Public Sector Personnel Economics: Wages, Promotions, and the Competence-Control Trade-off

We model personnel policies in public agencies, examining how wages and promotion standards can partially offset a fundamental contracting problem: the inability of public sector workers to contract on performance, and the inability of political masters to contract on forbearance from meddling. Despite the dual contracting problem, properly constructed personnel policies can encourage intrinsically motivated public sector employees to invest in expertise, seek promotion, remain in the public sector, and develop policy projects. However, doing so requires internal personnel policies that sort slackers from zealots. Personnel policies that accomplish this task are quite different in agencies where acquired expertise has little value in the private sector, and agencies where acquired expertise commands a premium in the private sector. Finally, even with well-designed personnel policies, there remains an inescapable trade-off between political control and expertise acquisition

Elections, Ideology, and Turnover in the U.S. Federal Government

A defining feature of public sector employment is the regular change in elected leadership. Yet, we know little about how elections influence public sector careers. We describe how elections alter policy outputs and disrupt the influence of civil servants over agency decisions. These changes shape the career choices of employees motivated by policy, influence, and wages. Using new Office of Personnel Management data on the careers of millions of federal employees between 1988 and 2011, we evaluate how elections influence employee turnover decisions. We find that presidential elections increase departure rates of career senior employees, particularly in agencies with divergent views relative to the new president and at the start of presidential terms. We also find suggestive evidence that vacancies in high-level positions after elections may induce lower-level executives to stay longer in hopes of advancing. We conclude with implications of our findings for public policy, presidential politics, and public management

Quitting in Protest: A Theory of Presidential Policy Making and Agency Response

This paper examines the effects of centralized presidential policy-making, implemented through unilateral executive action, on the willingness of bureaucrats to exert effort and stay in the government. Extending models in organizational economics, we show that policy initiative by the president is a substitute for initiative by civil servants. Yet, total effort is enhanced when both work. Presidential centralization of policy often impels policy-oriented bureaucrats ( zealots ) to quit rather than implement presidential policies they dislike. Those most likely to quit are a range of moderate bureaucrats. More extreme bureaucrats may be willing to wait out an opposition president in the hope of tempering future policy when an allied president is elected. As control of the White House alternates between ideologically opposed extreme presidents, policy-minded moderates are stripped from bureaucratic agencies leaving only policy extremists or poorly performing slackers. These departures degrade policy initiative in moderate agencies

Sequence analysis of the cis-regulatory regions of the bithorax complex of Drosophila

The bithorax complex (BX-C) of Drosophila, one of two complexes that act as master regulators of the body plan of the fly, has now been entirely sequenced and comprises approximate to 315,000 bp, only 1.4% of which codes for protein. Analysis of this sequence reveals significantly overrepresented DNA motifs of unknown, as well as known, functions in the nonprotein-coding portion of the sequence. The following types of motifs in that portion are analyzed: (i) concatamers of mono-, di-, and trinucleotides; (ii) tightly clustered hexanucleotides (spaced less than or equal to 5 bases apart); (iii) direct and reverse repeats longer than 20 bp; and (iv) a number of motifs known from biochemical studies to play a role in the regulation of the BX-C. The hexanucleotide AGATAC is remarkably overrepresented and is surmised to play a role in chromosome pairing. The positions of sites of highly overrepresented motifs are plotted for those that occur at more than five sites in the sequence, when <0.5 case is expected. Expected values are based on a third-order Markov chain, which is the optimal order for representing the BXCALL sequence

Three-dimensional cell to tissue assembly process

The present invention relates a 3-dimensional cell to tissue and maintenance process, more particularly to methods of culturing cells in a culture environment, either in space or in a gravity field, with minimum fluid shear stress, freedom for 3-dimensional spatial orientation of the suspended particles and localization of particles with differing or similar sedimentation properties in a similar spatial region

Experiments in Diversifying Flickr Result Sets

The 2013 MediaEval Retrieving Diverse Social Images Task looked to tackling the problem of search result diversification of Flickr results sets formed from queries about geographic places and landmarks. In this paper we describe our approach of using a min-max similarity diversifier coupled with pre-filters and a reranker. We also demonstrate a number of novel features for measuring similarity to use in the diversification step

Solution Processing of Two-Dimensional Black Phosphorus

This feature article discusses solution-phase routes to semiconducting two-dimensional black phosphorus (‘phosphorene’) and highlights challenges in processing the material as well as illuminating new avenues and opportunities in the area.</p

Identifying the Geographic Location of an Image with a Multimodal Probability Density Function

There is a wide array of online photographic content that is not geotagged. Algorithms for efficient and accurate geographical estimation of an image are needed to geolocate these photos. This paper presents a general model for using both textual metadata and visual features of photos to automatically place them on a world map