Uber, the ride-sharing company launched in 2010, has grown at an exponential rate. Using both survey and administrative data, the authors provide the first comprehensive analysis of the labor market ...for Uber’s driver-partners. Drivers appear to be attracted to the Uber platform largely because of the flexibility it offers, the level of compensation, and the fact that earnings per hour do not vary much based on the number of hours worked. Uber’s driver-partners are more similar in terms of their age and education to the general workforce than to taxi drivers and chauffeurs. Most of Uber’s driver-partners had full- or part-time employment before joining Uber, and many continue in those positions after starting to drive with the Uber platform, which makes the flexibility to set their own hours especially valuable. Drivers often cite the desire to smooth fluctuations in their income as one of their reasons for partnering with Uber.
How Uber affects public transit ridership is a relevant policy question facing cities worldwide. Theoretically, Uber’s effect on transit is ambiguous: while Uber is an alternative mode of travel, it ...can also increase the reach and flexibility of public transit’s fixed-route, fixed-schedule service. We estimate the effect of Uber on public transit ridership using a difference-in-differences design that exploits variation across U.S. metropolitan areas in both the intensity of Uber penetration and the timing of Uber entry. We find that Uber is a complement for the average transit agency, increasing ridership by five percent after two years. This average effect masks considerable heterogeneity, with Uber increasing ridership more in larger cities and for smaller transit agencies.
Noncoding RNAs in disease Lekka, Evangelia; Hall, Jonathan
FEBS letters,
September 2018, Letnik:
592, Številka:
17
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Noncoding RNAs are emerging as potent and multifunctional regulators in all biological processes. In parallel, a rapidly growing number of studies has unravelled associations between aberrant ...noncoding RNA expression and human diseases. These associations have been extensively reviewed, often with the focus on a particular microRNA (miRNA) (family) or a selected disease/pathology. In this Mini‐Review, we highlight a selection of studies in order to demonstrate the wide‐scale involvement of miRNAs and long noncoding RNAs in the pathophysiology of three types of diseases: cancer, cardiovascular and neurological disorders. This research is opening new avenues to novel therapeutic approaches.
Abstract
The growth of the “gig” economy generates worker flexibility that, some have speculated, will favour women. We explore this by examining labour supply choices and earnings among more than a ...million rideshare drivers on Uber in the U.S. We document a roughly 7% gender earnings gap amongst drivers. We show that this gap can be entirely attributed to three factors: experience on the platform (learning-by-doing), preferences and constraints over where to work (driven largely by where drivers live and, to a lesser extent, safety), and preferences for driving speed. We do not find that men and women are differentially affected by a taste for specific hours, a return to within-week work intensity, or customer discrimination. Our results suggest that, in a “gig” economy setting with no gender discrimination and highly flexible labour markets, women’s relatively high opportunity cost of non-paid-work time and gender-based differences in preferences and constraints can sustain a gender pay gap.
For almost 50 years the structure of the Λ(1405) resonance has been a mystery. Even though it contains a heavy strange quark and has odd parity, its mass is lower than any other excited spin-1/2 ...baryon. Dalitz and co-workers speculated that it might be a molecular state of an antikaon bound to a nucleon. However, a standard quark-model structure is also admissible. Although the intervening years have seen considerable effort, there has been no convincing resolution. Here we present a new lattice QCD simulation showing that the strange magnetic form factor of the Λ(1405) vanishes, signaling the formation of an antikaon-nucleon molecule. Together with a Hamiltonian effective-field-theory model analysis of the lattice QCD energy levels, this strongly suggests that the structure is dominated by a bound antikaon-nucleon component. This result clarifies that not all states occurring in nature can be described within a simple quark model framework and points to the existence of exotic molecular meson-nucleon bound states.
Though economists have long advocated road pricing as an efficiency-enhancing solution to traffic congestion, it has rarely been implemented, primarily because it is thought to create losers as well ...as winners. This paper shows that a judiciously designed toll applied to a portion of the lanes of a highway can generate a Pareto improvement before using the revenue, a sufficient condition being that drivers with a high value of time travel at the peak of rush hour. I obtain these new theoretical results by extending a standard dynamic congestion model to reflect an important additional traffic externality: extra traffic does not simply increase travel times, but also introduces frictions that reduce throughput. The analysis draws attention to a practical policy that may help overcome the widespread opposition to road pricing.
•Congestion pricing can help all road users, even before using the revenue.•Requires time-varying tolls and often requires pricing just some of the lanes•Possible if there are some rich drivers are using the road at the peak of rush hour
The pole structure of the Λ(1405) is examined by fitting the couplings of an underlying Hamiltonian effective field theory to cross sections of K−p scattering in the infinite-volume limit. ...Finite-volume spectra are then obtained from the theory, and compared to lattice QCD results for the mass of the Λ(1405). Momentum-dependent, nonseparable potentials motivated by the well-known Weinberg-Tomozawa terms are used, with SU(3) flavor symmetry broken in the couplings and masses. In addition, we examine the effect on the behavior of the spectra from the inclusion of a bare triquarklike isospin-zero basis state. It is found that the cross sections are consistent with the experimental data with two complex poles for the Λ(1405), regardless of whether a bare-baryon basis state is introduced or not. However, it is apparent that the bare baryon is important for describing the results of lattice QCD at high pion masses.
Reclaiming the Past examines the post-antique history of Argos and how the city's archaeological remains have been perceived and experienced since the late eighteenth century by both local residents ...and foreign visitors to the Greek Peloponnese. The first western visitors to Argos—a city continuously inhabited for six millennia—invariably expected to encounter landscapes described in classical texts—yet what they found fell far short of those expectations. At the same time, local meanings attributed to ancient sites reflected an understanding of the past at odds with the supposed expertise of classically educated outsiders.Jonathan M. Hall details how new views of Argos emerged after the Greek War of Independence (1821–1830) with the adoption of national narratives connecting the newly independent kingdom to its ancient Hellenic past. With rising local antiquarianism at the end of the nineteenth century, new tensions surfaced between conserving the city's archaeological heritage and promoting urban development. By carefully assessing the competing knowledge claims between insiders and outsiders over Argos's rich history, Reclaiming the Past addresses pressing questions about who owns the past.
Abstract
Economists have long advocated road pricing as an efficiency-enhancing solution to traffic congestion, yet it has rarely been implemented because it is thought to create losers as well as ...winners. In theory, a judiciously designed toll applied to a portion of the lanes of a highway can generate a Pareto improvement, even before using the toll revenue. This paper explores the practical relevance of this theoretical possibility by using survey and travel time data, combined with a structural model of traffic congestion, to estimate the joint distribution of agent preferences over three dimensions—value of time, schedule inflexibility, and desired arrival time—and evaluate the effects of adding optimal time-varying tolls. I find that adding tolls on half of the lanes of a highway yields a Pareto improvement. Further, the social welfare gains from doing so are substantial—up to $1,740 per road user per year.
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