Pompeu Fabra University

About: Pompeu Fabra University is a education organization based out in Barcelona, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 8093 authors who have published 23570 publications receiving 858431 citations. The organization is also known as: Universitat Pompeu Fabra & UPF.

The Survival of the Welfare State

Abstract: This Paper provides an analytical characterization of Markov perfect equilibria in a model with repeated majority voting, where agents vote over income redistribution. The key feature of the theory is that the future constituency of redistributive policies depends positively on the current level of redistribution, since this affects both private investments and the future distribution of voters. Agents vote rationally, and fully anticipate the effects of their political choice on both private incentives and future voting outcomes. The equilibrium features multiple steady-states, one with and one without a welfare state. The theory can explain why welfare state institutions, originally introduced in response to specific shocks (e.g., the Great Depression), have been so persistent. complementarity, wage inequality, education

Positive Cueing: Promoting Sustainable Consumer Behavior By Cueing Common Environmental Behaviors as Environmental

Abstract: People frequently fail to see themselves as environmentally-conscious consumers; one reason for this is that they are oftentimes prone to dismissing their more common ecological behaviors (e.g., avoid littering) as non-diagnostic for that particular self-image. The cueing of commonly performed ecological behaviors as environmentally-friendly (what we call positive cueing) renders both cued and non-cued common ecological behaviors more diagnostic for the inference of pro-environmental attitudes (Study 1). As a result, positive cueing increases the likelihood that people will see themselves as consumers who are concerned with the degree to which their behavior is environmentally responsible (Study 2). The cueing of common ecological behaviors leads participants to choose environmentally-friendly products with greater frequency, and even to use scrap paper more efficiently (Study 3). We discuss the implications for effective social marketing campaigns.

A global perspective on genetic variation at the ADH genes reveals unusual patterns of linkage disequilibrium and diversity.

Abstract: Variants of different Class I alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) genes have been shown to be associated with an effect that is protective against alcoholism. Previous work from our laboratory has shown that the two sites showing the association are in linkage disequilibrium and has identified the ADH1B Arg47His site as causative, with the ADH1C Ile349Val site showing association only because of the disequilibrium. Here, we describe an initial study of the nature of linkage disequilibrium and genetic variation, in population samples from different regions of the world, in a larger segment of the ADH cluster (including the three Class I ADH genes and ADH7). Linkage disequilibrium across ∼40 kb of the Class I ADH cluster is moderate to strong in all population samples that we studied. We observed nominally significant pairwise linkage disequilibrium, in some populations, between the ADH7 site and some Class I ADH sites, at moderate values and at a molecular distance as great as 100 kb. Our data indicate (1) that most ADH-alcoholism association studies have failed to consider many sites in the ADH cluster that may harbor etiologically significant alleles and (2) that the relevance of the various ADH sites will be population dependent. Some individual sites in the Class I ADH cluster show values that are among Fst the highest seen among several dozen unlinked sites that were studied in the same subset of populations. The high values can be attributed to the discrepant frequencies of specific alleles in eastern Asia relative to those Fst in other regions of the world. These alleles are part of a single haplotype that exists at high (165%) frequency only in the eastern-Asian samples. It seems unlikely that this haplotype, which is rare or unobserved in other populations, reached such high frequency because of random genetic drift alone.