Showing 201 - 210 of 732 Items
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The citizens united election? or same as it ever was?
- In January 2010, the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC overturned long-standing regulations governing the role of unions and corporations in sponsoring pro-candidate advocacy. Many predicted a deleterious effect on the electoral process. In the aftermath of the midterm elections, a number of questions deserve consideration. Was the observed level of outside spending abnormally high in 2010? What can we say about the potential effect of outside spending on the outcomes of House and Senate races? Moreover, what has the decision done to the power of parties and, most especially, their ability to compete with special interests in backing federal candidates? This paper investigates these questions using data from the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracked political ads in 2010. The initial evidence suggests that while interest groups were aggressive players in the air war, their impact may not have been as negative or as large as initially predicted. © 2011 Berkeley Electronic Press.
2010
Vertical Trade, Exchange Rate Pass-Through, and Exchange Rate Regime
- We compare the welfare of different combinations of monetary and currency policies in an open-economy macroeconomic model that incorporates two important features of many small economies: a high level of vertical international trade and a prevalent use of a large trade partner's currency as the invoicing currency for both imports and exports. In this environment, a small economy prefers a fixed exchange rate regime over a flexible regime, while the larger economy prefers a flexible exchange rate regime. There are two main causes underlying our results. First, in the presence of sticky prices, relative prices adjust through changes in the exchange rate. Multiple stages of production and trade make it more difficult for one exchange rate to balance the whole economy by adjusting several relative prices throughout the vertical chain of production and trade. Namely, there is a trade-off between delivering an efficient relative price between home and foreign final goods and delivering an efficient relative price between home and foreign intermediate goods. Second, because the small economy uses the larger economy's currency in trade, it faces a high degree of exchange rate pass-through under a flexible regime and hence suffers from the lack of efficient relative prices in vertical trade. The larger economy, however, does not face this problem because its level of exchange rate pass-through is low.
2012
The H.C. Carey School of U.S. Currency Doctors: A "Subtle Principle" and its Progeny
- Henry C. Carey led a school of post-Civil War U.S. currency doctors prescribing an “elastic currency,” expanding and contracting according to commercial needs. The problem for the Careyites was reconciling elasticity, which implied inconvertibility with gold, with the related aim of decentralized financial power. Careyite currency doctors included, among others, Wallace P. Groom, editor of the New York Mercantile Journal, and Henry Carey Baird, Carey’s own nephew and inheritor of his mantle. Their prescribed reform of the banking system featured a financial innovation that would remove superfluous currency from circulation while supplying what was needed. The innovation was an “interconvertible bond,” a debt instrument of the U.S. Treasury that was to be issued upon demand and redeemable for currency at the option of the holder. Its function was supposed to be like the mechanical governor of a steam engine, operating by a “subtle principle” that obviated human governing power and discretion. The Carey school’s prescription and its rationale remained salient up to the advent of the Federal Reserve System.
2024
Hedgehog signaling regulates dental papilla formation and tooth size during zebrafish odontogenesis
- Intercellular communication by the hedgehog cell signaling pathway is necessary for tooth development throughout the vertebrates, but it remains unclear which specific developmental signals control cell behavior at different stages of odontogenesis. To address this issue, we have manipulated hedgehog activity during zebrafish tooth development and visualized the results using confocal microscopy. Results: We first established that reporter lines for dlx2b, fli1, NF-κB, and prdm1a are markers for specific subsets of tooth germ tissues. We then blocked hedgehog signaling with cyclopamine and observed a reduction or elimination of the cranial neural crest derived dental papilla, which normally contains the cells that later give rise to dentin-producing odontoblasts. Upon further investigation, we observed that the dental papilla begins to form and then regresses in the absence of hedgehog signaling, through a mechanism unrelated to cell proliferation or apoptosis. We also found evidence of an isometric reduction in tooth size that correlates with the time of earliest hedgehog inhibition. Conclusions: We hypothesize that these results reveal a previously uncharacterized function of hedgehog signaling during tooth morphogenesis, regulating the number of cells in the dental papilla and thereby controlling tooth size.
2015
Evolution of the interaction between Hox genes and a downstream target
- Segmental identifies along the insect body depend on the activities of Hox genes [1,2]. In Drosophila melanogaster, one well-studied Hox regulatory target is Distal-less (DII), which Is required for the development of distel limb structures [3]. In abdominal segments, DII transcription is prevented when Hox proteins of the Bithorax Complex (BX-C) bind to cis-regulatory elements upstream of the DII transcription start site [4,5]. Previous evolutionary comparisons of gene expression patterns suggest that this direct repression is conserved between Diptera and Lepidoptera, but is absent in the Crustacea [6,7]. We examined gene expression patterns in three orders of hexapods, all of which develop abdominal appendages, in order to determine when the strong repressive interaction between BX-C proteins and DII appeared during evolution. In each of the species examined, DII expression was initiated in abdominal cells despite the presence of high levels of BX-C proteins. It appears that the strong repressive effects of BX-C proteins on DII expression arose relatively late in insect evolution. We suggest that the regulatory interaction between the BX-C genes and DII has evolved within the hexapods in a complex, segment-specific manner.
1998
Interest groups in electoral politics: 2012 in context
- This paper compares the levels of ad spending from outside groups and traditional party organizations across seven federal election cycles. The data show clearly that outside groups advertised at historic levels in 2012. Such intense efforts send two important signals to students of American campaign finance. The first involves a crisis in the system of limited donations to candidates and party committees moving forward. The second resurrects an old debate in political science about whether parties or candidates should be the center of our electoral process. The paper concludes with a consideration of possible reforms that might help restore parties and candidates to the center of issue debates in competitive federal elections.
2012
Peatlands and their role in the global carbon cycle
- Global peatlands store a very large carbon (C) pool located within a few meters of the atmosphere. Thus, peatland-atmosphere C exchange should be a major concern to global change scientists: Will large amounts of respired belowground C be released in a warmer climate, causing the climate to further warm (a positive climate feedback)? Will more C be sequestered due to increased plant growth in a warmer climate? How will land use change, fires, and permafrost thaw affect the magnitude and direction of carbon dioxide (CO ) and methane (CH ) exchange with the atmosphere? These questions remain challenging, but some significant progress has been made recently. 2 4
2011
CHY representations for gauge theory and gravity amplitudes with up to three massive particles
- We show that a wide class of tree-level scattering amplitudes involving scalars, gauge bosons, and gravitons, up to three of which may be massive, can be expressed in terms of a Cachazo-He-Yuan representation as a sum over solutions of the scattering equations. These amplitudes, when expressed in terms of the appropriate kinematic invariants, are independent of the masses and therefore identical to the corresponding massless amplitudes.
2015