Social Identity and Inequality--The Impact of China’s Hukou System

We conduct an experimental study to investigate the causal impact of social identity on individuals? response to economic incentives. We focus on China?s decades old household registration system, or the hukou institution, which categorizes citizens into urban and rural residents, and favors the former over the latter in resource allocation. Our results indicate that making individuals? hukou status salient and public significantly reduces the performance of rural migrant students on an incentivized cognitive task by 10 percent. This leads to a leftward shift of their earnings distribution – the proportion of rural migrants below the 25th earnings percentile increases significantly by almost 19 percentage points. However, among non-migrants the proportion with earnings below the 25th percentile drops by 5 percentage points, and the proportion above the 75th percentile increases by almost 8 percentage points, albeit insignificantly. The results demonstrate the impact of institutionally imposed social identity on individuals? intrinsic response to incentives, and consequently on widening income inequality.social identity, hukou, inequality, field experiment, China

Characterization of the effects of 3,3'-diindolylmethane (DIM) in the TRAMP mouse prostate cancer model and DIM's interaction with estrogen receptor signaling

3,3'- diindolylmethane (DIM) is an acid -derived compound formed during the digestion of indole-3-carbinol (I3C), which is one of the main compounds in cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, cabbage and kale. Studies indicate that the cancer protective effects of cruciferous vegetables and I3C partially rely on DIM, which is the bioactive form of I3C in the body, and DIM has been shown to interact with several signaling pathways in cancer. However, the primary molecular working mechanism of DIM is still not clear. In this dissertation, we hypothesize that DIM works through estrogen receptor (ER) signaling to inhibit prostate cancer. We focus on DIM's interaction with ER, as well as its effects on preventing advanced prostate cancer and weight gain in the TRansgenic Adenocarcinoma of Mouse Prostate (TRAMP) model.Includes bibliographical reference

Elastography: modality-specific approaches, clinical applications, and research horizons

Manual palpation has been used for centuries to provide a relative indication of tissue health and disease. Engineers have sought to make these assessments increasingly quantitative and accessible within daily clinical practice. Since many of the developed techniques involve image-based quantification of tissue deformation in response to an applied force (i.e., "elastography”), such approaches fall squarely within the domain of the radiologist. While commercial elastography analysis software is becoming increasingly available for clinical use, the internal workings of these packages often remain a "black box,” with limited guidance on how to usefully apply the methods toward a meaningful diagnosis. The purpose of the present review article is to introduce some important approaches to elastography that have been developed for the most widely used clinical imaging modalities (e.g., ultrasound, MRI), to provide a basic sense of the underlying physical principles, and to discuss both current and potential (musculoskeletal) applications. The article also seeks to provide a perspective on emerging approaches that are rapidly developing in the research laboratory (e.g., optical coherence tomography, fibered confocal microscopy), and which may eventually gain a clinical foothol

The Spillover Effects of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) Integration and Data Sharing on Opioids Prescribing Rate

To reduce the supply of opioids to non-medical users in the U.S., many states have implemented Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) to collect patients’ opioids purchase history and provide physicians this information. We study the impact of two PDMP-enhancement policies: 1) within-state IS integration, which aims to integrate a state’s PDMP into local hospitals’ health information technologies (HITs), and 2) interstates IS data sharing, which facilitates the interoperability of PDMP data across states line. We construct a county-level panel dataset from 2006 to 2017. First, we do not find evidence that PDMP integration could reduce the focal state’s regional opioids prescribing rate; instead, we find that a focal state\u27s PDMP integration triggers doctor shopping phenomenon by increasing the opioids prescribing rate of counties located in neighboring states, suggesting the negative IT spillover effect. Second, we find nuanced evidence that PDMP interstate data sharing can mitigate this negative spillover effect, showing the positive information externality