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 labour market impact of immigration

Abstract: In the first part of this paper, we present a stylized model of the labour market impact of immigra- tion. We then discuss mechanisms through which an economy can adjust to immigration: changes in factor prices, output mix, and production technology. In the second part, we explain the problems of empirically estimating how immigration affects labour market outcomes of the resident population and review some strategies to address these. We then summarize some recent empirical studies for the UK and other countries. We conclude with an outlook on what we believe are important avenues for future research.

Neurodynamics of biased competition and cooperation for attention: a model with spiking neurons.

Abstract: Recent neurophysiological experiments have led to a promising "biased competition hypothesis" of the neural basis of attention. According to this hypothesis, attention appears as a sometimes nonlinear property that results from a top-down biasing effect that influences the competitive and cooperative interactions that work both within cortical areas and between cortical areas. In this paper we describe a detailed dynamical analysis of the synaptic and neuronal spiking mechanisms underlying biased competition. We perform a detailed analysis of the dynamical capabilities of the system by exploring the stationary attractors in the parameter space by a mean-field reduction consistent with the underlying synaptic and spiking dynamics. The nonstationary dynamical behavior, as measured in neuronal recording experiments, is studied by an integrate-and-fire model with realistic dynamics. This elucidates the role of cooperation and competition in the dynamics of biased competition and shows why feedback connections between cortical areas need optimally to be weaker by a factor of about 2.5 than the feedforward connections in an attentional network. We modeled the interaction between top-down attention and bottom-up stimulus contrast effects found neurophysiologically and showed that top-down attentional effects can be explained by external attention inputs biasing neurons to move to different parts of their nonlinear activation functions. Further, it is shown that, although NMDA nonlinear effects may be useful in attention, they are not necessary, with nonlinear effects (which may appear multiplicative) being produced in the way just described.

Signatures of positive selection in genes associated with human skin pigmentation as revealed from analyses of single nucleotide polymorphisms.

Abstract: Phenotypic variation between human populations in skin pigmentation correlates with latitude at the continental level. A large number of hypotheses involving genetic adaptation have been proposed to explain human variation in skin colour, but only limited genetic evidence for positive selection has been presented. To shed light on the evolutionary genetic history of human variation in skin colour we inspected 118 genes associated with skin pigmentation in the Perlegen dataset, studying single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and analyzed 55 genes in detail. We identified eight genes that are associated with the melanin pathway (SLC45A2, OCA2, TYRP1, DCT, KITLG, EGFR, DRD2 and PPARD) and presented significant differences in genetic variation between Europeans, Africans and Asians. In six of these genes we detected, by means of the EHH test, variability patterns that are compatible with the hypothesis of local positive selection in Europeans (OCA2, TYRP1 and KITLG) and in Asians (OCA2, DCT, KITLG, EGFR and DRD2), whereas signals were scarce in Africans (DCT, EGFR and DRD2). Furthermore, a statistically significant correlation between genotypic variation in four pigmentation candidate genes and phenotypic variation of skin colour in 51 worldwide human populations was revealed. Overall, our data also suggest that light skin colour is the derived state and is of independent origin in Europeans and Asians, whereas dark skin color seems of unique origin, reflecting the ancestral state in humans.