Rent Seeking and the Common Agricultural Policy: Do member countries free ride on lobbying?

The Common Agricultural Policy is modelled as a club good providing the European Union (EU) farmer with financial benefits. We build an economic model which explains how much farmers in individual EU countries invest in rent-seeking activities in order to test for free-riding behaviour on lobbying costs. For our investigation we group the EU member countries by farm structure, and the type of benefit received. We explain the fees paid by farmers for lobbying by other countries fees, political variables, and country and regional agricultural characteristics. The model shows that some member countries free ride on others. This suggests a form of policy path dependency and leads to a suboptimal investment on lobbying of 7.5%.free-riding, rent-seeking, Common Agricultural Policy, Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade, Political Economy, D72, Q18,

RENT SEEKING AND THE COMMON AGRICULTURAL POLICY: DO MEMBER COUNTRIES FREE RIDE ON LOBBYING?

The Common Agricultural Policy is modelled as a club good providing the European Union (EU) farmer with financial benefits. We build an economic model which explains how much farmers in individual EU countries invest in rent-seeking activities in order to test for free-riding behaviour on lobbying costs. For our investigation we group the EU member countries by farm structure, and the type of benefit received. We explain the fees paid by farmers for lobbying by other countries fees, political variables, and country and regional agricultural characteristics. The model shows that some member countries free ride on others. This suggests a form of policy path dependency and leads to a suboptimal investment on lobbying of 7.5%.Free-riding, rent-seeking, Common Agricultural Policy, Agricultural and Food Policy, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Transcriptional regulation of respiration in yeast metabolizing differently repressive carbon substrates

BACKGROUND: Depending on the carbon source, Saccharomyces cerevisiae displays various degrees of respiration. These range from complete respiration as in the case of ethanol, to almost complete fermentation, and thus very low degrees of respiration on glucose. While many key regulators are known for these extreme cases, we focus here on regulators that are relevant at intermediate levels of respiration. RESULTS: We address this question by linking the functional degree of respiration to transcriptional regulation via enzyme abundances. Specifically, we investigated aerobic batch cultures with the differently repressive carbon sources glucose, mannose, galactose and pyruvate. Based on 13C flux analysis, we found that the respiratory contribution to cellular energy production was largely absent on glucose and mannose, intermediate on galactose and highest on pyruvate. In vivo abundances of 40 respiratory enzymes were quantified by GFP-fusions under each condition. During growth on the partly and fully respired substrates galactose and pyruvate, several TCA cycle and respiratory chain enzymes were significantly up-regulated. From these enzyme levels and the known regulatory network structure, we determined the probability for a given transcription factor to cause the coordinated expression changes. The most probable transcription factors to regulate the different degrees of respiration were Gcr1p, Cat8p, the Rtg-proteins and the Hap-complex. For the latter three ones we confirmed their importance for respiration by quantifying the degree of respiration and biomass yields in the corresponding deletion strains. CONCLUSIONS: Cat8p is required for wild-type like respiration, independent of its known activation of gluconeogenic genes. The Rtg-proteins and the Hap-complex are essential for wild-type like respiration under partially respiratory conditions. Under fully respiratory conditions, the Hap-complex, but not the Rtg-proteins are essential for respiration

Contact Metamorphism of Bituminous Coal by Intruding Dike in the Illinois Basin Causes Short-Range Thermal Alteration

This poster will be presented at the joint meeting of the Canadian Society for Coal Science and Organic Petrology, The Society for Organic Petrology, and the International Committee for Coal and Organic Petrology at the University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, on August 19-25, 2007.Changes in high-volatile bituminous coal (Pennsylvanian) near contacts with volcanic intrusions in Illinois were investigated with respect to coal chemistry, carbon and hydrogen stable isotope ratios, and pore structure. Vitrinite reflectance (Ro) increases from ~0.6% to ~5% within 4.7 m from the dike. Elemental chemistry of the coal shows distinct reduction in hydrogen and nitrogen content approaching the intrusions. No trend was noticed for total sulfur content, but decreases in sulfate and organic sulfur contents towards the dikes indicate thermal sulfur reduction (TSR). Carbon isotopic values did not show significant changes, whereas hydrogen isotopic values showed a distinct trend of becoming more negative toward the dikes. Contact metamorphism has a dramatic effect on coal porosity. The mesopore volume decreases 3 3 from 0.01 cm /g in the unaffected coal to 0.004 cm /g at a distance 3 of 4.5 m away from the contact, then hovers around 0.004 cm /g closer to the contact. In contrast, the micropore volume shows a 3 progressive decrease from 0.04 cm /g in unaffected coal to almost 3 0.01 cm /g at the contact. Strongly decreasing mesopore and micropore volumes in the altered zone, together with frequent cleat and fracture-filling by calcite, indicate deteriorating conditions for both coalbed gas sorption and gas transmissibility

Markenstress bei Jugendlichen : Entwicklung eines Messinstruments am Beispiel von Kleidung

Die Zielgruppe der Jugendlichen gewinnt in der Marketing-Praxis zunehmend an Bedeutung. Der KidsVerbraucherAnalyse 2003 zufolge beläuft sich die durchschnittliche jährliche Kaufkraft eines Jugendlichen auf EUR 1.811. Diese Zahl belegt eindrucksvoll das enorme Marktpotenzial der jungen Zielgruppe, das den Anbietern stetig steigende Einnahmen beschert. Das Wachstum des Segments birgt allerdings auch Probleme, die von Verbraucherschützern lautstark thematisiert und in der Politik heftig diskutiert werden. Es wird postuliert, dass die zunehmende Verfügbarkeit finanzieller Mittel von Jugendlichen und die vermehrte Ansprache dieser Zielgruppe durch die Anbieter und Medien sowohl finanzielle Schwierigkeiten als auch psychische Probleme verursachen können. Letztere können sich beispielsweise in Markenstress ausdrücken. Da für Jugendliche das äußere Erscheinungsbild, das zu einem großen Teil über Kleidung mitbestimmt wird, eine große Rolle spielt, sind sie sich der Wirkung der "richtigen" Kleidungsmarke in ihrem sozialen Umfeld durchaus bewusst. Diese Entwicklung kann jedoch häufig zu einem "Markenwahn" oder "Markenzwang" führen. Obwohl hierüber in der Gesellschaft seit längerer Zeit diskutiert und in diesem Zuge in den Kultusministerien über die Einführung von Schuluniformen nachgedacht wird, fand eine wissenschaftliche Erforschung dieses Themenkomplexes bisher kaum statt. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird in der vorliegenden Studie ein Instrument entwickelt, durch das Markenstress messbar gemacht werden kann. Da bisher keine Skala zur Operationalisierung des Konstrukts existiert, wird auf Grundlage bisheriger Forschungsergebnisse, eines fundierten Theoriegerüsts und der Ergebnisse einer qualitativen Vorstudie zunächst eine Konzeptualisierung von Markenstress vorgenommen

How to Simulate Realistic Survival Data? A Simulation Study to Compare Realistic Simulation Models

In statistics, it is important to have realistic data sets available for a particular context to allow an appropriate and objective method comparison. For many use cases, benchmark data sets for method comparison are already available online. However, in most medical applications and especially for clinical trials in oncology, there is a lack of adequate benchmark data sets, as patient data can be sensitive and therefore cannot be published. A potential solution for this are simulation studies. However, it is sometimes not clear, which simulation models are suitable for generating realistic data. A challenge is that potentially unrealistic assumptions have to be made about the distributions. Our approach is to use reconstructed benchmark data sets %can be used as a basis for the simulations, which has the following advantages: the actual properties are known and more realistic data can be simulated. There are several possibilities to simulate realistic data from benchmark data sets. We investigate simulation models based upon kernel density estimation, fitted distributions, case resampling and conditional bootstrapping. In order to make recommendations on which models are best suited for a specific survival setting, we conducted a comparative simulation study. Since it is not possible to provide recommendations for all possible survival settings in a single paper, we focus on providing realistic simulation models for two-armed phase III lung cancer studies. To this end we reconstructed benchmark data sets from recent studies. We used the runtime and different accuracy measures (effect sizes and p-values) as criteria for comparison