520 research outputs found
An Optimal Size for Rural Tourism Villages with Agglomeration and Club-Good Effects
No full textHelping to sustain a viable rural sector, rural tourism enjoys public support in many countries. We claim that due to club-good and agglomeration externalities in the rural accommodation market, public support should be integrated in a broader local development policy that regulates the number of accommodation units in a locality. To demonstrate this we extended an equilibrium model that accounts for product differentiation and oligopolistic competition to address club-good and agglomeration effects and applied it to data collected in north Israel. We show that under the prevailing regulation, the number of units is by far higher than the social optimum.Community/Rural/Urban Development, International Development, Political Economy,
Demand for On-Farm Permanent Hired Labor in Family Holdings: A Comment
No full textThis comment critically discusses the theoretical and empirical treatment of corner solutions in the analysis of labor decisions on farm households. As more and more labor decisions are analyzed jointly, the more ambitious becomes the theoretical justification of empirical applications. "Cutting corners" in theoretical models puts the validity of empirical conclusions in doubt. In such cases relying on intuitive theoretical justification of empirical modeling is preferred.Community/Rural/Urban Development,
The Role of Cybermediaries in the Hotel Market
No full textThe advent of the Internet changed the way buyers and sellers interact. Although access to information seems unlimited, non-expert agents find it difficult to identify the information they can confidently use. A third-party expert or a cybermediary (an intermediary in the cyberspace) can help sort out the information for the contracting partners. In this paper, we study the case of the online hotel market and the role of the cyber travel agent (CTA). We claim that CTAs encourage hoteliers to exert effort in service quality and provide empirical evidence that these hotels are compensated with a price premium.Cybermediaries, Internet, travel agents, reputation, hotel market, Agricultural Finance, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,
On the Theory and Practice of Water Regulation
No full textWe study water regulation for a schematic water economy representing a wide range of real world situations. A water policy has inter- and intra-temporal components. The first determines the limits on extractions from the naturally replenished sources, given the stochastic nature of recharge processes associated with uncertain precipitation. The intra-temporal regulation is concerned mainly with the allocating of the extracted and produced water among the end-users. The prices that implement the optimal intra-temporal allocation are derived. Regulation issues associated with cost recovery and asymmetric information are discussed.scarcity, pricing, optimal allocation, water economy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, C61, D82, Q11, Q25,
Uncertain Climate Policy and the Green Paradox
No full textUnintended consequences of announcing a climate policy well in advance of its implementation have been studied in a variety of situations. We show that a phenomenon akin to the so-called “Green- Paradox” holds also when the policy implementation date is uncertain. Governments are compelled, by international and domestic pressure, to demonstrate an intention to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Taking actual steps, such as imposing a carbon tax on fossil energy, is a different matter altogether and depends on a host of political considerations. As a result, economic agents often consider the policy implementation date to be uncertain. We show that in the interim period between the policy announcement and its actual implementation the emission of green-house gases increases vis-`a-vis business-as-usual.Climate policy, carbon tax, uncertainty, green paradox, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,
Understanding gene regulation (or not)
No full textNon UBCUnreviewedAuthor affiliation: University of ChicagoFacult
False positive peaks in ChIP-seq and other sequencing-based functional assays caused by unannotated high copy number regions
No full textAbstract
Motivation: Sequencing-based assays such as ChIP-seq, DNase-seq and MNase-seq have become important tools for genome annotation. In these assays, short sequence reads enriched for loci of interest are mapped to a reference genome to determine their origin. Here, we consider whether false positive peak calls can be caused by particular type of error in the reference genome: multicopy sequences which have been incorrectly assembled and collapsed into a single copy.
Results: Using sequencing data from the 1000 Genomes Project, we systematically scanned the human genome for regions of high sequencing depth. These regions are highly enriched for erroneously inferred transcription factor binding sites, positions of nucleosomes and regions of open chromatin. We suggest a simple masking procedure to remove these regions and reduce false positive calls.
Availability: Files for masking out these regions are available at eqtl.uchicago.edu
Contact: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.</jats:p
Impact of regulatory variation across human iPSCs and differentiated cells
No full textInduced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are an essential tool for studying cellular differentiation and cell types that are otherwise difficult to access. We investigated the use of iPSCs and iPSC-derived cells to study the impact of genetic variation across different cell types and as models for studies of complex disease. We established a panel of iPSCs from 58 well- studied Yoruba lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs); 14 of these lines were further differentiated into cardiomyocytes. We characterized regulatory variation across individuals and cell types by measuring gene expression, chromatin accessibility and DNA methylation. Regulatory variation between individuals is lower in iPSCs than in the differentiated cell types, consistent with the intuition that developmental processes are generally canalized. While most cell type-specific regulatory quantitative trait loci (QTLs) lie in chromatin that is open only in the affected cell types, we found that 20% of cell type-specific QTLs are in shared open chromatin. Finally, we developed a deep neural network to predict open chromatin regions from DNA sequence alone and were able to use the sequences of segregating haplotypes to predict the effects of common SNPs on cell type-specific chromatin accessibility.Non UBCUnreviewedAuthor affiliation: University of ChicagoFacult
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