The dissertation examines the microfoundations of household saving and consumption decisions and some resulting implications for the macroeconomy. The use of micro panel data reveals that ...heterogeneity, social beliefs and demographic structure shape household financial behavior. Chapter I examines the wealth accumulation patterns of U.S. households between 1984 and 1994. Wealth is systematically related to income, point in the life cycle and other demographic characteristics. But apart from those differences, there remains great residual heterogeneity in wealth holdings. Persistent differences in savings and wealth holdings exist across the pre-retired, different races and households in different locations, even after controlling for income and other demographics. Additionally, household wealth accumulation remained constant during the last fifteen years despite the well documented decline in personal savings. Chapter II focuses on individual heterogeneity in households' decisions to file for bankruptcy. Both the effects of bankruptcy stigma and financial benefit are modeled and empirically estimated within households' bankruptcy decisions. The financial benefit to bankruptcy is highly significant in the households' decision to file. Additionally, households who lived in a bankruptcy district with higher than normal bankruptcies during the last year (the proxy for stigma) were found to be more likely to file for bankruptcy this year, all else equal. This effect is also sizeable and helps to explain the accelerated rise in bankruptcies over the past half-decade. Chapter III explicitly tests for heterogeneity in discount rates and consumption rules in the population. The standard Permanent Income Hypothesis can be rejected for a group of refinancers who paid a rate premium so as to access home equity. These households, while similar to other refinancers in income and demographics, had their consumption paths respond both to predictable income increases and declines. This result is inconsistent with a theory of exogenous liquidity constraints, but is consistent with rule of thumb or with buffer stock consumption behavior.
The altering of the presentation of Japan's imperialist adventures in Japanese high school history textbooks reflects a continuing dispute between Japan and her Asian neighbors, as well as between a ...politically conservative bureaucracy in the Ministry of Education and a historical profession heavily influenced by "progressives" who write from a leftist perspective. While the Ministry claims it is attempting to redress a Marxist bias in the presentation of history, it has been criticized for seeking to gloss over, if not actually justify, historical Japanese imperialism. Japanese texts do contain a leftist slant, are remarkably lacking in patriotic fervor or nationalist pride, and tend to be poorly designed and physically unattractive as compared to U.S. texts. The Japanese Ministry's efforts to engender patriotism seems to have led to a Korean decision to respond in a like manner to Korean-Japanese issues with a strong wave of anti-Japanese sentiment, and to further bolster nationalism through other biased revisions, especially in regard to ancient Korean history. (PPB)
The Software Environment for Biological Network Inference (SEBINI) has been created to provide an interactive environment for the deployment and testing of network inference algorithms that use ...high-throughput expression data. Networks inferred from the SEBINI software platform can be further analyzed using the Collective Analysis of Biological Interaction Networks (CABIN), software that allows integration and analysis of protein- protein interaction and gene-to-gene regulatory evidence obtained from multiple sources. In this paper, we present a case study on the SEBINI and CABIN tools for protein-protein interaction network reconstruction. Incorporating the Bayesian Estimator of Protein-Protein Association Probabilities (BEPro) algorithm into the SEBINI toolkit, we have created a pipeline for structural inference and supplemental analysis of protein- protein interaction networks from sets of mass spectrometry bait-prey experiment data.
