This book applies methods from nonlinear dynamics to problems in neuroscience. It uses modern mathematical approaches to understand patterns of neuronal activity seen in experiments and models of ...neuronal behavior. The intended audience is researchers interested in applying mathematics to important problems in neuroscience, and neuroscientists who would like to understand how to create models, as well as the mathematical and computational methods for analyzing them. The authors take a very broad approach and use many different methods to solve and understand complex models of neurons and circuits. They explain and combine numerical, analytical, dynamical systems and perturbation methods to produce a modern approach to the types of model equations that arise in neuroscience. There are extensive chapters on the role of noise, multiple time scales and spatial interactions in generating complex activity patterns found in experiments. The early chapters require little more than basic calculus and some elementary differential equations and can form the core of a computational neuroscience course. Later chapters can be used as a basis for a graduate class and as a source for current research in mathematical neuroscience. The book contains a large number of illustrations, chapter summaries and hundreds of exercises which are motivated by issues that arise in biology, and involve both computation and analysis. Bard Ermentrout is Professor of Computational Biology and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh. David Terman is Professor of Mathematics at the Ohio State University.This excellent 422 page hardcover publication is an accessible and concise monograph. Mathematical Foundations is a timely contribution that will prove useful to mathematics graduate students and faculty interested in the application of dynamical systems theory to
cellular and systems neuroscience. welcome addition to the pedagogical literature. For mathematics graduate students who are investigating the field of computational neuroscience, I would highly recommend Mathematical Foundations of Neuroscience as their first computational neuroscience text. (Gregory D. Smith, The Mathematical Association of America, December, 2010) '...it is a good substitute for a lengthy regime of abstract maths classes, but it is also well integrated into the field of neuroscience. Ermentrout and Terman's book conveys much of the advanced mathematics used in theoretical neuroscience today.' (Vincent A. Billock, Nature).
Combining administrative data from the US Army, Department of Veterans Affairs, and Social Security Administration, we analyze the effect of the VA's Disability Compensation (DC) program on veterans' ...labor force participation and earnings. We study the 2001 Agent Orange decision, a unique policy change that expanded DC eligibility for Vietnam veterans who served in theater but did not expand eligibility to other veterans of this era, to assess the causal effects of DC enrollment. We estimate that benefits receipt reduced veterans' labor force participation by 18 percentage points, though measured income net of transfer income rose on average.
The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market Autor, David H.; Katz, Lawrence F.; Kearney, Melissa S.
The American economic review,
05/2006, Letnik:
96, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Recent work emphasizes a slowing of wage inequality growth over the last 15 years. This "revisionist" literature views the 1980s surge in wage inequality as an "episodic" event caused by ...institutional forces and argues that "modest" inequality growth in the 1990s is inconsistent with a key role for skill-biased technical change. This paper reconsiders this revisionist view, focusing on a marked change in the evolution of the US wage structure over the past 15 years and divergent trends in upper- and lower-tail wage inequality. This analysis offers unambiguous evidence that demand shifts are likely to be a key component of any cogent explanation for the changing US wage structure. Quantity and price changes covary positively throughout the earnings distribution both in the 1980s when the wage structure was spreading monotonically, and in the 1990s, when it was polarizing. The paper concludes that the changing distribution of job task demands, spurred directly by advancing information technology and indirectly by its impact on outsourcing, goes some distance toward interpreting the recent polarization of the wage structure.
Between 1984 and 2001, the share of nonelderly adults receiving Social Security Disability Insurance income (DI) rose by 60 percent to 5.3 million beneficiaries. Rapid program growth despite ...improving aggregate health appears to be explained by reduced screening stringency, declining demand for less skilled workers, and an unforeseen increase in the earnings replacement rate. We estimate that the sum of these forces doubled the labor force exit propensity of displaced high school dropouts after 1984, lowering measured U. S. unemployment by one-half a percentage point. Steady state calculations augur a further 40 percent increase in the rate of DI receipt.
We measure the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the unanticipated elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in ...1995. Pooling data on the universe of assessed values and transacted prices of Cambridge residential properties between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent decontrol generated substantial, robust price appreciation at decontrolled units and nearby never-controlled units, accounting for a quarter of the $7.8 billion in Cambridge residential property appreciation during this period. The majority of this contribution stems from induced appreciation of never-controlled properties. Residential investment explains only a small fraction of the total.
Abstract
The fall of labor’s share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical assessments typically ...rely on industry or macro data, obscuring heterogeneity among firms. In this article, we analyze micro panel data from the U.S. Economic Census since 1982 and document empirical patterns to assess a new interpretation of the fall in the labor share based on the rise of “superstar firms.” If globalization or technological changes push sales toward the most productive firms in each industry, product market concentration will rise as industries become increasingly dominated by superstar firms, which have high markups and a low labor share of value added. We empirically assess seven predictions of this hypothesis: (i) industry sales will increasingly concentrate in a small number of firms; (ii) industries where concentration rises most will have the largest declines in the labor share; (iii) the fall in the labor share will be driven largely by reallocation rather than a fall in the unweighted mean labor share across all firms; (iv) the between-firm reallocation component of the fall in the labor share will be greatest in the sectors with the largest increases in market concentration; (v) the industries that are becoming more concentrated will exhibit faster growth of productivity; (vi) the aggregate markup will rise more than the typical firm’s markup; and (vii) these patterns should be observed not only in U.S. firms but also internationally. We find support for all of these predictions.
Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology is a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the ...distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the twentieth century. This essay reviews the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of this work and documents the success of Goldin and Katz's framework in accounting for numerous broad labor market trends. The essay also considers areas where the framework falls short in explaining several key labor market puzzles of recent decades and argues that these shortcomings can potentially be overcome by relaxing the implicit equivalence drawn between workers' skills and their job tasks in the conceptual framework on which Goldin and Katz build. The essay argues that allowing for a richer set of interactions between skills and technologies in accomplishing job tasks both augments and refines the predictions of Goldin and Katz's approach and suggests an even more important role for human capital in economic growth than indicated by their analysis.
The majority of U. S. temporary help supply (THS) firms offer nominally free, unrestricted computer skills training, a practice inconsistent with the competitive model of training. I propose and test ...a model in which firms offer general training to induce self-selection and perform screening of worker ability. The model implies, and the data confirm, that firms providing training attract higher ability workers yet pay them lower wages after training. Thus, beyond providing spot market labor, THS firms sell information about worker quality to their clients. The rapid growth of THS employment suggests that demand for worker screening is rising.
The U.S. Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program has grown dramatically over the last 20 years in size and expense. This growth poses significant risks to the finances of the DI program and ...the broader Social Security system, and raises troubling questions as to whether the program is being misused by claimants. This article first provides an overview of the Disability Insurance program, describing who qualifies for the program, how an individual applies for benefits and how the level of benefits is determined. Next, we summarize the factors responsible for the growth in the DI rolls and discuss how the characteristics of DI recipients have changed as a result. We then explore the extent of moral hazard in the DI program and the effectiveness of the screening process in distinguishing meritorious from nonmeritorious claims. Finally, we identify the challenges that the DI program creates for Social Security finances and Social Security reform, and discuss potential reforms to the DI program.
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