Sectoral Shifts and Unemployment in Interwar Britain

This paper measures the importance of sectoral shifts, as against aggregate shocks and changes in search intensity, in explaining the persistent high unemployment that prevailed in interwar Britain. It develops a new measure of sectoral shifts that captures the arrival of information about reallocation shocks by using the cross-section variation in sectoral stock market excess returns over time. The cross-section variation series accounts for roughly one-quarter of the average level of aggregate unemployment during the interwar period, even after controlling for a variety of shocks to aggregate demand, and for roughly one-half of the variation in unemployment, suggesting an important role for sectoral shifts.

Learning is enhanced by tailoring instruction to individual genetic differences.

It is widely argued that personalized instruction based on individual differences in learning styles or genetic predispositions could improve learning outcomes. However, this proposition has resisted clear demonstration in human studies, where it is difficult to control experience and quantify outcomes. Here, we take advantage of the tractable nature of vocal learning in songbirds (Lonchura striata domestica) to test the idea that matching instruction to individual genetic predispositions can enhance learning. We use both cross-fostering and computerized instruction with synthetic songs to demonstrate that matching the tutor song to individual predispositions can improve learning across genetic backgrounds. Moreover, we find that optimizing instruction in this fashion can equalize learning differences across individuals that might otherwise be construed as genetically determined. Our results demonstrate potent, synergistic interactions between experience and genetics in shaping song, and indicate the likely importance of such interactions for other complex learned behaviors

The Political Economy of Declining Industries: Senescent Industry Collapse Revisited

One of the most robust empirical regularities in the political economy of trade is the persistence of protection. This paper explains persistent protection in terms of the interaction between industry adjustment, lobbying, and the political response. Faced with a trade shock, owners of industry-specific factors can undertake costly adjustment, or they can lobby politicians for protection and thereby mitigate the need for adjustment. The choice depends on the returns from adjusting relative to lobbying. By introducing an explicit lobbying process, it can be shown that the level of tariffs is an increasing function of past tariffs. Since current adjustment diminishes future lobbying intensity, and protection reduces adjustment, current protection raises future protection. This simple lobbying feedback effect has an important dynamic resource allocation effect: declining industries contract more slowly over time and never fully adjust. In addition, the model makes clear that the type of collapse predicted by Cassing and Hillman (1986) is only possible under special conditions, such as a fixed cost to lobbying. The paper also considers the symmetric case of lobbying in growing industries.

Starlight Waltz :

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-ps/3193/thumbnail.jp

Vocal learning promotes patterned inhibitory connectivity.

Skill learning is instantiated by changes to functional connectivity within premotor circuits, but whether the specificity of learning depends on structured changes to inhibitory circuitry remains unclear. We used slice electrophysiology to measure connectivity changes associated with song learning in the avian analog of primary motor cortex (robust nucleus of the arcopallium, RA) in Bengalese Finches. Before song learning, fast-spiking interneurons (FSIs) densely innervated glutamatergic projection neurons (PNs) with apparently random connectivity. After learning, there was a profound reduction in the overall strength and number of inhibitory connections, but this was accompanied by a more than two-fold enrichment in reciprocal FSI-PN connections. Moreover, in singing birds, we found that pharmacological manipulations of RA's inhibitory circuitry drove large shifts in learned vocal features, such as pitch and amplitude, without grossly disrupting the song. Our results indicate that skill learning establishes nonrandom inhibitory connectivity, and implicates this patterning in encoding specific features of learned movements

Sounds From St. John : Polka Staccato

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-ps/2719/thumbnail.jp

Starlight Waltz

Illustration of two women dancing; One woman is touching a star while the other is grabbing her armhttps://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/cht-sheet-music/7710/thumbnail.jp

A Simple Theory of Multinational Corporations and Trade with a Trade-Off Between Proximity and Concentration

This paper develops a two-sector, two-country model, where firms in a differentiated products sector choose between exporting and multinational expansion as alternative modes of foreign market penetration, based on a trade-off between proximity and concentration advantages. The differentiated sector is characterized by multi-stage production, with increasing returns at the corporate level associated with some activity such as R&D, scale economies at the plant level, and a variable transport cost that rises with distance. A pure multinational equilibrium, where two-way horizontal expansion across borders completely supplants two-way trade in differentiated products, is possible even in the absence of factor proportion differences. It is more likely the greater are transport costs relative to fixed plant costs, and the greater are increasing returns at the corporate level relative to the plant level. The model also establishes conditions for a mixed equilibrium, in which national and multinational firms coexist.