The Willingness to Pay for Environmental Protection: Are Developing Economies Different?

This paper explores the micro-foundations of public policy over environmental protection in developing economies by examining individual-level preferences for economically costly pollution abatement. The paper empirically investigates individuals' marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for stronger environmental protection, analyzing nearly 24,000 survey responses, from 24 developing economies, to environmental questions from the 2005-2008 wave of the World Values Survey. I analyze the probability that an individual states she is WTP for further environmental protection depending on her individual-level characteristics and her country's characteristics. The main results to emerge from the analysis include: (i) perceived environmental problems that are local do not determine MWTP, where as perceived problems that are global do, (ii) self-identification as a world citizen is the strongest determinant of demand for greater environmental protection, indicating that motivation to contribute to a global public good is not a strictly post-material notion, and (iii) the primary determinants of MWTP are not qualitatively different from those among respondents in advanced economies. The results pose a challenge to the objective problems, subjective values response to the critique of the post-materialism hypothesis. It appears that the WTP for environmental protection in developing economies follows from subjective values that are universal, rather than from objective problems. --Environmental protection policy,Political preferences,Global public goods,World Values Survey,Developing economies

TRANSFERABILITY OF CAREER CAPITAL ACQUIRED DURING STUDIES ABROAD TO EXPATRIATION CONTEXTS

Through increasing globalization the skills needed for success in today's world differ from those needed only 15 years ago to pursue a successful career. Many companies are searching for employees with international skills and a cosmopolitan and global world‐view. Hence, graduates need an education that enables them to compete in global markets, since many of them might work in an international context or even abroad for some time during their career. Study periods abroad are considered as a possibility to acquire cross‐cultural abilities necessary for a successful career in today's globalised world. Over the past two decades an increasing number of students decided to study in a foreign country. It can be assumed that those former internationally mobile students can benefit from their experience gained during studies abroad and transfer these skills to expatriation contexts. Therefore, the aim of this research is to capture the developmental aspects of such study periods abroad on the career and career capital development of graduates, and the transferability of these skills to expatriation contexts. A qualitative research design has been chosen for this study to capture a richness of information on the career competencies of former internationally mobile students. Data was collected during ten semi‐structured interviews, which were recorded and fully transcribed for analysis. The main findings of this research suggest that studies abroad have a strong effect on the development of career capital. They increased the participants' language skills, lead to the acquisition of intercultural competences, and increased their self‐confidence. Generally, it seems that studies abroad were an important factor for students to seek for international jobs. When it comes to the transferability of the acquired career capital, mainly so‐called soft skills and language skills could be utilized during expatriation. Previous experience of living abroad also facilitated integration.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Democratic Accountability and the Relative Obstacles to Foreign Investment

This paper considers the relationship between democratic accountability in de- veloping countries and the policies they use to attract foreign direct investment (FDI). We isolate two policy areas that governments of developing countries use to attract FDI: the tax burden on firms and the regulatory standards within which they operate. Countries that maintain high business taxes can only attract FDI by offering a less regulated business environment, which may have associated po- litical costs. The extent to which democratic accountability constrains leaders in their tax/regulatory policy choices is our main line of analysis. The novelty of the paper is that it endogenously determines policy choices within a political economy framework that recognizes the trade-offs between attracting FDI and maintaining political control. Examination of firm-level survey data from foreign firms operating in eastern Europe and central Asian economies confirms our model's main conclusion: regulation is seen to be a relatively larger obstacle to doing business in countries with greater democratic accountability. --

A Very Strong Enhancer Is Located Upstream of an Immediate Early Gene of Human Cytomegalovirus

A strong transcription enhancer was identified in the genomic DNA (235 kb) of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), a ubiquitous and severe pathogen of the herpesvirus group. Cotransfection of enhancerless SV40 DNA with randomly fragmented HCMV DNA yielded two SV40-HCMV recombinant viruses that had incorporated overlapping segments of HCMV DNA to substitute for the missing SV40 enhancer. Within HCMV, these enhancer sequences are located upstream of the transcription initiation site of the major immediate-early gene, between nucleotides -118 and −524. Deletion studies with the HCMV enhancer, which harbors a variety of repeated sequence motifs, show that different subsets of this enhancer can substitute for the SV40 enhancer. The HCMV enhancer, which seems to have little cell type or species preference, is severalfold more active than the SV40 enhancer. It is the strongest enhancer we have analyzed so far, a property that makes it a useful component of eukaryotic expression vectors

Antiplatelet Drug Resistance: Almost Ready for Prime Time

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90218/1/phco.26.8.1201.pd

Applying the Web of Things Abstraction to Bluetooth Low Energy Communication

We apply the Web of Things (WoT) communication pattern, i.e., the semantic description of metadata and interaction affordances, to Internet of Things (IoT) devices that rely on non-IP-based protocols, using Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) as an example. The reference implementation of the WoT Scripting API, node-wot, currently supports only IP-based application layer protocols such as HTTP and MQTT. However, a significant number of IoT devices do not communicate over IP, but via other network layer protocols, e.g. L2CAP used by Bluetooth LE. To leverage the WoT abstraction in Bluetooth Low Energy communication, we specified two ontologies to describe the capabilities of Bluetooth LE devices and transmitted binary data, considered the different interaction possibilities with the Linux Bluetooth stack BlueZ, and due to better documentation, used the D-Bus API to implement Bluetooth LE bindings in JavaScript. Finally, we evaluated the latencies of the bindings in comparison to the BlueZ tool bluetoothctl, showing that the Bluetooth LE bindings are on average about 16 percent slower than the comparison program during connection establishment and about 6 percent slower when disconnecting, but have almost the same performance during reading (about 3 percent slower).Comment: Accepted at Connected World Semantic Interoperability Workshop 2022, 8 page

Genetic Causes of Clopidogrel Nonresponsiveness: Which Ones Really Count?

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91111/1/phco.30.3.265.pd

Inefficient predation, information, and contagious institutional change

This paper presents an agency theory of revolutionary political transitions from autocracy to democracy. We model authoritarian economic policy as the equilibrium outcome of a repeated game between an elite ruling class and a disenfranchised working class, in which workers have imperfect information about the elite's policy choice and the economy's productive capacity. We characterize the conditions under which, in equilibrium, (i) the elite will set inefficient economic institutions under the threat of revolution, (ii) information shocks can catalyze democratic revolutions that may be contagious among similar countries, and (iii) democracy can be consolidated following a political transition

To Give and Get: Poverty Alleviation as A Local Public Good

The paper theoretically analyzes the public choice of transfer payments to the poor (welfare spending) by modeling poverty alleviation as a public good provided by local governments. Voters that are not welfare recipients support welfare spending out of self-interest, rather than altruism, due to the public good property of poverty alleviation. Equilibrium policies are then analyzed according to characteristics of localities, such as population density and income inequality. More generally, our paper provides a technique to solve certain multiple peak problems that arise when a public goods policy has an explicitly redistributive component. To provide empirical support for our model, we use county-level demographic and government expenditure data from the United States Census.

Abciximab‐Associated Thrombocytopenia After Previous Tirofiban‐Related Thrombocytopenia

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90080/1/phco.26.3.423.pd