So far in this course we have dealt entirely with the evolution of characters that are controlled by simple Mendelian inheritance at a single locus. There are notes on the course website about gametic disequilibrium and how allele frequencies change at two loci simultaneously, but we didn’t discuss them. In every example we’ve considered we’ve imagined that we could understand something about evolution by examining the evolution of a single gene. That’s the domain of classical population genetics. For the next few weeks we’re going to be exploring a field that’s actually older than classical population genetics, although the approach we’ll be taking to it involves the use of population genetic machinery. If you know a little about the history of evolutionary biology, you may know that after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900 there was a heated debate between the “biometricians” (e.g., Galton and Pearson) and the “Mendelians” (e.g., de Vries, Correns, Bateson, and Morgan). Biometricians asserted that the really important variation in evolution didn’t follow Mendelian rules. Height, weight, skin color, and similar traits seemed to

Human biochemical genetics

世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

The reference human genome sequence set the stage for studies of genetic variation and its association with human disease, but epigenomic studies lack a similar reference. To address this need, the NIH Roadmap Epigenomics Consortium generated the largest collection so far of human epigenomes for primary cells and tissues. Here we describe the integrative analysis of 111 reference human epigenomes generated as part of the programme, profiled for histone modification patterns, DNA accessibility, DNA methylation and RNA expression. We establish global maps of regulatory elements, define regulatory modules of coordinated activity, and their likely activators and repressors. We show that disease- and trait-associated genetic variants are enriched in tissue-specific epigenomic marks, revealing biologically relevant cell types for diverse human traits, and providing a resource for interpreting the molecular basis of human disease. Our results demonstrate the central role of epigenomic information for understanding gene regulation, cellular differentiation and human disease.

Integrative analysis of 111 reference human epigenomes

Despite the growing attention to social entrepreneurship as a scholarly field of research, it is still in a stage of infancy. Research in the past two decades has been primarily dedicated to establishing a conceptual foundation, which has resulted in a considerable stream of conceptual papers. Empirical articles have gradually appeared since the turn of the century. Although they are still outnumbered by conceptual articles, empirical articles are of considerable significance for the evolution of social entrepreneurship as a field of scientific inquiry. The purpose of this paper is to gauge the current state of empirical research by reviewing 31 empirical research studies on social entrepreneurship, classifying them along four dimensions and summarising research findings for each of these dimensions. To serve this purpose in a meaningful fashion requires discriminating between different perspectives on social entrepreneurship. Hence, a conceptual overview with four different schools of thought is presented, and the articles in our sample are analysed accordingly.

/pdf/what-do-we-know-about-social-entrepreneurship-an-analysis-of-25k5l2fndm.pdf

What Do We Know about Social Entrepreneurship? An Analysis of Empirical Research

In this paper, the relevance of some debt ratio determinants from the recent theory of finance is empirically investigated in a small business sector. The data used in this study consist of average financial data of 27 shoptypes in 20 different years, covering a period of 24 years. The panel character of the data facilitates the use of analytical techniques aimed at reducing or avoiding the biasing effect of omitted variables on the outcomes. The main conclusion is, that the theoretical determinants appear indeed to be relevant for the small business sector investigated here, but the influences encountered in the analyses are far less straightforward than the hypothesized effects in the theory. Influences on total debt are frequently found to be the net effects of opposite influences on long and short term debt and some variables show large time and industry specific effects. Further, distinct patterns in the time specific effects were found.

/pdf/determinants-of-small-firm-debt-ratios-an-analysis-of-retail-5cf0lphjfq.pdf

Determinants of small firm debt ratios: An analysis of retail panel data

https://repub.eur.nl/pub/9815/EIM20070208015_N200312.pdf

Business accomplishments, gender and entrepreneurial self-image

This paper documents that a process of industrial restructuring has been transforming the developed economies, where large corporations are accounting for less economic activity and small firms are accounting for a greater share of economic activity. Not all countries, however, are experiencing the same shift in their industrial structures. Little is known about the cost of resisting this restructuring process. The goal of this paper is to identify whether there is a cost, measured in terms of forgone growth, of an impeded restructuring process. The cost is measured by linking growth rates of European countries to deviations from the "optimal" industrial structure. The empirical evidence suggests that countries impeding the restructuring process pay a penalty in terms of forgone growth.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/Dp2648.pdf?abstractid=258081&mirid=2

Impeded Industrial Restructuring: The Growth Penalty

Empirical analyses presented by Acs and Audretsch suggest differences in the market structure determinants of innovation between large and small firms in U.S. manufacturing. The evidence they offer is ambiguous. By using data for a different country (The Netherlands), a different measure of innovation and a different aggregation level, we offer new evidence, allowing a revaluation of the findings for the U.S. material. Moreover, the influence of the market structure determinants does not appear to differ between a period of sluggish growth (1983) and one of relatively high growth (1989).

/pdf/some-new-evidence-on-the-determinants-of-large-and-small-2fu7vy0dsz.pdf

Roy Thurik

Papers

What Do We Know about Social Entrepreneurship? An Analysis of Empirical Research

Determinants of small firm debt ratios: An analysis of retail panel data

Business accomplishments, gender and entrepreneurial self-image

Impeded Industrial Restructuring: The Growth Penalty

Some new evidence on the determinants of large- and small-firm innovation