Spite and Cognitive Skills in Preschoolers

Although spiteful preferences play a crucial role in the development of human large-scale cooperation, there is little evidence on spiteful behavior and its determinants in children. We investigate the relationship between children's cognitive skills and spiteful behavior in a sample of 214 preschoolers aged 5-6 and their mothers. Other-regarding behavior of both mothers and children is elicited through four simple allocation decisions. A key advantage of our study is that it is carried out in a household context. Therefore, we have information about both the child's and mother's cognitive and noncognitive skills as well as health and household characteristics. We find that higher cognitive skills are associated with more spiteful behavior in children. This relationship is even more pronounced among boys and possibly reflects differences in competitiveness. Moreover, we find further gender differences depending on the measure of cognitive skills and the degree of spite. These results shed light on the determinants of the development of other-regarding preferences in humans.Spite, other-regarding preferences, cognitive skills, child experiments, household survey studies

Home Value Protection: Final Report

The following report provides an overview of a Home Value Protection (HVP) product to evaluate the practicality of making such a program more widely available and provide background for anyone considering such a plan. The paper is based largely on the Home Value Protection product established in Syracuse New York in 2002, and a number of the authors of this paper participated in the establishment of the Syracuse Home Value Protection program.The paper contains four sections:1: Investor OutreachThis section provides background information about the Syracuse program, the current and potential participants and what roles they might play, a review of a few of the ways such a program could be implemented, and links to various media coverage.2: Index ResearchThe Syracuse program measured changes in house values by a real estate index for the area (rather than individual house sale price), and this section evaluates a number of different index methods using four markets historical data to see how well the different indexes would have performed with a HVP product (had it been available).3: Capital Requirements & PricingThis section provides a model for estimating the pricing requirements and capital required for a program across multiple markets. While not exhaustive, this approach will provide a useful reference and starting point for anyone evaluating investment in such a program.4: Regulatory EnvironmentThis section provides information on some of the regulatory entities across the markets used in the analysis. Due to the variations in the way a HVP product could be implemented, regulations could apply in a variety of ways and this section can only offer a starting point for potential investors or participants

The work value of information

We present quantitative relations between work and information that are valid both for finite sized and internally correlated systems as well in the thermodynamical limit. We suggest work extraction should be viewed as a game where the amount of work an agent can extract depends on how well it can guess the micro-state of the system. In general it depends both on the agent's knowledge and risk-tolerance, because the agent can bet on facts that are not certain and thereby risk failure of the work extraction. We derive strikingly simple expressions for the extractable work in the extreme cases of effectively zero- and arbitrary risk tolerance respectively, thereby enveloping all cases. Our derivation makes a connection between heat engines and the smooth entropy approach. The latter has recently extended Shannon theory to encompass finite sized and internally correlated bit strings, and our analysis points the way to an analogous extension of statistical mechanics.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Human interleukin-1 receptor antagonist is expressed in liver

AbstractUsing PCR and Northern blot analysis, an IL-1 receptor antagonist specific transcript was amplified from HepG2- and liver mRNA, cDNA clones coding for IL-1 receptor antagonist were isolated from a liver cDNA library and sequence comparison revealed complete identity with the secreted, monocytic form of IL-1 receptor antagonist

FAMILY AND COMMUNITY NETWORKS IN MEXICO-U.S. MIGRATION

A household's decision to send migrants is based on information the household has on the expected returns and the costs of migration. Information on migration flows from both family migrant networks and community migrant networks. Direct assistance - in the form of money, housing, transportation, and food - is often provided to migrants by these networks, thus reducing the costs of migration. Using data from a national survey of rural Mexican households, we show the importance of networks in both the decision to migrate and the level of migration. We find that community and family networks are substitutes in the production of information and assistance suggesting that, once migration is well established in a community, family networks become less important. In addition, the development of strong community networks erases the role of household characteristics in migration, allowing those initially least favored to also participate in migration. Results suggest that policies designed to reduce Mexico-U.S. migration should focus on regions where migrant networks are yet weakly developed since, once strong community networks become established, reducing migration would require much higher levels of public investment.Migration, networks, Mexico, Consumer/Household Economics, Labor and Human Capital,

Allelic variation in HLA-B and HLA-C sequences and the evolution of the HLA-B alleles

Several new HLA-B (B8, B51, Bw62)- and HLA-C (Cw6, Cw7)-specific genes were isolated either as genomic cosmid or cDNA clones to study the diversity of HLA antigens. The allele specificities were identified by sequence analysis in comparison with published HLAB and -C sequences, by transfection experiments, and Southern and northern blot analysis using oligonucleotide probes. Comparison of the classical HLA-A, -B, and -C sequences reveals that allele-specific substitutions seem to be rare events. HLA-B51 codes only for one allelespecific residue: arginine at position 81 located on the cd helix, pointing toward the antigen binding site. HLA-B8 contains an acidic substitution in amino acid position 9 on the first central/3 sheet which might affect antigen binding capacity, perhaps in combination with the rare replacement at position 67 (F) on the Alpha-l helix. HLA-B8 shows greatest homology to HLA-Bw42, -Bw41, -B7, and -Bw60 antigens, all of which lack the conserved restriction sites Pst I at position 180 and Sac I at position 131. Both sites associated with amino acid replacements seem to be genetic markers of an evolutionary split of the HLA-B alleles, which is also observed in the leader sequences. HLA-Cw7 shows 98% sequence identity to the JY328 gene. In general, the HLA-C alleles display lower levels of variability in the highly polymorphic regions of the Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 domains, and have more distinct patterns of locusspecific residues in the transmembrane and cytoplasmic domains. Thus we propose a more recent origin for the HLA-C locus