Firms' Main Market, Human Capital and Wages

Recent international trade literature emphasizes two features in characterizing the current patterns of trade: efficiency heterogeneity at the firm level and quality differentiation. This paper explores human capital and wage differences across firms in that context. We build a partial equilibrium model predicting that firms selling in more-remote markets employ higher human capital and pay higher wages to employees within each education group. The channel linking these variables is firms’ endogenous choice of quality. Predictions are tested using Spanish employer-employee matched data that classify firms according to four main destination markets: local, national, European Union, and rest of the World. Employees’ average education is increasing in the remoteness of firm’s main output market. Market–destination wage premia are large, increasing in the remoteness of the market, and increasing in individual education. These results suggest that increasing globalization may play a significant role in raising wage inequality within and across education groups

The regional economic impact of more graduates in the labour market: a “micro-to-macro” analysis for Scotland

This paper explores the system-wide impact of graduates on the regional economy. Graduates enjoy a significant wage premium, often interpreted as reflecting their greater productivity relative to non-graduates. If this is so there is a clear and direct supply-side impact of HEI activities on regional economies. We use an HEI-disaggregated computable general equilibrium model of Scotland to estimate the impact of the growing proportion of graduates in the Scottish labour force that is implied by the current participation rate and demographic change, taking the graduate wage premium in Scotland as an indicator of productivity enhancement. While the detailed results vary with alternative assumptions about the extent to which wage premia reflect productivity, they do suggest that the long-term supply-side impacts of HEIs provide a significant boost to regional GDP. Furthermore, the results suggest that the supply-side impacts of HEIs are likely to be more important than the expenditure impacts that are the focus of most HEI impact studies

Mineralization of Acephate, a Recalcitrant Organophosphate Insecticide Is Initiated by a Pseudomonad in Environmental Samples

An aerobic bacterium capable of breaking down the pesticide acephate (O,S-dimethyl acetyl phosphoramidothioic acid) was isolated from activated sludge collected from a pesticide manufacturing facility. A phylogenetic tree based on the 16 S rRNA gene sequence determined that the isolate lies within the Pseudomonads. The isolate was able to grow in the presence of acephate at concentrations up to 80 mM, with maximum growth at 40 mM. HPLC and LC-MS/MS analysis of spent medium from growth experiments and a resting cell assay detected the accumulation of methamidophos and acetate, suggesting initial hydrolysis of the amide linkage found between these two moieties. As expected, the rapid decline in acephate was coincident with the accumulation of methamidophos. Methamidophos concentrations were maintained over a period of days, without evidence of further metabolism or cell growth by the cultures. Considering this limitation, strains such as described in this work can promote the first step of acephate mineralization in soil microbial communities

Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors Globally Enhance H3/H4 Tail Acetylation Without Affecting H3 Lysine 56 Acetylation

Histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi) represent a promising avenue for cancer therapy. We applied mass spectrometry (MS) to determine the impact of clinically relevant HDACi on global levels of histone acetylation. Intact histone profiling revealed that the HDACi SAHA and MS-275 globally increased histone H3 and H4 acetylation in both normal diploid fibroblasts and transformed human cells. Histone H3 lysine 56 acetylation (H3K56ac) recently elicited much interest and controversy due to its potential as a diagnostic and prognostic marker for a broad diversity of cancers. Using quantitative MS, we demonstrate that H3K56ac is much less abundant than previously reported in human cells. Unexpectedly, in contrast to H3/H4 N-terminal tail acetylation, H3K56ac did not increase in response to inhibitors of each class of HDACs. In addition, we demonstrate that antibodies raised against H3K56ac peptides cross-react against H3 N-terminal tail acetylation sites that carry sequence similarity to residues flanking H3K56

Are Immigrants Paid Less for Education?

This paper is on measuring the gap in returns to education between foreign-born and native workers in France, Germany, and Austria and investigates the extent to which this gap can be explained by a mis-match between the actual and the years of schooling typical for a given occupation. The return to usual years of schooling across different occupations is found to be higher than that for actual years of education. In the case of correctly matched workers who have the 'typical' education in a certain occupation, there is no additional reward in earnings for natives compared to foreign workers. Immigrants, however, have significantly lower wage returns in being over-educated than natives but are penalized less for being under-educated