A recent report by
Watashi et al. (2005) in
Molecular Cell reveals a role for the host cell prolyl isomerase cyclophilin B (CyPB) in the replication of the hepatitis C viral genome, opening potential ...avenues for antiviral therapeutic intervention.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
This report describes a novel technique for the preparation of homogeneously labeled DNA probes. The procedure uses a heteroduplex intermediate, which is directly prepared from a double-stranded ...plasmid, and therefore requires neither sub-cloning of the fragment of interest into a specialized vector nor the use of a synthetic primer. The technical advantages of the procedure are demonstrated by preparation of a probe able to determine the precise location and efficiency of utilization of the polyadenylation site used during transcription of the rat preproinsulin II gene in a transfected avian cell line.
Several anaesthetics were tested with mice to study: (a) their ability to immobilize the animal; (b) their effect on blood pressure and heart rate; and (c) their effect on the response to ...X-irradiation of the mouse sarcoma RIF-1. All anaesthetics which produced adequate immobilization also caused a fall in blood pressure and some radioprotection of tumour cells. Physical restraint of the tumour-bearing leg of an unanaesthetized mouse also caused radioprotection of the tumour cells.
In 4 field experiments, all sites showed economic yield responses to banded P, but broadcast P was much less effective except at the site where the response to banded P was least. Yield responses ...came mostly through increased tuber number. Increasing rates of banded triple superphosphate (TSP) increased tuber Cd concentrations by 50-300 percent; broadcast TSP had little effect. Cd concentrations were about 5 times greater in petiole than tuber.
As the world globalizes and more multinationals operate in foreign locales, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how people react to information technology. In this paper, we use a ...combined social institutions and national culture approach to examine how these are related to one component of the technology acceptance model. Specifically, we hypothesize that three social institutions (degree of industrialization, degree of social inequality, and religiosity) and three national culture dimensions (uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and individualism) are related to the perceived usefulness of information technology. Because of the cross-level nature of our study, we use Hierarchical Linear Modeling to test our hypotheses on 26,999 individuals from 24 nations. Results support four of the six hypotheses (degree of industrialization, degree of social inequality, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity). Results reject hypotheses for religiosity and individualism. Implications of our findings for future research and practice are discussed.
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BFBNIB, CEKLJ, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
This research considers important social institutions (e.g., the economic system, the level of industrialization, the level of social inequality, and the degree of religiosity) as determinants of ...individuals’ justifications to commit socially sanctioned behaviors. Using factor analyses on data from 32,734 individuals located in 27 nations, we find that regardless of country, all individuals group 23 socially sanctioned behaviors uniformly in three categories, which we term controversial behaviors (e.g., abortion), peccadilloes (e.g., keeping money found), and illegal behaviors (e.g., political assassinations). We used Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) to test the country-level effects of the social institutions on individuals’ ability to justify these three types of sanctioned behaviors. The results confirm that the social institutions influence individuals’ justifications of sanctioned behaviors, above and beyond important individual-level control variables included in the HLM analyses. The economic system (degree of socialism) and the level of industrialization show positive effects on all three types of sanctioned behaviors. Social inequality has a positive effect on illegal behaviors and peccadilloes, but a negative effect on controversial behaviors. Religiosity affects illegal behaviors positively and controversial behaviors negatively with no significant influence on peccadilloes.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This dissertation explores questions in labor economics with a particular focus on economic inequality. As one might expect, race, gender, and location are recurring themes. The dissertation makes ...headway on long-standing questions in economics, in large part, through the collection of administrative datasets, and complementary field experiments. In the first chapter, I present evidence that employers pay a premium to equalize pay between workers if those workers can share information about their compensation. To establish a causal relationship between pay transparency and wage compression, I work with the operator of an online labor market who granted me access to detailed records of the tasks that employers advertise and the prices at which workers are willing to do them. These data capture the entire wage determination process, making it possible to observe the drivers of wage compression and the gender wage gap. Three facts emerge. First, for a particular multi-worker setting, pay between any two workers differs on average by over fifty percent when workers propose a price for their services. Second, when workers are in the same location, employers deliberately raise the pay of lower bidders, reducing dispersion, irrespective of differences in assessed productivity or reservation values. Finally, employers who compress pay when workers work in the same place will allow disparities when workers are physically separated. Overall, we find that even in this short-term spot market for labor, consideration of relative pay are quantitatively important for both wages and labor supply. We combine these online platform data with a field experiment to show that, with few institutional constraints, paying a premium to compress pay may be efficient when workers can communicate pay. Our field experiment shows that when pay is unequal, workers strategically use information about co-worker pay to negotiate higher wages that can double the time it takes to complete a job. Worker morale response to lower relative pay can lead quality of output to fall by a full standard deviation. An employer can make trade-offs between these costs by adjusting the terms of negotiation or compressing pay. A profit maximizing employer may optimally equalize wages ex-ante in equilibrium. An important extension to this empirical result is the effect of gender on the ramifications of pay transparency. While a male worker who communicates with co-workers is, on average, able to close the wage gap between the highest paid work and himself by 85 percent, a female worker in the same position closes the gap by 12 percent. This result may give pause to advocates of pay transparency policies if their goal is more equal pay for men and women. The second and third chapter examine the relationship between place and productivity. In the second chapter, I study the impact on aggregate productivity of policies that affect a firm's choice of where to locate. In particular, I study the relationship between state corporate taxes and the investment of firms in R& D, as captured by new patents. While tax advantaged-areas make investment cheaper for firms, they often require firms to locate where their productivity will be lower. In this chapter, I create a unique patent-establishment panel dataset by linking the residence of scientists on each patent application granted, over a thirty-year window, with the address of U.S. establishments. With this dataset, I show that innovation productivity is lower in low tax places, suggesting that place-based productivity is a more important determinant of innovative activity than traditional explanations which focus on the cost of investment. Our analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we analyze establishment mobility and show that lower taxes attract establishments. In particular, a one percent lower corporate tax rate increases the share of establishments in a local area by roughly 3.4%. Second, we exploit establishment migration to separate variation in innovation productivity due to establishment-specific and place-specific characteristics. We show that moving to a place that is 5% more productive increases a given firm's patent activity by 1\%. We follow this literature in evaluating the validity of this variation using pre-move behavior and control functions in the spirit of Dahl (2002). We then relate these place effects to corporate taxes and document that low tax places tend to have lower innovation productivity. The third chapter provides evidence that the voluntary choice of African-Americans to move from Northern regions in the U.S. to Southern regions is responsible in part for lower occupational standing and real income. I find that these migration patterns are also part of a trend that accelerated during the early 21st century among Northern born African-Americans. We combine evidence from four nationally-representative surveys, the U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and the Survey of Income Program and Participation, to statistically assess the forces behind a reverse migration from North to South and associated economic trade-offs. Using variation in the precise timing of individual moves and a model of the wage process, I provide evidence that, on average, African-American are moving to places where their earnings are lower after adjusting for regional price differences, and much lower relative to non-Hispanic white migrants. As suggestive evidence about the reason for these moves, we find that the magnitude of the economic trade-off between origin and destination is proportional to the severity and duration of riots which occurred in Northern cities at the time of the earlier Great Migration. We conclude from this that attractive amenities of the South may play a minor role in driving a reverse migration relative to the failure of some Northern cities to integrate during the 20th century. In chapters 1 and 2, I work closely with co-authors Bobak Pakzad Hurson, currently a classmate of mine, and Juan Carlos Suarez Serrato, who was a post-doc at Stanford at the inception of our collaboration, and who has since take a faculty position at Duke University.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic economic disruptions, including government-imposed restrictions that required millions of American businesses to temporarily close. We present three main facts ...about business decisions to reopen at the end of the lockdown, using a nation-wide survey of thousands of small businesses. First, the plurality of firms reopened within days of the end of legal restrictions, suggesting that the lockdowns were generally binding for businesses - although a sizable minority delayed their reopening. Second, decisions to delay reopenings were not driven by public health concerns. Instead, businesses in high-proximity sectors planned to reopen more slowly because of expectations of stricter regulation rather than concerns about public health. Third, pessimistic demand projections played the primary role in explaining delays among firms that could legally reopen. Owners expected demand to be one-third lower than before the crisis throughout the pandemic. Using experimentally induced shocks to perceived demand, we find that a 10% decline in expected demand results in a 1.5 percentage point (8%) increase in the likelihood that firms expected to remain closed for at least one month after being legally able to open.
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