Endogenous Trade Policies in a Developing Economy

Consider a small developing economy with a manufacturing sector opened to international trade, and an agricultural sector having limited, not to say any, access to world markets. We modify the Grossman and Helpman's influence-driven model of trade policy formation to allow for an endogenously determined wage rate in a three-sector economy where the manufacturing sector can lobby policy makers for favorable policies. Beside protectionist policies, namely an import tariff or an export subsidy, we show that the owners of the specific factor in agriculture - a non-lobby group - have to bear a consumption tax imposed on their products. This would further strengthen the trade protectionist measure, and imply possibly undesirable general equilibrium repercussions: there will be a reallocation of labor to the manufacturing sector which enjoys an output expansion, an output contraction in the agricultural sector, and a lower workers' "real" income.

Toward Sustainability: Technology Transition and Endogenous Population Growth

In order to reach the state of economic sustainability, the problem of technology transition emphasizes the possibility of substituting for the exhaustible resource with an everlasting source of energy input. This paper aims at providing an analysis of this problem in an overlapping-generation model where the population is not a datum, but endogenous in the sense that it results from fertility decisions made by economic agents. First, we provide a new proof of the existence of competitive equilibrium under infinite time horizon. Here the difficulty lies in the fact that the market size is itself endogenous, because fertility - hence the population - is an individual decision at every point in time. Second, and perhaps most interestingly, the oil stock might not be entirely depleted, and the unused part in situ may serve the role of storing value for wealth transmission over time, just as money. But in contrast with paper money, which has no intrinsic value, leaving productive oil in situ as a bubble certainly adds another dimension to the inefficiency of overlapping-generation model. In this case, there are infinitely many equilibria as well as many steady states, depending on the data that characterize the initial state of the economy. Moreover, the convergence to some steady state, far from being simply monotone, might exhibit cyclical behavior, such as damped oscillation, limit cycles, etc.Endogenous Population, Overlapping Generations, Oil Bubble, Dynamic Equilibria, Complex Dynamics

An Integrated TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource to Drive High-Quality Survival Outcome Analytics

For a decade, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program collected clinicopathologic annotation data along with multi-platform molecular profiles of more than 11,000 human tumors across 33 different cancer types. TCGA clinical data contain key features representing the democratized nature of the data collection process. To ensure proper use of this large clinical dataset associated with genomic features, we developed a standardized dataset named the TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource (TCGA-CDR), which includes four major clinical outcome endpoints. In addition to detailing major challenges and statistical limitations encountered during the effort of integrating the acquired clinical data, we present a summary that includes endpoint usage recommendations for each cancer type. These TCGA-CDR findings appear to be consistent with cancer genomics studies independent of the TCGA effort and provide opportunities for investigating cancer biology using clinical correlates at an unprecedented scale. Analysis of clinicopathologic annotations for over 11,000 cancer patients in the TCGA program leads to the generation of TCGA Clinical Data Resource, which provides recommendations of clinical outcome endpoint usage for 33 cancer types

Driver Fusions and Their Implications in the Development and Treatment of Human Cancers.

Gene fusions represent an important class of somatic alterations in cancer. We systematically investigated fusions in 9,624 tumors across 33 cancer types using multiple fusion calling tools. We identified a total of 25,664 fusions, with a 63% validation rate. Integration of gene expression, copy number, and fusion annotation data revealed that fusions involving oncogenes tend to exhibit increased expression, whereas fusions involving tumor suppressors have the opposite effect. For fusions involving kinases, we found 1,275 with an intact kinase domain, the proportion of which varied significantly across cancer types. Our study suggests that fusions drive the development of 16.5% of cancer cases and function as the sole driver in more than 1% of them. Finally, we identified druggable fusions involving genes such as TMPRSS2, RET, FGFR3, ALK, and ESR1 in 6.0% of cases, and we predicted immunogenic peptides, suggesting that fusions may provide leads for targeted drug and immune therapy

Measurement of the azimuthal anisotropy of Y(1S) and Y(2S) mesons in PbPb collisions at √S^{S}NN = 5.02 TeV

The second-order Fourier coefficients (υ$_{2}$) characterizing the azimuthal distributions of Υ(1S) and Υ(2S) mesons produced in PbPb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV are studied. The Υmesons are reconstructed in their dimuon decay channel, as measured by the CMS detector. The collected data set corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 1.7 nb$^{-1}$. The scalar product method is used to extract the υ$_{2}$ coefficients of the azimuthal distributions. Results are reported for the rapidity range |y| < 2.4, in the transverse momentum interval 0 < p$_{T}$ < 50 GeV/c, and in three centrality ranges of 10–30%, 30–50% and 50–90%. In contrast to the J/ψ mesons, the measured υ$_{2}$ values for the Υ mesons are found to be consistent with zero