Indexation Of Unemployment Benefits To Previous Earnings, Employment And Wages

In most OECD countries, unemployment benefits are tied to individual previous labor earnings. We study the progressivity of this indexation with regard to its effects on employment, output and wages in four equilibrinin models of the labor market keeping the level of unemployment benefits fixed. In the two cases of competitive labor markets and decentralized wage bargaining, employment and output increase, while wages decrease with the degree of indexation. In the model with search unemployment and Nash wage bargaining, all wages, employment and output increase, while die indexation of employirient benefits to previous carnings has no effect in the case of efficiency wages. In addition, our results suggest that a more progressive mdexation of unemployment benefits to labor earnings is wellare enhancing.Unemployment Benefits ; Progressive Indexation ; Union Wage-Setting ; Search Unemployment ; Efficiency Wages

Indexation Of Unemployment Benefits To Previous Earnings, Employment And Wages

In most OECD countries, unemployment benefits are tied to individual previous labor earnings. We study the progressivity of this indexation with regard to its effects on employment, output and wages in four equilibrinin models of the labor market keeping the level of unemployment benefits fixed. In the two cases of competitive labor markets and decentralized wage bargaining, employment and output increase, while wages decrease with the degree of indexation. In the model with search unemployment and Nash wage bargaining, all wages, employment and output increase, while die indexation of employirient benefits to previous carnings has no effect in the case of efficiency wages. In addition, our results suggest that a more progressive mdexation of unemployment benefits to labor earnings is wellare enhancing

Indexation Of Unemployment Benefits To Previous Earnings, Employment And Wages

In most OECD countries, unemployment benefits are tied to individual previous labor earnings. We study the progressivity of this indexation with regard to its effects on employment, output and wages in four equilibrinin models of the labor market keeping the level of unemployment benefits fixed. In the two cases of competitive labor markets and decentralized wage bargaining, employment and output increase, while wages decrease with the degree of indexation. In the model with search unemployment and Nash wage bargaining, all wages, employment and output increase, while die indexation of employirient benefits to previous carnings has no effect in the case of efficiency wages. In addition, our results suggest that a more progressive mdexation of unemployment benefits to labor earnings is wellare enhancing

New journal: Algorithms for Molecular Biology

This editorial announces Algorithms for Molecular Biology, a new online open access journal published by BioMed Central. By launching the first open access journal on algorithmic bioinformatics, we provide a forum for fast publication of high-quality research articles in this rapidly evolving field. Our journal will publish thoroughly peer-reviewed papers without length limitations covering all aspects of algorithmic data analysis in computatioal biology. Publications in Algorithms for Molecular Biology are easy to find, highly visible and tracked by organisations such as PubMed. An established online submission system makes a fast reviewing procedure possible and enables us to publish accepted papers without delay. All articles published in our journal are permanently archived by PubMed Central and other scientific archives. We are looking forward to receiving your contributions

RasBhari: optimizing spaced seeds for database searching, read mapping and alignment-free sequence comparison

Many algorithms for sequence analysis rely on word matching or word statistics. Often, these approaches can be improved if binary patterns representing match and don't-care positions are used as a filter, such that only those positions of words are considered that correspond to the match positions of the patterns. The performance of these approaches, however, depends on the underlying patterns. Herein, we show that the overlap complexity of a pattern set that was introduced by Ilie and Ilie is closely related to the variance of the number of matches between two evolutionarily related sequences with respect to this pattern set. We propose a modified hill-climbing algorithm to optimize pattern sets for database searching, read mapping and alignment-free sequence comparison of nucleic-acid sequences; our implementation of this algorithm is called rasbhari. Depending on the application at hand, rasbhari can either minimize the overlap complexity of pattern sets, maximize their sensitivity in database searching or minimize the variance of the number of pattern-based matches in alignment-free sequence comparison. We show that, for database searching, rasbhari generates pattern sets with slightly higher sensitivity than existing approaches. In our Spaced Words approach to alignment-free sequence comparison, pattern sets calculated with rasbhari led to more accurate estimates of phylogenetic distances than the randomly generated pattern sets that we previously used. Finally, we used rasbhari to generate patterns for short read classification with CLARK-S. Here too, the sensitivity of the results could be improved, compared to the default patterns of the program. We integrated rasbhari into Spaced Words; the source code of rasbhari is freely available at http://rasbhari.gobics.de

AUGUSTUS at EGASP: using EST, protein and genomic alignments for improved gene prediction in the human genome

BACKGROUND: A large number of gene prediction programs for the human genome exist. These annotation tools use a variety of methods and data sources. In the recent ENCODE genome annotation assessment project (EGASP), some of the most commonly used and recently developed gene-prediction programs were systematically evaluated and compared on test data from the human genome. AUGUSTUS was among the tools that were tested in this project. RESULTS: AUGUSTUS can be used as an ab initio program, that is, as a program that uses only one single genomic sequence as input information. In addition, it is able to combine information from the genomic sequence under study with external hints from various sources of information. For EGASP, we used genomic sequence alignments as well as alignments to expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and protein sequences as additional sources of information. Within the category of ab initio programs AUGUSTUS predicted significantly more genes correctly than any other ab initio program. At the same time it predicted the smallest number of false positive genes and the smallest number of false positive exons among all ab initio programs. The accuracy of AUGUSTUS could be further improved when additional extrinsic data, such as alignments to EST, protein and/or genomic sequences, was taken into account. CONCLUSION: AUGUSTUS turned out to be the most accurate ab initio gene finder among the tested tools. Moreover it is very flexible because it can take information from several sources simultaneously into consideration

DIALIGN-TX: greedy and progressive approaches for segment-based multiple sequence alignment

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>DIALIGN-T is a reimplementation of the multiple-alignment program DIALIGN. Due to several algorithmic improvements, it produces significantly better alignments on locally and globally related sequence sets than previous versions of DIALIGN. However, like the original implementation of the program, DIALIGN-T uses a a straight-forward greedy approach to assemble multiple alignments from local pairwise sequence similarities. Such greedy approaches may be vulnerable to spurious random similarities and can therefore lead to suboptimal results. In this paper, we present DIALIGN-TX, a substantial improvement of DIALIGN-T that combines our previous greedy algorithm with a progressive alignment approach.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our new heuristic produces significantly better alignments, especially on globally related sequences, without increasing the CPU time and memory consumption exceedingly. The new method is based on a guide tree; to detect possible spurious sequence similarities, it employs a vertex-cover approximation on a conflict graph. We performed benchmarking tests on a large set of nucleic acid and protein sequences For protein benchmarks we used the benchmark database BALIBASE 3 and an updated release of the database IRMBASE 2 for assessing the quality on globally and locally related sequences, respectively. For alignment of nucleic acid sequences, we used BRAliBase II for global alignment and a newly developed database of locally related sequences called <it>DIRM-BASE 1</it>. IRMBASE 2 and DIRMBASE 1 are constructed by implanting highly conserved motives at random positions in long unalignable sequences.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>On BALIBASE3, our new program performs significantly better than the previous program DIALIGN-T and outperforms the popular global aligner CLUSTAL W, though it is still outperformed by programs that focus on global alignment like MAFFT, MUSCLE and T-COFFEE. On the locally related test sets in IRMBASE 2 and DIRM-BASE 1, our method outperforms all other programs while MAFFT E-INSi is the only method that comes close to the performance of DIALIGN-TX.</p