This book analyzes William of Ockham's early theory of property rights alongside those of his fellow dissident Franciscans, paying careful attention to each friar's use of Roman and civil law, which ...provided the conceptual building blocks of the poverty controversy.
Using data from a field experiment in Kenya, we document that providing individuals with simple informal savings technologies can substantially increase investment in preventative health and reduce ...vulnerability to health shocks. Simply providing a safe place to keep money was sufficient to increase health savings by 66 percent. Adding an earmarking feature was only helpful when funds were put toward emergencies, or for individuals that are frequently taxed by friends and relatives. Group-based savings and credit schemes had very large effects.
In recent years, Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has revolutionized social science by providing a way to collect behavioral data with unprecedented speed and efficiency. However, MTurk was not intended to be ...a research tool, and many common research tasks are difficult and time-consuming to implement as a result. TurkPrime was designed as a research platform that integrates with MTurk and supports tasks that are common to the social and behavioral sciences. Like MTurk, TurkPrime is an Internet-based platform that runs on any browser and does not require any downloads or installation. Tasks that can be implemented with TurkPrime include: excluding participants on the basis of previous participation, longitudinal studies, making changes to a study while it is running, automating the approval process, increasing the speed of data collection, sending bulk e-mails and bonuses, enhancing communication with participants, monitoring dropout and engagement rates, providing enhanced sampling options, and many others. This article describes how TurkPrime saves time and resources, improves data quality, and allows researchers to design and implement studies that were previously very difficult or impossible to carry out on MTurk. TurkPrime is designed as a research tool whose aim is to improve the quality of the crowdsourcing data collection process. Various features have been and continue to be implemented on the basis of feedback from the research community. TurkPrime is a free research platform.
Does limited access to formal savings services impede business growth in poor countries? To shed light on this question, we randomized access to noninterest-bearing bank accounts among two types of ...self-employed individuals in rural Kenya: market vendors (who are mostly women) and men working as bicycle taxi drivers. Despite large withdrawal fees, a substantial share of market women used the accounts, were able to save more, and increased their productive investment and private expenditures. We see no impact for bicycletaxi drivers. These results imply significant barriers to savings and investment for market women in our study context.
We model farmers as facing small fixed costs of purchasing fertilizer and assume some are stochastically present biased and not fully sophisticated about this bias. Such farmers may procrastinate, ...postponing fertilizer purchases until later periods, when they may be too impatient to purchase fertilizer. Consistent with the model, many farmers in Western Kenya fail to take advantage of apparently profitable fertilizer investments, but they do invest in response to small, time-limited discounts on the cost of acquiring fertilizer (free delivery) just after harvest. Calibration suggests that this policy can yield higher welfare than either laissez-faire policies or heavy subsidies.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is widely used by behavioral scientists to recruit research participants. MTurk offers advantages over traditional student subject pools, but it also has important ...limitations. In particular, the MTurk population is small and potentially overused, and some groups of interest to behavioral scientists are underrepresented and difficult to recruit. Here we examined whether online research panels can avoid these limitations. Specifically, we compared sample composition, data quality (measured by effect sizes, internal reliability, and attention checks), and the non-naivete of participants recruited from MTurk and Prime Panels—an aggregate of online research panels. Prime Panels participants were more diverse in age, family composition, religiosity, education, and political attitudes. Prime Panels participants also reported less exposure to classic protocols and produced larger effect sizes, but only after screening out several participants who failed a screening task. We conclude that online research panels offer a unique opportunity for research, yet one with some important trade-offs.
The collection of proteins secreted from a cell—the secretome—is of particular interest in cancer pathophysiology due to its diagnostic potential and role in tumorigenesis. However, cancer secretome ...studies are often limited to one tissue or cancer type or focus on biomarker prediction without exploring the associated functions. We therefore conducted a pan-cancer analysis of secretome gene expression changes to identify candidate diagnostic biomarkers and to investigate the underlying biological function of these changes. Using transcriptomic data spanning 32 cancer types and 30 healthy tissues, we quantified the relative diagnostic potential of secretome proteins for each cancer. Furthermore, we offer a potential mechanism by which cancer cells relieve secretory pathway stress by decreasing the expression of tissue-specific genes, thereby facilitating the secretion of proteins promoting invasion and proliferation. These results provide a more systematic understanding of the cancer secretome, facilitating its use in diagnostics and its targeting for therapeutic development.
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•Secreted proteins with elevated expression in tumors comprise potential biomarkers•Secretome expression changes common to many cancer types tend to be decreases•Common expression increases include functions such as extracellular matrix turnover•Tumors appear to reduce their tissue-specific secretome to relieve secretory stress
Robinson et al. compare secreted protein expression changes across different cancer types and healthy tissues to identify candidate biomarkers likely to be detectable in biological fluids. Functional analyses reveal a pattern whereby cancers decrease the expression of secreted proteins responsible for tissue of origin function in favor of those supporting proliferation and invasion.
We experimentally test the impact of expanding access to basic bank accounts in Uganda, Malawi, and Chile. Over two years, 17, 10, and 3 percent of treatment individuals made five or more deposits, ...respectively. Average monthly deposits in treatment accounts were sizable among users, corresponding to the seventy-ninth, ninety-first, and ninety-sixth percentiles of baseline savings. Survey data show no discernible intention-to-treat effects on savings or any downstream outcomes, though we cannot reject large effect sizes for active users. Results suggest that policies merely focused on expanding access to basic accounts are unlikely to improve welfare noticeably on average.
In this study, we examined data quality among Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers based in India, and the effect of monetary compensation on their data quality. Recent studies have shown that work ...quality is independent of compensation rates, and that compensation primarily affects the quantity but not the quality of work. However, the results of these studies were generally based on compensation rates below the minimum wage, and far below a level that was likely to play a practical role in the lives of workers. In this study, compensation rates were set around the minimum wage in India. To examine data quality, we developed the squared discrepancy procedure, which is a task-based quality assurance approach for survey tasks whose goal is to identify inattentive participants. We showed that data quality is directly affected by compensation rates for India-based participants. We also found that data were of a lesser quality among India-based than among US participants, even when optimal payment strategies were utilized. We additionally showed that the motivation of MTurk users has shifted, and that monetary compensation is now reported to be the primary reason for working on MTurk, among both US- and India-based workers. Overall, MTurk is a constantly evolving marketplace where multiple factors can contribute to data quality. High-quality survey data can be acquired on MTurk among India-based participants when an appropriate pay rate is provided and task-specific quality assurance procedures are utilized.
The energy metabolism of the brain is poorly understood partly due to the complex morphology of neurons and fluctuations in ATP demand over time. To investigate this, we used metabolic models that ...estimate enzyme usage per pathway, enzyme utilization over time, and enzyme transportation to evaluate how these parameters and processes affect ATP costs for enzyme synthesis and transportation. Our models show that the total enzyme maintenance energy expenditure of the human body depends on how glycolysis and mitochondrial respiration are distributed both across and within cell types in the brain. We suggest that brain metabolism is optimized to minimize the ATP maintenance cost by distributing the different ATP generation pathways in an advantageous way across cell types and potentially also across synapses within the same cell. Our models support this hypothesis by predicting export of lactate from both neurons and astrocytes during peak ATP demand, reproducing results from experimental measurements reported in the literature. Furthermore, our models provide potential explanation for parts of the astrocyte-neuron lactate shuttle theory, which is recapitulated under some conditions in the brain, while contradicting other aspects of the theory. We conclude that enzyme usage per pathway, enzyme utilization over time, and enzyme transportation are important factors for defining the optimal distribution of ATP production pathways, opening a broad avenue to explore in brain metabolism.
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