PERFECT SUBSTITUTES: A NOTE ON THE ALCHIAN-ALLEN HYPOTHESIS

Alchian and Allen hypothesized that a country will export high rather than low quality goods. Here we show that if the inherent attributes of the commodities are identical the country will only export the high-quality good.transport costs, patterns of trade, product quality, International Relations/Trade, F1,

A study of factors related to over-achievers and under-achievers of average ability at the elementary level.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

General linear and functor cohomology over finite fields

In recent years, there has been considerable success in computing Ext-groups of modular representations associated to the general linear group by relating this problem to one of computing Ext-groups in functor categories. In this paper, we extend our ability to make such Ext-group calculations by establishing several fundamental results. Throughout this paper, we work over fields of positive characteristic p.Comment: 66 pages, published version, abstract added in migratio

The short-lived MATα2 transcriptional regulator is ubiquitinated in vivo

The substrates of ubiquitin-dependent proteolytic pathways include both damaged or otherwise abnormal proteins and undamaged proteins that are naturally short-lived. Few specific examples of the latter class have been identified, however. Previous work has shown that the cell type-specific MAT-alpha-2 repressor of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is an extremely short-lived protein. We now demonstrate that alpha-2 is conjugated to ubiquitin in vivo. More than one lysine residue of alpha-2 can be joined to ubiquitin, and some of the ubiquitin moieties form a Lys48-linked multiubiquitin chain. Overexpression of degradation-impaired ubiquitin variants was used to show that at least a significant fraction of alpha-2 degradation is dependent on its ubiquitination

Reduction of dynamical biochemical reaction networks in computational biology

Biochemical networks are used in computational biology, to model the static and dynamical details of systems involved in cell signaling, metabolism, and regulation of gene expression. Parametric and structural uncertainty, as well as combinatorial explosion are strong obstacles against analyzing the dynamics of large models of this type. Multi-scaleness is another property of these networks, that can be used to get past some of these obstacles. Networks with many well separated time scales, can be reduced to simpler networks, in a way that depends only on the orders of magnitude and not on the exact values of the kinetic parameters. The main idea used for such robust simplifications of networks is the concept of dominance among model elements, allowing hierarchical organization of these elements according to their effects on the network dynamics. This concept finds a natural formulation in tropical geometry. We revisit, in the light of these new ideas, the main approaches to model reduction of reaction networks, such as quasi-steady state and quasi-equilibrium approximations, and provide practical recipes for model reduction of linear and nonlinear networks. We also discuss the application of model reduction to backward pruning machine learning techniques