from different systems. Therefore, we aimed to apply the theory of statistical multivariate phase synchronization to understand the cell's cyclic transcriptome as a phenomenon of collective synchronization. To this end, a novel algorithm called Self-Organizing Maps with statistical Phase Synchronization (SOMPS) is proposed and evaluated using yeast cell cycle-specific gene expression data. From the evaluation experiments, we draw the following conclusions: 1) It is possible to find groups of genes that have biological interactions with each other and significantly share gene ontology slim terms of biological processes using the theory of multivariate phase synchronization with cell cycle-specific gene expression signals; 2) Among all output clusters of SOMPS, a relatively large cluster with high periodicity with respect to its trained mean field can be considered a prominent cluster; 3) For each gene, it is possible to identify the degree of the strength of its biological interactions with other genes using the coupling strength of synchronization with its trained mean field; and 4) It is feasible to understand cell cycle-specific expression patterns as a phenomenon of collective synchronization.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 2
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2008, 1, art46 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: This paper presents a model of local network effects in which agents connected in a social network each value the adoption of a product by a heterogeneous subset of other agents in their neighborhood, and have incomplete information about the structure and strength of adoption complementarities between all other agents. I show that the symmetric Bayes-Nash equilibria of this network game are in monotone strategies, can be strictly Pareto-ranked based on a scalar neighbor-adoption probability value, and that the greatest such equilibrium is uniquely coalition-proof. Each Bayes-Nash equilibrium has a corresponding fulfilled-expectations equilibrium under which agents form local adoption expectations. Examples illustrate cases in which the social network is an instance of a Poisson random graph, when it is a complete graph, a standard model of network effects, and when it is a generalized random graph. A generating function describing the structure of networks of adopting agents is characterized as a function of the Bayes-Nash equilibrium they play, and empirical implications of this characterization are discussed.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 3
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Global jurist 7.2008, 3, art8 
    ISSN: 1934-2640
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: In recent years the West has dispatched ``rule doctors" across the developing world to guide poor countries through the process of legal modernization and westernization. Their goal, laid out by the so-called Washington Consensus, has been to reform those countries' legal systems so that they might share in the economic bounty of globalization. But things have not always gone well, particularly - this paper argues - where those rule doctors have ignored existing legal traditions.The paper focuses on the particular case of Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world. At present, most of Niger's citizens rely on magio-religious traditions to accomplish what we in the West would consider law. One important, and from a Western perspective colorful, Nigerien legal tradition is its citizens' reliance on an oracle called the gon to identify wrongdoers and restore harmony to their communities. The paper will describe the gon, and will point out some of the ways that it differs fundamentally from Western conceptions of law. It then will conclude that Washington Consensus law reform in Niger will fail, and will very likely cause social unrest, unless it takes a different tack and finds a way to accommodate existing legal traditions.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 4
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2008, 1, art47 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: The effect of replacing an agent in a two-person two-state finance economy by a more risk averse agent is studied. It is established under which conditions the other agent benefits or looses in equilibrium from dealing with a more risk averse agent. If one agent becomes more risk averse, then the equilibrium allocation moves towards that agent's certainty line. Whether or not that is beneficial for the other agent depends on the location of the endowment point.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 5
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Global jurist 7.2008, 3, art7 
    ISSN: 1934-2640
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: This paper examines legal and economic integration between China and its two Special Administrative Regions, namely, Hong Kong and Macau. Two dimensions are dealt with in this paper: the constitutional/national framework and the WTO/CEPA framework. In the constitutional/national framework, this paper examines the interaction between People's Supreme Court and the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong and Macau. It analyzes the horizontal and vertical interaction between courts in China and in the Special Administrative Regions, focusing mainly on three issues: the Standing Committee/CFA, exclusive/residual competence, and the competition of jurisdiction. In the WTO/CEPA framework, this paper presents the legal bases and accession histories of these three memberships in the WTO, and examines their trade policies and practices both in the GATT and the WTO. Emphasis is placed on how and why Hong Kong, China and Macau, China enjoy full memberships in the WTO as China does. This paper finally explores the dispute settlement mechanism provided in the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangements between China and its two SARs, and examines the possibility for these three members to avail themselves of the WTO dispute settlement mechanism. This paper finds that the legal and economic integration between China and its two SARs offers much both to comparative lawyers and international trade lawyers: the vast diversity of legal culture in these three areas yields an unprecedented conflict and combination, while the interaction between China and its two separate customs territories, Hong Kong, China and Macau, China, in the international trading regime, presents a new landscape in the WTO.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 6
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 7.2008, 1, art2 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: The relationship between speciation times and the corresponding times of gene divergence is of interest in phylogenetic inference as a means of understanding the past evolutionary dynamics of populations and of estimating the timing of speciation events. It has long been recognized that gene divergence times might substantially pre-date speciation events. Although the distribution of the difference between these has previously been studied for the case of two populations, this distribution has not been explicitly computed for larger species phylogenies. Here we derive a simple method for computing this distribution for trees of arbitrary size. A two-stage procedure is proposed which (i) considers the probability distribution of the time from the speciation event at the root of the species tree to the gene coalescent time conditionally on the number of gene lineages available at the root; and (ii) calculates the probability mass function for the number of gene lineages at the root. This two-stage approach dramatically simplifies numerical analysis, because in the first step the conditional distribution does not depend on an underlying species tree, while in the second step the pattern of gene coalescence prior to the species tree root is irrelevant. In addition, the algorithm provides intuition concerning the properties of the distribution with respect to the various features of the underlying species tree. The methodology is complemented by developing probabilistic formulae and software, written in R. The method and software are tested on five-taxon species trees with varying levels of symmetry. The examples demonstrate that more symmetric species trees tend to have larger mean coalescent times and are more likely to have a unimodal gamma-like distribution with a long right tail, while asymmetric trees tend to have smaller mean coalescent times with an exponential-like distribution. In addition, species trees with longer branches generally have shorter mean coalescent times, with branches closest to the root of the tree being most influential.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 7
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Global jurist 7.2008, 3, art6 
    ISSN: 1934-2640
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: This paper tries to individuate various actual and potential aspects of an anthropological analysis of development, aiming to draw a comprehensive picture. A number of background questions encourage this attempt. Is development a form of engagement with the great questions of poverty, hunger and oppression in Africa? What is the relationship between development and politics? What is that between development and technical expertise? Why should African people articulate their political aspirations in the language of development, while Europeans or Americans have at their disposal a political language? Section one considers the general representation of Africa as transmitted by social and economical indicators. It underlines some dissatisfaction with the process of reducing the social and economic reality to a set of data. It also considers the material and cultural implications lying behind technocratic attitudes, suggesting that they should be the object of anthropological analysis. The limits of data reductionism make clearer the advantages of an anthropological perspective on the topic of development, which is too often considered in a technical dimension, ultimately discarding human agency. In turn, however, a deeper understanding of the geo-political and historical context of development intervention is very much needed in order to enrich anthropological approaches, which run the risk of being excessively narrow and self-reflective. Reviewing a number of works in the field of development and anthropology, section two tries to find out the main limitations of such literature, and calling for a broader understanding. Finally, section three considers more ambitious approaches, such as Ferguson's ``anti-politics machine". In particular, this part puts an emphasis on the de-politicizing effect of technocratic development interventions. It also underlines the problems arising from a Foucauldian view of institutions being produced by discourses. The conclusion will summarise the tools needed by an anthropological perspective on development, trying to find a balance between the representation of human agency and the understanding of the deeper hegemonic structures characterising development intervention.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 8
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Business and politics 9.2008, 3, art3 
    ISSN: 1369-5258
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Political Science , Economics
    Notes: Environmental policies of providers of international finance - namely the World Bank, export credit agencies, and Equator Principles banks - provide interesting cases within which to study the power of business not as only an input to the political process or as a constraint on politics, but also as a conduit for both state and non-state actors.This paper shows how targeting financial actors has allowed NGOs to transform their rather weak discursive power base into instrumental power over business actors in other sectors. NGOs have channeled their power through states, consumers, and financial institutions; this has allowed them to augment discursive power over their targets with additional indirect, yet more immediate, forms of structural and instrumental power. As a consequence of both direct and indirect NGO pressure, financial institutions have adopted environmental policies. This article posits a theoretical explanation of the underspecified power relationships in NGO strategies that allow NGOs to exploit weak links in commodity chains for their campaigns.This paper argues that financial institutions wield considerable structural power through their ability to control access to finance. It is particularly this power base which has made them prime targets for NGOs campaigning for the greening of infrastructure development projects. As a consequence of NGO pressure, financial institutions have adopted environmental policies which in turn have provided the World Bank and Equator banks with additional sources of discursive power.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 9
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Business and politics 9.2008, 3, art5 
    ISSN: 1369-5258
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Political Science , Economics
    Notes: The concluding article to the special issue critically reflects on arguments and analysis presented in the preceding articles. It argues that globalisation, new forms of private authority and the increased power of transnational business have not generally weakened the state, but rather advanced a business-oriented transformation of statehood. To understand this transformation the article first provides a very short overview of the state-globalisation debate. Subsequently, it deals more explicitly with the state theoretical debate. In particular, it brings together neo-Marxist and post-Weberian conceptualisations in order to address both the social nature of the state and the particular forms and processes by which it is interactively embedded in the economy and society. After an outline of the transformation of statehood and the strategic options for non-state actors, the article concludes with some critical remarks on the future of democratic politics.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 10
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Business and politics 9.2008, 3, art2 
    ISSN: 1369-5258
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Political Science , Economics
    Notes: Research on conflict in resource-rich countries suggests that resource extraction companies contribute to tension but not development. In recent times, public-private partnerships (PPPs) have flourished, in which set up regulation is not against business but in joint cooperation with corporate actors. Yet PPPs are criticized for serving business self-interest and increasing business power rather than the common good. The paper takes the Kimberley Process and the diamond industry as an example to examine the multi-faceted nature of business power when this PPP was negotiated. The core of the argument is that realist-informed perspectives about business power in PPPs and constructivist accounts emphasizing socialization and social learning processes only tell one part of the story. While demonstrating that the diamond industry acted as a both a socializing and socialized agent, the analysis of the different facets of power shows that structural and discursive power were crucial elements in making socialization happen in the first place.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 11
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Business and politics 9.2008, 3, art4 
    ISSN: 1369-5258
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Political Science , Economics
    Notes: This investigation of accounting standard setting as a case of business power in global governance links together three facets of power. First we examine the discursive power of international accounting standards in the ongoing process of financialization, which we break into two dynamics centered on profit and control. We argue that the selection of accounting paradigms does not concern measurement accuracy but is rather a choice of perspectives between finance and production when presenting economic reality as numbers. Drawing on evidence from the contestation between Rhenish capitalism and the financial perspective, we then explain why, despite the overwhelming structural power of finance, instrumental power exercised in political lobbying over accounting standards can still have considerable success.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 12
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of macroeconomics 8.2008, 1, art1 
    ISSN: 1555-0486
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: We extend the class of quality-ladder growth models (Grossman and Helpman, 1991, Segerstrom, 1998 and others), to encompass an economy with asymmetric fundamentals. In contrast to the standard framework, in our model industries may differ in terms of their innovative potential (quality jumps and arrival rates) and consumers' preferences. This extension allows us to bring industrial policy back into the realm of the growth policy debate. We first show that it is always possible to raise the long-run growth rate and the social welfare of the economy through a costless tax/subsidy scheme reallocating resources towards the relatively more promising industries. We then prove that, in certain economies, even a mere profit taxation policy increases economic growth and social welfare above the laissez-faire.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 13
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Business and politics 9.2008, 3, art1 
    ISSN: 1369-5258
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Political Science , Economics
    Notes: The introduction to the special issue develops a systematic and theoretically grounded framework for assessing business power in global governance. It is shown that power is said to have shifted from the world of states to the world of business. However, in order to evaluate such a claim first a differentiation of power in its instrumental, structural, and discursive facets is necessary. It is furthermore explained that the strength of such a three-dimensional assessment is that it combines different levels of analysis and considers actor-specific and structural dimensions and their material and ideational sources. Following a short introduction to the more empirical articles is provided summarizing their commonalities and differences.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 14
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art14 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 15
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art5 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: The gradualist approach towards an unconditional basic income for all involves the introduction or extension of universal benefits in place of current income-tested ones. Such a policy shift might cause higher fiscal costs or adverse distributional effects, at least in the short run. However, this need not always be the case. Using the tax-benefit model EUROMOD, the article simulates the introduction of a universal housing transfer - that is flat rate, tenure neutral and budget neutral - in place of mortgage interest tax relief and housing benefits in the Netherlands and Sweden. As it turns out, the regressive effect of mortgage interest tax relief thwarts the progressive effect of housing benefits. In view of that, replacing both by the universal housing transfer (equivalent to a partial basic income for housing) would enhance tax progressivity and reduce income inequality at no extra fiscal cost. Policy implications and possible objections are discussed in the concluding section.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 16
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art17 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 17
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art16 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 18
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art15 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 19
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art7 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: This article addresses some of the issues raised for the Basic Income (BI) principle by global economic integration; especially the argument that a new model of reciprocity between affluent and developing economies does not require, and might be undermined by, this approach. In that view, complementarity between an Anglophone version of capitalism and an Asian model of human development can supply a more reliable route to eliminating world poverty and advancing global well-being.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 20
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art4 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: The debate about Basic Income (BI) has hitherto been preoccupied with questions of desirability. To correct this imbalance and to throw light on the problems of winning political support for BI, this article considers whether BI is viable. At this stage, the exercise is necessarily speculative, but can be useful as long as care is taken to specify institutional arrangements and to take into account the way social agents are likely to respond to the introduction of BI. Accordingly, I develop a theoretical model of the interaction between tax-transfer policy and economic performance to explore the options facing the citizens of an imaginary state, who are contemplating radical reform but espouse divergent moral values. Initially, to fix ideas, I assume that their options are independent of the prevailing normative climate. In the end, however, I show that this assumption is untenable, and I draw conclusions for BI as a political project.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 21
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art9 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 22
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art12 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 23
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art10 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 24
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art13 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 25
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art1 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 26
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art3 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 27
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art8 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: Each year the US federal individual income tax delivers over $500 billion worth of tax incentives intended to encourage socially beneficial activities. Currently the vast majority operate through deductions or exclusions, which link the size of the subsidy to the taxpayer's marginal tax bracket. This article argues that uniform refundable credits are a more efficient approach for tax incentives intended to correct for positive externalities, absent evidence that positive externalities exist or that externalities or elasticities associated with the subsidized activity vary by income class. Moreover, some type of refundable credit should almost always be the most efficient subsidy even if externalities or elasticities rise with income. Their efficiency benefits are further magnified by their tendency to automatically smooth household income and macroeconomic demand. This article thus proposes a dramatic change in how the government provides tax incentives for socially valued activities: the default for all such tax incentives should be a uniform refundable tax credit.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 28
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art2 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 29
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art11 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 30
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Basic income studies 2.2008, 2, art6 
    ISSN: 1932-0183
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: In the 1930s Danish author and painter Johannes Hohlenberg (1881-1960) published several essays in defense of an unconditional income for all. These original writings, strongly influenced by Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, are not widely known. This article makes two of Hohlenberg's essays on this topic available in English translation for the first time. The first part of this article introduces Hohlenberg's ideas, followed in section two by English translations of the two Hohlenberg essays: Samfundsarven (The Heritage of Society) (1934) and Dersom nogen ikke vil arbejde, så skal han heller ikke have føden (He who Does not Work, Neither Shall He Eat) (1937).
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 31
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of business valuation and economic loss analysis 2.2008, 2, art1 
    ISSN: 1932-9156
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: Miller and Modigliani's seminal papers (1958, 1963) gave rise to two alternative methodologies for project and firm valuations: the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) and Adjusted Present Value (APV). As is often the case of many larger firms in industrialized economies, whenever a target debt ratio is set up for the long term, WACC might be a good approximation. However, APV has certain advantages making it more convenient for smaller companies with unstable debt ratios, in countries with complex tax legislation and in emerging markets where high economic uncertainty makes the leveraging decision much more opportunistic.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 32
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of business valuation and economic loss analysis 3.2008, 1, art2 
    ISSN: 1932-9156
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: State statutory law concerning recoverable damages for wrongful death is comprehensively surveyed and categorized, as in Schap and Valvo (1997). Various kinds of awards, limitations, and procedures are presented in tabular form. Suitable coding within the table highlights statutory changes since the previous published survey. The table should both facilitate comparative institutional analysis by researchers and provide an informational base for practitioners.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 33
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of business valuation and economic loss analysis 2.2008, 2, art2 
    ISSN: 1932-9156
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: This paper identifies the responses of measures of health care workers' relative compensation to unexpected changes in several macroeconomic variables. The results provide time series information about the relative compensation of workers in the health care sector of the economy. The findings will be valuable to those engaged in economic loss analysis, business valuations and assessments, and related research that often requires industry-specific knowledge about business conditions, trends in cost factors, and the overall economic environment. Moreover, the results should be important to health care managers and administrators who must plan for labor market changes following macroeconomic events.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 34
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of business valuation and economic loss analysis 2.2008, 2, art5 
    ISSN: 1932-9156
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: With the FASB's emphasis on fair value, valuation of privately held companies' capital structures has taken on additional emphasis. Each methodology proposed in the AICPA's Practice Aid "Valuation of Privately-Held-Company Equity Securities Issued as Compensation" can result in suboptimal valuations when valuing complex capital structures. We discuss valuation of such capital structures and offer a workable, integrated simulation methodology combining the strengths of the probability-weighted expected return method with those of the option-pricing method. We demonstrate the methodology using transformed real-world data resulting in a flexible methodology that can be expanded to accommodate various aspects of complex capital structures.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 35
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of business valuation and economic loss analysis 2.2008, 2, art3 
    ISSN: 1932-9156
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: A broker has an obligation to ensure that his client incorporates suitable assets into his portfolio. Greater objectivity can be brought to assessments of suitability by comparing the performance of the aggrieved investor's portfolio to a benchmark portfolio using the Modigliani & Modigliani risk-adjusted performance measure. The applicable counterfactual benchmark could be either a ``market" portfolio or a suitable alternative portfolio. The calculation of confidence intervals associated with the measured difference in risk-adjusted returns is demonstrated. Castaneda-like standards can be used as criteria for whether defendant's actions negatively impacted portfolio performance rather than outside events.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 36
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of business valuation and economic loss analysis 2.2008, 2, art4 
    ISSN: 1932-9156
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: This study provides a survey of the empirical results associated with testing for a unit root in the net discount rate. As suggested by the literature, the use of the historical average of the net discount rate in the calculation of the present value of lost future earnings is valid if the net discount rate follows a mean reverting, stationary process. However, if the net discount rate follows a mean averting, non-stationary process forensic economists should perhaps use the current value of the net discount rate in such calculations. A majority of the studies surveyed indicate that the net discount rate experienced a structural break in the late 1970s-early 1980s. In general, if the net discount rate is stationary as a result of a structural break, forensic economists should use the average net discount rate over the post-break period.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 37
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of business valuation and economic loss analysis 3.2008, 1, art1 
    ISSN: 1932-9156
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: This study investigates the impact of privatization on value creation in State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. A multi-case study approach, using quantitative and qualitative data, is used to rectify the findings of prior SOE privatization research by taking a finer-grained analysis into the conditions that determine post-privatization performance. This study addresses the research question, "What is the effect of privatization in terms of value creation for State Owned Enterprises in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region?" Value creation is measured in terms of profitability, operating efficiency, capital expenditures, and leverage. Using quantitative performance metrics to assess value creation, we also use qualitative data to show that post-privatization value creation depends on specific strategic initiatives as well as government policy toward competition. Our overall conclusion is that privatizing SOEs can be beneficial in the MENA region but must coincide with strong government reform policies, and certain financial and managerial strategies.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 38
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Chemical product and process modeling 3 (2008), S. 4 
    ISSN: 1934-2659
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Chemistry and Pharmacology , Process Engineering, Biotechnology, Nutrition Technology
    Notes: The outputs of statistical process control (SPC) tools developed for fault detection are comparatively examined while applied to actual data collected in an industrial plant. The influence of added information gathered from the plant operation under different strategies is analyzed. Particularly, standard principal component analysis (PCA), kernel PCA and the Hotelling's T2 charts are inspected for a reported problem. The effect of training the tools either with an extended historic databank obtained under standard operation, or including also non-conventional conditions, is studied. The ability of the tools to provide a specific alarm and identify the responsible variable is examined by analyzing the contributions per variable to the SPE and the T2 statistics. In addition, the capacity of the tested tools to adapt to a new operation strategy is compared.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 39
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Chemical product and process modeling 3 (2008), S. 1 
    ISSN: 1934-2659
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Chemistry and Pharmacology , Process Engineering, Biotechnology, Nutrition Technology
    Notes: The multizone circulating reactor (MZCR) technology is a newly announced reactor design for solid-catalyzed gas-phase polymerization. The process is characterized by two hydrodynamically distinct but interconnecting polymerization zones, thus forming a continuous loop of polymer flow between the said zones. In the present study, a dynamic model for the MZCR reactor is developed to illustrate the basic dynamic behavior of the new reactor design; the model is used to study the copolymerization of ethylene with butene. Several parameter sensitivity analyses are performed to show the computer-simulated time responses for reactor temperature, number-average molecular weight, weight-average molecular weight, catalyst feed rate and the monomer concentration along the reactor length.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 40
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Chemical product and process modeling 3 (2008), S. 2 
    ISSN: 1934-2659
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Chemistry and Pharmacology , Process Engineering, Biotechnology, Nutrition Technology
    Notes: To investigate the factors affecting splashing in Peirce-Smith copper converters of Sarcheshmeh copper complex, South-East Iran, a laboratory scale model with dimensions one eighth of the actual converter was designed and assembled. The model was filled with water. Air was impinged onto the water. The sequence of events was subsequently recorded using high speed cameras. Factors affecting splashing such as blowing angle, volumetric flow rate of air, and the distance of the blowers from water surface were studied.Using a value of 2.65×10-11 for Morton dimensionless number, it was found that splashing may be reduced by 75% if the air speed in the tuyeres is reduced from 155 m/s to 30 m/s while the nozzle distance from the melt free surface is between 2 to 0.5 meters.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 41
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Chemical product and process modeling 3 (2008), S. 3 
    ISSN: 1934-2659
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Chemistry and Pharmacology , Process Engineering, Biotechnology, Nutrition Technology
    Notes: Expandable Polystyrene (EPS), a material of the insulation productions and packages, is commonly produced in a batch process. The control of the batch process is based on predefined process recipes and process parameters such as mixing properties. The EPS production has to be able to satisfy the aims and quality requirements of the markets, which causes additional demands on the process control. In this paper we demonstrate the optimization and modeling application for the EPS-batch process. The application consists of a production optimization tool and a simulation tool for the process parameters based on the Multi-Layer Perceptron network (MLP) with retrain properties. The software can be used at the operational level as well as at the process management level. The features are programmed into standalone software built up in the Matlab environment and it is tailored for the needs of the EPS production company StyroChem Ltd. The results show that the application can offer an efficient tool to economize production and storage costs.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 42
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Studies in ethics, law and technology 1.2008, 1, art9 
    ISSN: 1941-6008
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Sociology , Technology
    Notes: Liberal eugenics according to one version is distinguished from authoritarian eugenics on the basis that the choice of enhancement is devolved to parents. The argument for liberal eugenics combines a commitment to the right of parents to autonomy - in reproductive decisions and in the upbringing of children - and a parity claim that there is no morally significant difference between ante-natal and post-natal alterations of a child. The article reviews the putative constraints on parental choice, and assesses some criticisms of the parity claim. It concludes that a liberal commitment to social justice is in tension with a liberal commitment to parental choice, but judges that the former commitment does not entail the authoritarian eugenics which is represented as the alternative to liberal eugenics.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 43
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Studies in ethics, law and technology 1.2008, 1, art12 
    ISSN: 1941-6008
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Sociology , Technology
    Notes: The treatment-enhancement distinction is difficult to make, and defenders of enhancement often base their case on that. Critics of enhancement, however, often have prototypical cases of enhancement-oriented interventions in mind, and the ethics of these can be evaluated on a case by case basis. Things like intelligence enhancement may have adverse effects on equality and utility. If the equality and utility effects of such enhancements were sufficiently severe, then restrictions would be called for. We need to think more about how to make tradeoffs between liberty, equality, and utility--and we need to know more about the extent to which each of these is at stake--before reaching conclusions about the ethics of, and appropriate social policy regarding, human enhancement.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 44
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Studies in ethics, law and technology 1.2008, 1, art10 
    ISSN: 1941-6008
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Sociology , Technology
    Notes: This short comment presents arguments in support of human enhancement.What is enhancement? Surely it is a procedure that improves our functioning: any intervention which increases our general capabilities for human flourishing. We exclude from consideration those procedures often termed ``enhancements" that are of dubious overall benefit (for example breast or penis augmentation, or the taking of anabolic steroids to increase muscle mass). Equally we are not talking of ``designer" modifications which are more akin to aesthetic or fashion preferences than to improvements: hair colour, eye colour, or physique. An enhancement (as we are using the term) is something of benefit to the individual.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 45
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Studies in ethics, law and technology 1.2008, 1, art13 
    ISSN: 1941-6008
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Sociology , Technology
    Notes: This article examines Aubrey de Grey's case for allocating substantial funding to interventive biogerontological research immediately. The conclusion is that the case is inconclusive and that scientific analyses of costs and probabilities would be needed to defend it properly.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 46
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Studies in ethics, law and technology 1.2008, 1, art11 
    ISSN: 1941-6008
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Sociology , Technology
    Notes: Aubrey de Grey's enthusiasm may or may not be infectious, but it is certainly palpable. And it adds a dimension to the discussion the priority that should be given to life-extension/anti-ageing research of which he seems to be unaware. For on the cusp of developments in emerging technologies we find ourselves button-holed by enthusiasts whose ``transhumanist" visions importunately press upon us the most radical understanding of their implications. My suspicion is that the transhumanist mini-insurgency is partly responsible for the general failure of the policy establishment to summon up the courage and vision to address the implications of emerging technologies at all. The insurgents' effort at ``branding" these technologies as transhumanist (like that of the Raelian flying-saucer cult, a decade ago, to claim cloning as their own) does no favors to the technology. The irony is that de Grey and his fellow-visionaries, far from generating consensus enthusiasm for emerging technology applications, are making them too hot to handle.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 47
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of economic analysis & policy 8.2008, 1, art2 
    ISSN: 1555-0494
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: I present a Stackelberg model of conflict, in which contestants have limited endowments to be put in two separate sectors, thus incorporating salient features of many conflicts. The model is applied to the case of conflict over natural resources. Consistent with amounting empirical evidence regarding a so-called "resource curse," I find that the relation between conflict intensity and resource rents is non-monotonous, and that the economy's income growth rate may be negatively affected by resource abundance.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 48
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of economic analysis & policy 8.2008, 1, art1 
    ISSN: 1555-0494
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: Incompatibility in markets with network effects reduces consumers' ability to "mix and match" components offered by different sellers, but can also spur changes in product attributes that might benefit consumers. In this paper, we estimate the effects of incompatibility on consumers in a classic hardware/software market: ATM cards and machines. We find that ATM fees ceteris paribus reduce the network benefit from other banks' ATMs. However, a surge in ATM deployment accompanies the shift to surcharging. Even under conservative assumptions regarding how much of the surge is directly attributable to surcharging, greater deployment often completely offsets the harm from higher fees. The results suggest that policy discussions of incompatibility must consider not only its direct effect on consumers, but also its effect on product attributes.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 49
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of economic analysis & policy 7.2008, 2, art9 
    ISSN: 1555-0494
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: The aim of this paper is to analyze intergenerational earnings mobility in Britain for cohorts of sons born between 1950 and 1972. Since there are no British surveys with information on both sons' and their fathers' earnings covering the above period, we consider two separate samples from the British Household Panel Survey. We combine information from the two samples using the two-sample two-stage least squares estimator described by Arellano and Meghir (1992). Our main result shows that intergenerational earnings mobility was stable for the cohorts born between 1950 and 1960 and decreased statistically significantly among more recent cohorts, those born during 1961-1972.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 50
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of economic analysis & policy 8.2008, 1, art3 
    ISSN: 1555-0494
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: A large literature examines the addictive properties of such behaviors as smoking, drinking alcohol, gambling and eating. We argue that for some people addictive behavior may apply to a much more central aspect of economic life: working. Although workaholism raises some of the same health-related concerns as other addictions, compared to most of the more familiar addictions it is more likely to be a problem of higher-income individuals and is more likely to generate negative spillovers onto individuals around the workaholic. Using the Retirement History Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that high-income, highly educated people exhibit behavior that is consistent with workaholism with regard to retiring-they are more likely to postpone earlier plans for retirement. The theory and evidence suggest that the presence of workaholism calls for a more progressive income tax system than otherwise, although other more targeted policies may be part of optimal policy.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 51
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of economic analysis & policy 8.2008, 2, art3 
    ISSN: 1555-0494
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: The State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) significantly expanded public insurance eligibility and coverage for children in ``working poor" families. Despite this success, it is estimated that over 6 million children who are eligible for public insurance remain uninsured. An important first step for designing strategies to increase enrollment of eligible but uninsured children is to determine how the take-up of public coverage varies within the population. Because of their low rates of insurance coverage and unique enrollment barriers, children of immigrants are an especially important group to consider. We compare the effect of SCHIP eligibility on the insurance coverage of children of foreign-born and native-born parents. In contrast to research on the earlier Medicaid expansions, we find similar take-up rates for the two groups. This suggests that state outreach strategies were not only effective at increasing take-up overall, but were successful in reducing disparities in access to coverage.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 52
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of economic analysis & policy 7.2008, 2, art8 
    ISSN: 1555-0494
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: Using data on children whose parents lost their jobs during the post-communist transition of Hungary, we address the causal effect of unexpected long-term unemployment of parents on their children's educational achievement. We estimate the effect of the children's age at the time of their parents' job loss on their probability of dropping out of secondary school (an event that follows the parents' job loss by many years). The treatment is an additional year reared in a family with regularly employed parents, which can be interpreted as additional human capital investment. We provide bounding estimates to the causal effect. The estimated bounds are tight, they show a substantial effect, and the effect is significantly stronger for preschool age children than for older ones.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 53
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of economic analysis & policy 8.2008, 2, art4 
    ISSN: 1555-0494
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: Much of the debate surrounding Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA) of pharmaceuticals centers on whether DTCA conveys useful information to consumers or indiscriminately increases requests for the advertised medication. By identifying how DTCA changes the shape of the demand curve for antidepressants, we seek to infer the promotional objectives of manufacturers. Using data from the 1996-2003 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), we find that advertising shifts the demand curve for antidepressants outward and rotates it counter-clockwise. DTCA increases the probability that an individual will initiate use of antidepressants, particularly when out-of-pocket medication costs are low, but does not necessarily increase utilization levels among those already taking antidepressants. This is consistent with a promotional campaign that seeks to alert consumers to the product's existence, but conveys no real information that would allow them to learn their true match with the product.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 54
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of economic analysis & policy 8.2008, 2, art2 
    ISSN: 1555-0494
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: This paper uses data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to estimate the effect of COBRA on health care utilization among a sample of individuals who experience employment separation. The empirical specification employs a structural simultaneous equations model of insurance choice and utilization that is estimated by Maximum Simulated Likelihood. Results indicate that employment separators who elect COBRA appear to consume more health care compared to individuals who become temporarily uninsured. In addition, results do not indicate adverse selection into COBRA. Although COBRA enrollees consume more health care than temporary insurance losers, election appears to exhibit favorable selection with respect to physician utilization.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 55
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of economic analysis & policy 8.2008, 2, art1 
    ISSN: 1555-0494
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: The gateway, or stepping stone, hypothesis is important as it has had considerable influence on drug policy and legislation in many countries. The gateway hypothesis offers one possible explanation for young people's development of serious drug problems. It simply states that the use of one drug increases the risk of starting to consume another, possibly more harmful, drug later on and that the risk increases with frequency of use (dose-response). The empirical basis for the hypothesis is the common finding that most heavy drug users have started with less dangerous drugs first and that there seems to be a "staircase" from alcohol and solvents via cannabis and tablets to amphetamine, cocaine and heroin. The core question is whether the sequential initiation pattern of drug use is best explained by the gateway hypothesis or whether the phenomenon is better understood by employing the concepts of accessibility and/or transition proneness? Based on unique data from a representative sample of 21-30 year olds in Oslo we have examined the gateway effect of both legal (alcohol) and illegal drugs (cannabis) on subsequent use of cannabis and hard drugs (amphetamine and cocaine). We are the first to use multivariate probit models to examine the hypothesis. The models take into account unobservable individual-specific effects to reduce the possibility of a spurious effect of soft drug use on the onset of hard drug use. The gateway effects are greater when we do not take account of unobserved heterogeneity, but, although substantially reduced, they remain considerable when unobserved factors are accounted for.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 56
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of economic analysis & policy 7.2008, 2, art7 
    ISSN: 1555-0494
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: We present comparable evidence on intergenerational earnings mobility for Denmark, Finland, Norway, the UK and the US, with a focus on the role of gender and marital status. We confirm that earnings mobility in the Nordic countries is typically greater than in the US and in the UK, but find that, in contrast to all other groups, for married women mobility is approximately uniform across countries when estimates are based on women's own earnings. Defining offspring outcomes in terms of family earnings, on the other hand, leads to estimates of intergenerational mobility in the Nordic countries which exceed those for the US and the UK for both men and women, single and married. Unlike in the Nordic countries, we find that married women with children and with husbands from affluent backgrounds tend to exhibit reduced labor supply in the US and the UK. In these countries, it is the combination of assortative mating and labor supply responses which weakens the association between married women's own earnings and their parents' earnings.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 57
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of economic analysis & policy 8.2008, 2, art5 
    ISSN: 1555-0494
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: Waiting times have been a central concern in the English NHS, where care is provided free at the point of delivery and is rationed by waiting time. Pro-market reforms introduced in the NHS in the 1990s were not accompanied by large drops in waiting times. As a result, the English government in 2000 adopted the use of an aggressive policy of targets coupled with the publication of waiting times data at the hospital level and strong sanctions for poor performing hospital managers. This regime has been dubbed `targets and terror'. We estimate the effect of the English target regime for waiting times for hospital care after 2001 by a comparative analysis with Scotland, a neighbouring country with the same healthcare system that did not adopt the target regime. We estimate difference-in-differences models of the proportion of people on the waiting list who waited over 6, 9 and 12 months. Comparisons between England and Scotland are sensitive to whether published or unpublished data are used but, regardless of the data source, the 'targets and terror' regime in England lowered the proportion of people waiting for elective treatment relative to Scotland.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 58
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @international journal of biostatistics 4 (2008), S. 1 
    ISSN: 1557-4679
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology , Mathematics , Medicine
    Notes: The commonly used two-sample tests of equal area-under-the-curve (AUC), where AUC is based on the linear trapezoidal rule, may have poor properties when observations are missing, even if they are missing completely at random (MCAR). We propose two tests: one that has good properties when data are MCAR and another that has good properties when the data are missing at random (MAR), provided that the pattern of missingness is monotonic. In addition, we discuss other non-parametric tests of hypotheses that are similar, but not identical, to the hypothesis of equal AUCs, but that often have better statistical properties than do AUC tests and may be more scientifically appropriate for many settings.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 59
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Lincoln, Neb. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of agricultural & food industrial organization 5.2007, 1, art3 
    ISSN: 1542-0485
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Fishery, Domestic Science, Nutrition , Economics
    Notes: This paper revisits the analysis of generic commodity advertising under product differentiation by Crespi and Marette. Crespi and Marette had shown that a dominant firm producing high-quality goods and facing a competitive fringe of lower quality producers could be harmed by a generic advertising campaign while the fringe was left unaffected. Under this dominant-firm model, a question remained why these producers might support a program for which they were indifferent. In this paper we show that under a duopoly model a high-quality firm may be harmed while its lower-quality rival may be made better off by a generic program, thus helping to explain why some producers might favor a program while others do not. Further, this paper dismisses the claim made by some litigants that increased branded advertising is the result of a deleterious effect of generic advertising.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 60
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Lincoln, Neb. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of agricultural & food industrial organization 5.2007, 1, art10 
    ISSN: 1542-0485
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Fishery, Domestic Science, Nutrition , Economics
    Notes: With increasing interest in renewable energy from agriculture, including biopower and cellulose ethanol, there is a need for better understanding of the economic organization of this emerging industry. Study of the organization of the biopower industry represents an under-researched area and a new application of transaction cost theory to an emerging industry. Refinement of the theory can also result from challenging applications. This article provides an application of transaction cost economics to the existing United States biopower industry while challenging the empirical convention of excluding production cost variables from transaction cost analysis. Utilizing survey data from 53 biopower generators we study the relationship between physical asset specificity, site specificity, and scale in explaining firms' decisions to procure inputs internally, externally, or to use both methods. Consistent with transaction cost theory, both site specificity and scale are good predictors of organizational form. Given this evidence, this article reconsiders the impact of scale and transaction costs on the choice of organizational from.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 61
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Lincoln, Neb. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of agricultural & food industrial organization 5.2007, 1, art9 
    ISSN: 1542-0485
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Fishery, Domestic Science, Nutrition , Economics
    Notes: This article is a theoretical contribution to the debate surrounding the introduction of Fair Trade products into large-scale retail distribution. In the model, a Fair Trade certifier and a traditional producer compete to supply their product to a single retailer, consumers who are Fair Trade likers are willing to pay an "ethical" premium for the Fair Trade product, and the premium depends on the revenue of Fair Trade product producers. The conditions of existence of an equilibrium where the Fair Trade product coexists with the traditional brand product on the retailer's shelves are highlighted. In particular, we show that a Fair Trade certifier implements this equilibrium if his preferences are such that the weight devoted to the price paid to producers is smaller than the weight he grants to the quantities of Fair Trade product sold. We also show that a retailer's decision to sell the Fair Trade product is not based on the percentage of consumers who are willing to pay for it, but on how much the Fair Trade likers are willing to pay.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 62
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Lincoln, Neb. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of agricultural & food industrial organization 5.2007, 2, art2 
    ISSN: 1542-0485
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Fishery, Domestic Science, Nutrition , Economics
    Notes: US and state governments have subsidized ethanol since 1978, and the rationale for these subsidies has varied over time from supporting farm prices and income, to environmental quality, and more recently to energy security and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The recent boom in ethanol investment and production can be considered as an unintended consequence of an ethanol subsidy keyed to $20 crude oil and fixed at 51 cents per gallon combined with oil surging to $70/bbl. Thus, in the 2005-07 period, ethanol was extremely profitable inducing substantial new investment. For the future, different political action groups and political figures propose renewable fuels targets or standards ranging from 35 to 100 billion gallons per year. To achieve anything like these levels, it is likely that the current policy set will need to be reconsidered. In addition to the current policy, this paper considers using a subsidy tied to the energy security gains and greenhouse gas emission reductions provided by renewable fuels, subsidies targeted specifically at cellulose ethanol, and different versions of a renewable fuel standard such as the one passed by the US Senate. It is clear that we must develop a better understanding of the consequences of these alternative policy pathways.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 63
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Lincoln, Neb. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of agricultural & food industrial organization 5.2007, 2, art7 
    ISSN: 1542-0485
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Fishery, Domestic Science, Nutrition , Economics
    Notes: The EU has set ambitious targets to raise the share of renewable energies, particularly biofuels. With an increasingly controversial public debate and more scientific evidence about the downsites of biofuels, recently the European Unions biofuel targets have been bound to the condition that they have to be produced sustainable. Therefore the European Commission is currently developing sustainability criteria for biofuels. Establishing certification schemes is a possible strategy to ensure that bioenergy crops are produced in a sustainable manner. However, many questions with regard to the design and implementation of sustainability criteria and certification schemes remain unsolved. This article discusses the role that bioenergy plays in the European policy context and the approach the EU is currently following in order to ensure the sustainability of biofuels. It addresses the limits of the chosen approach, concluding that certification schemes can not serve as the only safeguard for sustainable bioenergy, but need to be complemented by other tools and policies.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 64
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Lincoln, Neb. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of agricultural & food industrial organization 5.2007, 2, art10 
    ISSN: 1542-0485
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Fishery, Domestic Science, Nutrition , Economics
    Notes: Research indicates that large biorefineries capable of handling 5000-10000MT of biomass per day are necessary to achieve process economies. However, such large biorefineries also entail increased costs of biomass transportation and storage, high transaction costs of contracting with a large number of farmers for biomass supply, potential market power issues, and local environmental impacts. We propose a network of regional biomass preprocessing centers (RBPC) that form an extended biomass supply chain feeding into a biorefinery, as a way to address these issues. The RBPC, in its mature form, is conceptualized as a flexible processing facility capable of pre-treating and converting biomass into appropriate feedstocks for a variety of final products such as fuels, chemicals, electricity, and animal feeds. We evaluate the technical and financial feasibility of a simple RBPC that uses ammonia fiber expansion pretreatment process and produces animal feed along with biorefinery feedstock.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 65
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art7 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: Many alternative data-adaptive algorithms can be used to learn a predictor based on observed data. Examples of such learners include decision trees, neural networks, support vector regression, least angle regression, logic regression, and the Deletion/Substitution/Addition algorithm. The optimal learner for prediction will vary depending on the underlying data-generating distribution. In this article we introduce the "super learner", a prediction algorithm that applies any set of candidate learners and uses cross-validation to select between them. Theory shows that asymptotically the super learner performs essentially as well as or better than any of the candidate learners. In this article we present the theory behind the super learner, and illustrate its performance using simulations. We further apply the super learner to a data example, in which we predict the phenotypic antiretroviral susceptibility of HIV based on viral genotype. Specifically, we apply the super learner to predict susceptibility to a specific protease inhibitor, nelfinavir, using a set of database-derived non-polymorphic treatment-selected mutations.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 66
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art19 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: Microarrays are a tool for measuring the expression levels of a large number of genes simultaneously. In the microarray experiment, however, many undesirable systematic variations are observed. Correct identification and removal of these variations is essential to allow the comparison of expression levels across experiments. We describe the use of linear mixed models for the normalization of two-color spotted microarrays for various sources of variation including printtip variation. Normalization with linear mixed models provides a parametric model of which results compare favorably to intensity dependent normalization LOWESS methods. We illustrate the use of this technique on two datasets. The first dataset contains 24 arrays, each with approximately 600 genes, replicated 3 times per array. A second dataset, coming from the apo AI experiment, was used to further illustrate the methods. Finally, a simulation study was done to compare between methods.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 67
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art5 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: Multi-color optical mapping is a new technique being developed to obtain detailed physical maps (indicating relative positions of various recognition sites) of DNA molecules. We consider a study design in which the data consist of noisy observations of multiple copies of a DNA molecule marked with colors at recognition sites. The primary goal is to estimate a physical map. A secondary goal is to estimate error rates associated with the experiment, which are potentially useful for analysis and refinement of the biochemical steps in the mapping procedure. We propose statistical models for various sources of error and use maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to construct a physical map and estimate error rates. To overcome difficulties arising in the maximization process, a latent-variable Markov chain version of the model is proposed, and the EM algorithm is used for maximization. In addition, a simulated annealing procedure is applied to maximize the profile likelihood over the discrete space of sequences of colors. We apply the methods to simulated data on the bacteriophage lambda genome.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 68
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art24 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: The objective of the present paper is to develop a truly functional Bayesian method specifically designed for time series microarray data. The method allows one to identify differentially expressed genes in a time-course microarray experiment, to rank them and to estimate their expression profiles. Each gene expression profile is modeled as an expansion over some orthonormal basis, where the coefficients and the number of basis functions are estimated from the data. The proposed procedure deals successfully with various technical difficulties that arise in typical microarray experiments such as a small number of observations, non-uniform sampling intervals and missing or replicated data. The procedure allows one to account for various types of errors and offers a good compromise between nonparametric techniques and techniques based on normality assumptions. In addition, all evaluations are performed using analytic expressions, so the entire procedure requires very small computational effort. The procedure is studied using both simulated and real data, and is compared with competitive recent approaches. Finally, the procedure is applied to a case study of a human breast cancer cell line stimulated with estrogen. We succeeded in finding new significant genes that were not marked in an earlier work on the same dataset.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 69
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art31 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: We describe a general model for pairwise microsatellite allele matching probabilities. The model can be used for analysis of population substructure, and is particularly focused on relating genetic correlation to measurable covariates. The approach is intended for cases when the existence of subpopulations is uncertain and a priori assignment of samples to hypothesized subpopulations is difficult. Such a situation arises, for example, with western Arctic bowhead whales, where genetic samples are available only from a possibly mixed migratory assemblage. We estimate genetic structure associated with spatial, temporal, or other variables that may confound the detection of population structure. In the bowhead case, the model permits detection of genetic patterns associated with a temporally pulsed multi-population assemblage in the annual migration. Hypothesis tests for population substructure and for covariate effects can be carried out using permutation methods. Simulated and real examples illustrate the effectiveness and reliability of the approach and enable comparisons with other familiar approaches. Analysis of the bowhead data finds no evidence for two temporally pulsed subpopulations using the best available data, although a significant pattern found by other researchers using preliminary data is also confirmed here. Code in the R language is available from www.stat.colostate.edu/~geof/gammmp.html.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 70
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art35 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: Maximum Likelihood (ML) is used as a standard method for estimating divergence times in phylogenetic trees. The method is consistent and hence the precision can be improved by analyzing longer sequences. In this paper we show that the precision can be improved also by including more taxa to the existing tree. It is a theoretical study, complemented with simulations, showing that the gain in precision is faster with increasing sequence length than with increasing number of taxa.We further compare the results of estimating divergence times using Maximum Likelihood with the much faster and less complex estimation method of Mean Path Length (MPL), which works with the evolution model of Jukes-Cantor (1969). It is shown that MPL is as good as ML in estimating divergence times of nodes that are located near the root in the tree, but ML is better in estimating the divergence times of nodes lower down.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 71
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art14 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: The paper examines under what conditions vertically differentiated duopolists engage in first-degree price discrimination. Each firm decides on a pricing regime at a first stage and sets prices at a second stage. The paper shows that when unit cost is an increasing and convex function of quality, the discriminatory regime is the unique subgame-perfect equilibrium of such two-stage game. In contrast to the case of horizontal differentiation, the discriminatory equilibrium is not necessarily Pareto-dominated by a bilateral commitment to uniform pricing. Also, the quality choices of perfectly discriminating duopolists are welfare maximizing. The paper explains why a threat of entry may elicit price discrimination by an incumbent monopolist.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 72
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art25 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: In many capacity-intensive industries (e.g. electricity, bandwidth), exchanges allow firms, including competitors, to buy and sell wholesale capacity before selling on the retail market. Capacity exchanges allow firms to smooth demand shocks, but do they also facilitate tacit collusion to limit capacity investment? This paper models investment and exchange in a one-shot game and in a repeated game with tacit collusion. It finds that the presence of the exchange does not reduce total capacity investment, and thus does not raise consumer prices. In fact, the exchange may make it more difficult to sustain tacit collusion.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 73
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art17 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: In a two-stage Cournot oligopoly cost minimization sometimes calls for ex ante identical firms to invest in diverse technologies. It is an implication of this result that it might be optimal to treat identical duopolistic polluters asymmetrically. We discuss the efficiency properties of a per-unit tax and a tradable permit when ex ante identical duopolists should ideally invest asymmetrically. It is argued that a tradable permit is efficient in promoting differential investments.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 74
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art8 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: Ability of managers and other nonproduction professionals is key for the productivity of firms. Hence, the assignment of heterogeneous nonproduction workers across firms determines the distribution of productivity. In turn, the transmission of productivity differences into profit differences -- resulting from product market competition -- determines firms' willingness to pay for higher managerial skills. This paper explores the equilibrium assignment of nonproduction workers across ex ante identical firms which results from this interaction between product market and the market for nonproduction skills. The analysis suggests that, typically, large and productive firms coexist with small, low-productivity firms. Consistent with empirical evidence, a skewed distribution of firm size tends to arise. Moreover, the model predicts a positive relationship of firm size to productivity, manager quality, and manager remuneration. Finally, according to comparative-static analysis, higher intensity of product market competition can account for increases in the compensation at the top of the wage distribution.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 75
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art4 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: In competitive economies with private firm ownership, incomplete markets, and firm shareholders changing over time, several firm objectives have been proposed. Some are useful to understand efficiency of equilibria, and others are explicitly consistent with majority shareholder control or collective choice rules, but it is not always clear if versions of each type are consistent with versions of the other type. This paper shows that ex-post, value maximizing rules, (including those proposed by Dreze, and Grossman and Hart,) are consistent with shareholder preferences in such economies; that is, along the equilibrium path, in every period and state of the world, every coalition of a firm's shareholders in that period and state approves a value maximizing production plan. This result applies to cases when shareholders within a firm and across firms can form coalitions, and when stock trading can be ex-dividend or cum-dividend, and with a combination of both. This result does not resolve the problem of inefficiency of stock market equilibria, or that of ex ante disagreement among shareholders. It can help understand when firm objectives with some desirable properties are consistent with a particular version of shareholder control, and it provides a stability criterion (in terms of robustness to shareholder coalitions) for organizing productive resources in such economies.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 76
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art24 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: In this paper we introduce product demand uncertainty in a mixed oligopoly model and reexamine the nature of sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE) when firms decide in the first stage whether to lead or follow in the subsequent quantity-setting game. In the non-stochastic setting, Pal (1998) demonstrated that when a public firm competes with a domestic private firm, multiple equilibria exist but the efficient equilibrium outcome is for the public firm to follow. Matsumura (2003a) proved that when the public firm's rival is a foreign private firm, leadership of the public firm is both efficient as well as SPN equilibrium. Our stochastic model shows that when the leader must commit to output before the resolution of uncertainty, multiple SPNE is possible. Whether the equilibrium outcome is public or private leadership hinges upon the degree of privatization and market volatility. More importantly, Pareto-inefficient simultaneous production is a likely SPNE. Our results are driven by the fact that the resolution of uncertainty enhances the profits of the follower firm in a manner that is well known in real option theory.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 77
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art12 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: This paper presents a model of opportunistic behaviour in decentralized economic exchange and considers the impact of inadequate institutional framework of formal contract enforcement on economic performance. It is shown that (i) when the number of cheating traders is sufficiently large, inadequate institutions result in a loss of decentralized trading contracts, (ii) an adequate institutional framework, while being necessary for the attainment of a Pareto optimal outcome, may not be sufficient if traders perceive it as inadequate; and (iii) sufficiently good formal enforcement provisions help deter contractual breach in environments with corrupt and powerful enforcers.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 78
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art39 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: This paper develops a model of competition among multiproduct retailers that is consistent with observed pricing regularities, such as the facts that virtually all products have large mass points in their price distributions and that most deviations fall below these mass points. The basis of the model is that, when consumers prefer to buy a bundle of goods from the same retailer, a given discount on any one good in the bundle will have a similar effect on consumers' likelihood of visiting that retailer. Consequently, discounts on goods sold by a retailer are substitute instruments for attracting customers, and factors that influence one goods' price will also affect other goods' prices. Hence, if intertemporal price changes are a means of price discriminating (as the literature suggests), then the impact of these changes will be reflected in the prices of many goods - including those for which discrimination is infeasible.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 79
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art15 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: We analyze credit market equilibrium when banks screen loan applicants. When banks have a convex cost function of screening, a pure strategy equilibrium exists where banks optimally set interest rates at the same level as their competitors. This result complements Broecker's (1990) analysis, where he demonstrates that no pure strategy equilibrium exists when banks have zero screening costs. In our set up we show that interest rate on loans are largely independent of marginal costs, a feature consistent with the extant empirical evidence. In equilibrium, banks make positive profits in our model in spite of the threat of entry by inactive banks. Moreover, an increase in the number of active banks increases credit risk and so does not improve credit market efficiency: this point has important regulatory implications. Finally, we extend our analysis to the case where banks have differing screening abilities.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 80
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art19 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: This paper analyses comparative statics for first price auctions and all pay auctions with independent private values. In all pay auctions, bidders with low values will respond to a stochastically higher (in the sense of likelihood ratio dominance) distribution of types by playing less aggressively while high value bidders bid more. In the first price auction, a similar change results in all types playing more aggressively. Furthermore, we show that a decrease in dispersion of values, in the sense of a refinement of second order stochastic dominance, although also associated with an increase in competitiveness, may in addition result in less aggressive play by bidders with high values in both auction forms. We also find similar considerations in an oligopoly game with incomplete information: stochastically lower costs can lead to higher prices.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 81
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art38 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: By combining a theory of herding behavior with the phenomenon of availability heuristic, this paper shows that non-informative advertisements can affect people's choices by influencing their perception of product quality. We present a model in which people can learn about product quality by observing the choices of others. Consumers are, however, not able to fully distinguish between the observations of real people and fictitious characters in advertisements. Even if a person is aware of this limitation and updates his beliefs accordingly, it is still rational for him to choose the product he has observed most often. In equilibrium the most observed product is always most likely to be of the highest quality. The analysis has important policy implications.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 82
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art34 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: The paper investigates the impact of examinations on incentives and decision-making in bureaucracies and similar organisations. When one amongst a group of bureaucrats can be appointed to give policy advice whose outcome affects all parties, with advisory ability increasing in personal effort, a free-riding problem is generated if preferences are aligned, leading to an ex ante inefficiency. Free-riding may be mitigated by an examination with a pass-mark, i.e., a minimum ability requirement as a necessary criterion for advisory appointment. By collectively punishing all experts when maximal ability is low, it raises private incentive to enhance ability, and improves decision quality.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 83
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art43 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: We study two-player all-pay contests in which there is a positive probability of a tied outcome. We show that the players' efforts in equilibrium do not depend on the expected prize in the case of a tie given that this prize is smaller than the prize for winning. The implications of this result are twofold. First, in symmetric one-stage contests, the designer who wishes to maximize the expected total effort should not award a prize in the case of a tie which is larger than one-third of the prize for winning. Second, in multi-stage contests, the designer should not limit the number of stages (tie-breaks) but should allow the contest to continue until a winner is decided.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 84
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art32 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: In two-sided matching markets, stable mechanisms are vulnerable to various kinds of manipulations. This paper investigates conditions for the student-optimal stable mechanism (SOSM) and the college-optimal stable mechanism (COSM) to be immune to manipulations via capacities and pre-arranged matches. For SOSM, we find that strongly monotone preferences in populations and weakly maximin preferences are the maximal domains of college preferences that guarantee immunity to manipulations via capacities and pre-arranged matches, respectively. In contrast, COSM is susceptible to both manipulations whenever colleges have multiple positions.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 85
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    The @B.E. journal of theoretical economics 7.2007, 1, art42 
    ISSN: 1555-0478
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: The paper studies the concept of ``ex post equilibrium" that has recently become popular in literature on auctions, mechanism design and implementation. We ask how one should define ex post equilibrium if one wants to consider extensive games, such as dynamic auctions, and if one wants to include sequential rationality in the equilibrium definition. As it turns out, this raises some conceptual questions that are not present in the static setting. We are lead to introduce three different definitions - all variations of what we call ``information-invariant equilibrium." One of these three definitions is equivalent to ``ex post equilibrium." In static games the three definitions coincide. In extensive games they do not - if we impose sequential rationality. Our main purpose is to make a methodological contribution to game theory, but we illustrate the relevance of this contribution by applying our concepts to several auction games.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 86
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Global jurist 7.2007, 3, art3 
    ISSN: 1934-2640
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: Nous avons, dans ce présent texte, esquissé les grandes lignes d'une procédure d'action, locale, nationale et mondiale, à  laquelle les organisations de la société civile peuvent avoir recours pour mieux faire entendre leurs voix en vue de mieux peser sur les structures politques des États et celles économiques des multinationales.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 87
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Advances in economic analysis & policy 6.2007, 2, art7 
    ISSN: 1538-0637
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: Sellers in eBay auctions have the opportunity to choose both a public minimum bid amount and a secret reserve price. We ask, empirically, whether the seller is made better or worse off by setting a secret reserve above a low minimum bid, versus the option of making the reserve public by using it as the minimum bid level. In a field experiment, we auction 50 matched pairs of Pokémon cards on eBay, half with secret reserves and half with equivalently high public minimum bids. We find that secret reserve prices make us worse off as sellers, by reducing the probability of the auction resulting in a sale, deterring serious bidders from entering the auction and lowering the expected transaction price of the auction. We also present evidence that some sellers choose to use secret reserve prices for reasons other than increasing their expected auction prices.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 88
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Advances in economic analysis & policy 6.2007, 1, art9 
    ISSN: 1538-0637
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: Cell phone use is increasing worldwide, leading to a concern that cell phone use while driving increases accidents. Several countries, three states and Washington, D.C. have banned the use of hand-held cell phones while driving. In this paper, we develop a new approach for estimating the relationship between cell phone use while driving and accidents. Our approach is the first to allow for the direct estimation of the impact of a cell phone ban while driving. It is based on new survey data from over 7,000 individuals.This paper differs from previous research in two significant ways: first, we use a larger sample of individual-level data; and second, we test for selection effects, such as whether drivers who use cell phones are inherently less safe drivers, even when not on the phone.The paper has two key findings. First, the impact of cell phone use on accidents varies across the population. This result implies that previous estimates of the impact of cell phone use on risk for the population, based on accident-only samples, may be overstated by about one-third. Second, once we correct for endogeneity, there is no significant effect of hands-free or hand-held cell phone use on accidents.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 89
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Advances in economic analysis & policy 6.2007, 2, art8 
    ISSN: 1538-0637
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Economics
    Notes: Laboratory experiments have been used extensively in economics in the past several decades to lend both positive and normative insights into a myriad of important economic issues. This study discusses a related approach that has increasingly grown in prominence of late--field experiments. I argue that field experiments serve as a useful bridge between data generated in the lab and empirical studies using naturally-occurring data. In discussing this relationship, I highlight that field experiments can yield important insights into economic theory and provide useful guidance to policymakers. I also draw attention to an important methodological contribution of field experiments: they provide an empirical account of behavioral principles that are shared across different domains. In this regard, at odds with conventional wisdom, I argue that representativeness of the environment, rather than representative of the sampled population, is the most crucial variable in determining generalizability of results for a large class of experimental laboratory games.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 90
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Lincoln, Neb. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of agricultural & food industrial organization 5.2007, 1, art7 
    ISSN: 1542-0485
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Fishery, Domestic Science, Nutrition , Economics
    Notes: In this paper we investigate consumers' preferences for various environment-friendly production systems for carrots. We use discrete-choice multi-attribute stated-preference data to explore the effect of collective reputations from growers of an Alpine valley known for its environment-friendly production: Val di Gresta 'the valley of organic orchards'. Data analysis of the panel of discrete responses identifies unobserved taste heterogeneity for organic, bio-dynamic and place of origin, while observed heterogeneity for income is addressed by a piece-wise linear function. The implied sample distributions of individual-specific WTP for each of these random attributes are then compared. Results indicate that Integrated Pest Management is preferred to biodynamic as an emerging method. The presence of a premium for Val di Gresta produce is confirmed. The use of an experimental design to identify the relevant second order effects reveals the presence of a reputation effect which can be decomposed into a generic effect from place of origin and a specific one for each EFPMs. Farmers operating in geographically limited marginal areas, such as mountain valleys, may find it useful to invest in collective reputation through high quality standard to achieve higher returns. This strategy may compensate for the dwindling public support to farm income from EU programmes.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 91
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Lincoln, Neb. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of agricultural & food industrial organization 5.2007, 2, art11 
    ISSN: 1542-0485
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Fishery, Domestic Science, Nutrition , Economics
    Notes: When the automobile was developed near the beginning of the last century, it was the relatively new fuel gasoline, not the familiar ethanol that became the fuel of choice. We examine the intersections of the early development of the automobile and the petroleum industry and consider the state of the agriculture sector during the same period. Through this process, we find a series of influences, such as relative prices and alternative markets, that help to explain how in the early years of automobile development, gasoline won out over the equally likely technical alternative ethanol. We also examine the industrial relations in the automobile industry that seem to have influenced the later adoption of leaded gasoline, rather than ethanol, as a solution to the problem of engine knock.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 92
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Lincoln, Neb. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Journal of agricultural & food industrial organization 5.2007, 2, art9 
    ISSN: 1542-0485
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Fishery, Domestic Science, Nutrition , Economics
    Notes: In this paper we investigate the potential production and implications of a global biofuels industry. We develop alternative approaches to consistently introduce land as an economic factor input and in physical terms into a computable general equilibrium framework. The approach allows us to parameterize biomass production consistent with agro-engineering information on yields and a "second generation" cellulosic biomass conversion technology. We explicitly model land conversion from natural areas to agricultural use in two different ways: in one approach we introduced a land supply elasticity based on observed land supply responses and in the other approach we considered only the direct cost of conversion. We estimate biofuels production at the end of the century could reach 221 to 267 EJ in a reference scenario and 319 to 368 EJ under a global effort to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. The version with the land supply elasticity allowed much less conversion of land from natural areas, forcing intensification of production, especially on pasture and grazing land, whereas the pure conversion cost model led to significant deforestation. These different approaches emphasize the importance of somehow reflecting the non-market value of land more fully in the conversion decision. The observed land conversion response we estimate may be a short turn response that does not fully reflect the effect of long run pressure to convert land if rent differentials are sustained over 100 years.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 93
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art1 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: Differentiating strains of a pathogen is often central to investigating its epidemiological aspects. The genetic similarity of a group of strains can be assessed by calculating a matrix of dissimilarities from their DNA fingerprinting profiles. The mean dissimilarity for each strain across other strains within the group is then used as an observation in a statistical analysis. These observations are not independent of each other, and so standard analysis techniques such as the t-test are inappropriate, because they underestimate the variance of the group means, and hence overstate the statistical significance of any differences. By examining the correlation between elements of the dissimilarity matrix, it is shown that the variance is underestimated by a factor of between about 2 and 4.Permutation tests are proposed as a way of addressing the problem of dependence, and are applied to a study of fluconazole resistance in Candida albicans.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 94
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art34 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: Digital images obtained by the laser scanning of spotted microarrays often include saturated pixel values. These arise when the scan settings are sufficiently high and some pixels exceed the limit L=65535 and are instead set to L. Failure to adjust for this censoring leads to biased estimates of gene expression levels. To impute censored values, we propose a linear model based on the principal components of uncensored spots on the same array. This is computationally fast, flexible to adapt to distinctive spot shapes and profiles on different arrays, and is shown to be more effective than the polynomial-hyperbolic model in correcting for the bias. The application to biological data demonstrates the potential for enhancing the dynamic range of detection. Fortran90 subroutines implementing these methods are available at http://www.bioss.ac.uk/~chris.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 95
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art3 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: For testing multiple null hypotheses, the classical approach to dealing with the multiplicity problem is to restrict attention to procedures that control the familywise error rate (FWER), the probability of even one false rejection. In many applications, one might be willing to tolerate more than one false rejection provided the number of such cases is controlled, thereby increasing the ability of the procedure to detect false null hypotheses. This suggests replacing control of the FWER by controlling the probability of k or more false rejections, which is called the k-FWER. In Hommel and Hoffmann (1987) and Lehmann and Romano (2005a), single step and stepdown procedures are derived that control the k-FWER, without making any assumptions concerning the dependence structure of the p-values of the individual tests. However, if the p-values are mutually independent, one can improve the procedures. In fact, Sarkar (2005) provided such an improvement. However, we show other improvements are possible which appear to be generally much better, and are sometimes unimprovable. When k=1, the procedure reduces to the classical method of Sidak, and the stepdown procedure is unimprovable and strictly dominates that of Sarkar. Under a monotonicity condition, an unimprovable procedure is obtained. In the case k=2, the monotonicity condition is satisfied, and the condition can be checked numerically in general. We then develop a stepdown method that controls the false discovery proportion. Except for the case of k-FWER control with k=1, the gains are surprisingly dramatic, and theoretical and numerical evidence is given.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 96
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art9 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: High-dimensional case-control analysis is encountered in many different settings in genomics. In order to rank genes accordingly, many different scores have been proposed, ranging from ad hoc modifications of the ordinary t statistic to complicated hierarchical Bayesian models. Here, we introduce the "shrinkage t" statistic that is based on a novel and model-free shrinkage estimate of the variance vector across genes. This is derived in a quasi-empirical Bayes setting. The new rank score is fully automatic and requires no specification of parameters or distributions. It is computationally inexpensive and can be written analytically in closed form.Using a series of synthetic and three real expression data we studied the quality of gene rankings produced by the "shrinkage t" statistic. The new score consistently leads to highly accurate rankings for the complete range of investigated data sets and all considered scenarios for across-gene variance structures.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 97
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art13 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: In genetic association studies, there is increasing interest in understanding the joint effects of genetic and nongenetic factors. For rare diseases, the case-control study is a practical design, and logistic regression is the standard method of inference. However, the power to detect statistical interaction is a concern, even with relatively large samples. Under independence of genetic and nongenetic covariates, improved precision of interaction estimators is possible, but logistic regression does not make use of this assumption and consequently is not statistically efficient. In recent work to improve efficiency, profile likelihood methods have been used to develop semi-parametric inference that incorporates the independence assumption. We describe an alternate derivation of these estimators for rare diseases that is based on classic arguments from case-control inference. These arguments lead to a simplification in the variance estimator. We also describe a strategy for relaxing the independence assumption. Under either independence or the proposed dependence model, inference for association parameters is conveniently obtained by fitting a conditional logistic regression. The statistical properties of the proposed methodology are investigated by simulation.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 98
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art32 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: Array Comparative Genomic Hybridization (aCGH) is an array-based technology which provides simultaneous spot assays of relative genetic abundance (RGA) levels at multiple sites across the genome. These spot assays are spatially correlated with respect to genomic location and, as a result, the univariate tests conducted using data generated from these spot assays are also spatially correlated. In the context of multiple hypothesis testing, this spatial correlation complicates the question of how best to define a `discovery' and consequently, how best to estimate the false discovery rate (FDR) corresponding to a given rejection region.One can quantify the number of discoveries as the total number of spots for which the spot-based univariate test statistic falls within a given rejection region. Under this spot-based method, separate but correlated discoveries are identified. We show via a simulation study that the method of Benjamini and Hochberg (1995) can provide a reasonable estimate of the spot-wise FDR, but these results require that the simulated spot assays are categorized as true or false discoveries in a particular way. However, laboratory researchers may actually be interested in estimating a `regional' FDR, rather than a `local' spot-wise FDR. We describe an example of such circumstances, and present a method for estimating the (chromosome) arm-wise False Discovery Rate. In this framework, one can quantify the number of discoveries as the total number of chromosome arms for which at least one spot-based test statistic falls into a given rejection region. Defining the discoveries in this way, both the biological and testing objectives coincide. We provide results from a series of simulations which involved the analysis of preferentially re-sampled spot assay values from a real aCGH dataset.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 99
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art20 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: Microarray applications for the study of gene expression are becoming accessible for researchers in more and more systems. Applications from field or laboratory experiments are often complicated by the need to superimpose sample pairing for two-color arrays on experimental designs that may already be complex. For example, split-plot designs are commonly used in biological systems where experiments involve two types of treatments that are not readily applied at the same scale. We demonstrate how effects that are confounded with arrays can still be estimated when there is sufficient replication. To illustrate, we evaluate three methods of sample pairing superimposed on a split-plot design with two treatments, deriving the variance associated with parameter estimates for each. Design A has levels of the whole plot treatment paired on the same microarray within a level of the subplot treatment. Design B has crossed levels paired on the same microarray. Design C has levels of the treatment applied to subplots paired on the same microarray within a whole plot. Designs A and B have lower variance than design C for comparing the levels of the whole plot treatment. Designs B and C have lower variance for comparing the levels of the subplot treatment and design C has lower variance for comparing the levels of the subplot treatment within each level of the whole plot treatment. We provide SAS code for the analyses of variance discussed.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
  • 100
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Berkeley, Calif. : Berkeley Electronic Press (now: De Gruyter)
    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology 6.2007, 1, art6 
    ISSN: 1544-6115
    Source: Berkeley Electronic Press Academic Journals
    Topics: Biology
    Notes: In this paper, we propose a novel method for sparse logistic regression with non-convex regularization Lp (p 〈1). Based on smooth approximation, we develop several fast algorithms for learning the classifier that is applicable to high dimensional dataset such as gene expression. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first algorithms to perform sparse logistic regression with an Lp and elastic net (Le) penalty. The regularization parameters are decided through maximizing the area under the ROC curve (AUC) of the test data. Experimental results on methylation and microarray data attest the accuracy, sparsity, and efficiency of the proposed algorithms. Biomarkers identified with our methods are compared with that in the literature. Our computational results show that Lp Logistic regression (p 〈1) outperforms the L1 logistic regression and SCAD SVM. Software is available upon request from the first author.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    Location Call Number Expected Availability
    BibTip Others were also interested in ...
Close ⊗
This website uses cookies and the analysis tool Matomo. More information can be found here...