Stimulate This!–But How?

When private spending plummeted in 2008, economists’ kneejerk response was to plug the gap with new government expenditures. Massive public spending not related to war had not been tried since the 1930’s. But the depth of the crisis, an abundance of willing constituent/recipients, and the imperatives of Ppresident Obama’s campaign promises moved the Congress to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). Hhow effective will this first peacetime experiment in Keynesian pump priming be? It’s too soon to say, but Connecticut’s experience to date illustrates the ARRA’s priorities, and can tell us something about the difference it has made in two big sectors, education and transportation.

Does funding of pensions stimulate economic growth?

Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press.Debate over superiority of pension funding over pay-as-you-go links notably to the question whether funding improves economic performance sufficiently to generate additional resources to meet the needs of an ageing population. To address this issue, we design a modified Cobb–Douglas production function with pension assets as a shift factor, and investigate the direct link between pension assets and economic growth employing a dataset covering up to 38 countries, using a variety of appropriate econometric methods. We find positive results for both OECD countries and Emerging Market Economies (EMEs), with consistent evidence for a larger effect for EMEs than OECD countries

Does the Badal optometer stimulate accommodation accurately?

Postprint (author's final draft

When Does Patent Protection Stimulate Innovation?

Patents act as an incentive to innovate. However, as this paper argues, patents can lead the patent holder to rest on his laurels and at the same time discourage some innovators from innovating, reducing knowledge spillovers. The combined result of the above suggests an inverse U relationship between patent protection and output growth.Intellectual property, patent races, growth.

Stimulate Car Buyers, Not Car Makers.

Should Uncle Sam do whatever is necessary to prevent General Motors, Ford and Chrysler from bankruptcy? If these were normal times, we suspect that most mainstream economists (and many mainstream legislators) would be inclined to let their stockholders, creditors and unions suffer the consequences of decades of myopic decisions. But with financial markets still in turmoil and the economy on the cusp of a nasty recession, these are hardly normal times.Technology and Industry

Exosomes released from breast cancer carcinomas stimulate cell movement

For metastasis to occur cells must communicate with to their local environment to initiate growth and invasion. Exosomes have emerged as an important mediator of cell-to-cell signalling through the transfer of molecules such as mRNAs, microRNAs, and proteins between cells. Exosomes have been proposed to act as regulators of cancer progression. Here, we study the effect of exosomes on cell migration, an important step in metastasis. We performed cell migration assays, endocytosis assays, and exosome proteomic profiling on exosomes released from three breast cancer cell lines that model progressive stages of metastasis. Results from these experiments suggest: (1) exosomes promote cell migration and (2) the signal is stronger from exosomes isolated from cells with higher metastatic potentials; (3) exosomes are endocytosed at the same rate regardless of the cell type; (4) exosomes released from cells show differential enrichment of proteins with unique protein signatures of both identity and abundance. We conclude that breast cancer cells of increasing metastatic potential secrete exosomes with distinct protein signatures that proportionally increase cell movement and suggest that released exosomes could play an active role in metastasis

Job Sharing: Tax Credits to Prevent Layoffs and Stimulate Employment

The unemployment rate is expected to average 10.2 percent for 2010, 9.1 percent for 2011, and 7.3 percent for 2012. With this in mind, this Issue Brief describes a job sharing tax credit, designed to provide a quick and substantial boost to the economy. It would use tax dollars to pay firms to shorten the typical workweek, while keeping pay constant. This should cause employers to want to hire additional workers. A rough estimate of the impact of this tax credit is between 1.3 and 2.7 million jobs created