Frontier Issues of the Political Economy of Migration Migration has a strong economic impact on the sending and host countries. Since individuals and groups do not benefit equally from migration, interest groups emerge to protect and take care of their narrow self-interests and compete for rents generated by migration. Narrow selfinterests may be present not only for interest groups but also fo...

Although previous works have discussed the benefits of precolonial centralization for development in Africa, the findings and the mechanisms provided do not explain the heterogeneity in development outcomes of formerly centralized states. Using new survey data from Nigeria, I find a significant negative effect of precolonial centralization on access to certain public services for centralized re...

There is a long normative ‘Social Contract’ tradition that attempts to characterize ex-post income inequalities that are agreeable to all ‘behind a veil of ignorance.’ This paper takes a similar normative approach to characterize social decision-making procedures. It is shown that quite generally some form of majority-voting is preferred to unanimity ‘behind a veil of ignorance’ whenever societ...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the most common neurodegenerative movement disorder characterized by the progressive loss of dopaminergic (DA) neurons. Both environmental and genetic factors are thought to contribute to the pathogenesis of PD. Although several genes linked to rare familial PD have been identified, endogenous risk factors for sporadic PD, which account for the majority of PD cases, ...

Mouse cell extracts support vigorous replication of polyomavirus (Py) DNA in vitro, while human cell extracts do not. However, the addition of purified mouse DNA polymerase alpha-primase to human cell extracts renders them permissive for Py DNA replication, suggesting that mouse polymerase alpha-primase determines the species specificity of Py DNA replication. We set out to identify the subunit...

The process of fertilization is critically dependent on the mutual recognition of gametes and in Plasmodium, the male gamete surface protein P48/45 is vital to this process. This protein belongs to a family of 10 structurally related proteins, the so called 6-cys family. To identify the role of additional members of this family in Plasmodium fertilisation, we performed genetic and functional an...