Trade impacts on skill formation: welfare improvements accompanied by rises in inequality

In this paper, we focus on the skill formation when considering the trade impacts on labor markets. Although workers are identical as unskilled labor, they differ in their productivity as skilled. Workers become skilled by incurring the training costs. Introducing the above settings into a trade model with monopolistic competition, we show that trade opening enhances skill formation. This is because trade enriches the varieties of differentiated goods and raises the utility of a worker for a given income. This effect works stronger for the skilled than for the unskilled although it makes all agents better off, leading to higher skill formation. However, it may be accompanied by rises in the real wage disparity between skilled and unskilled workers and by rises in the skilled wage inequality. Finally, we examine the possible effects of foreign direct investment on the labor market structure as well.trade, skill formation, monopolistic competition, wage inequality, FDI

Evolution of Small Scale Cosmological Baryon Perturbations and Matter Transfer Functions

The evolution of small scale cosmological perturbations is carefully re-examined. Through the interaction with photons via electrons, baryon perturbations show interesting behavior in some physical scales. Characteristic features of the evolution of baryon density fluctuations are discussed. In CDM models, it is found a power-law growing phase of the small-scale baryon density fluctuations, which is characterized by the terminal velocity, after the diffusion (Silk) damping and before the decoupling epoch. Then, a transfer function for total matter density fluctuations is studied by taking into account those physical processes. An analytic transfer function is presented, which is applicable for the entire range up to a solar mass scale in the high$-z$ universe, and it is suitable also to the high baryon fraction models.Comment: 29 pages, LaTex, Submitted to Astrophysical Journa

History and future perspectives of barley genomics

Barley (Hordeum vulgare), one of the most widely cultivated cereal crops, possesses a large genome of 5.1Gbp. Through various international collaborations, the genome has recently been sequenced and assembled at the chromosome-scale by exploiting available genetic and genomic resources. Many wild and cultivated barley accessions have been collected and preserved around the world. These accessions are crucial to obtain diverse natural and induced barley variants. The barley bioresource project aims to investigate the diversity of this crop based on purified seed and DNA samples of a large number of collected accessions. The long-term goal of this project is to analyse the genome sequences of major barley accessions worldwide. In view of technical limitations, a strategy has been employed to establish the exome structure of a selected number of accessions and to perform high-quality chromosome-scale assembly of the genomes of several major representative accessions. For the future project, an efficient annotation pipeline is essential for establishing the function of genomes and genes as well as for using this information for sequence-based digital barley breeding. In this article, the author reviews the existing barley resources along with their applications and discuss possible future directions of research in barley genomics