The neutral rate of allelic substitution is analyzed for a class-structured population subject to a stationary stochastic demographic process. The substitution rate is shown to be generally equal to the effective mutation rate, and under overlapping generations it can be expressed as the effective mutation rate in newborns when measured in units of average generation time. With uniform mutation...

Using a simple arbitrage argument, positivists claim that the interest rate provides the right basis to fix the discount rate to evaluate green investment projects. The real interest rate observed in the U.S. during the XXth century has been around 1% and 2%. On the contrary, ethicists estimate the discount rate by the marginal rate of substitution between current and future consumption. From c...

This paper uses a finite mixture model to uncover heterogeneous income tax rate perceptions, establishing four new results. First, almost half of respondents do not distinguish between marginal and average tax rates. Second, roughly 30 percent of respondents know the statutory marginal tax rates schedule (and answer questions accordingly). Third, among respondents who think all income is taxed ...

Likelihood-ratio statistics are proposed to test for heterogeneity in nucleotide substitution rate among regions of a DNA sequence. The tests examine three-sequence phylogenies, and two specific tests are proposed: a test to detect rate heterogeneity among genic regions within a sequence, over all evolutionary lineages; and a test to detect rate heterogeneity among regions in a specific evoluti...

Few estimates of relative substitution rates, and the underlying mutation rates, exist between mitochondrial and nuclear genes in insects. Previous estimates for insects indicate a 2-9 times faster substitution rate in mitochondrial genes relative to nuclear genes. Here we use novel methods for estimating relative rates of substitution, which incorporate multiple substitutions, and apply these ...

Evolutionary biologists frequently rely on estimates of the neutral rate of evolution when characterizing the selective pressure on protein-coding genes. We introduce a new method to estimate this value based on intron nucleotide substitutions. The new method uses a metascript model that considers alternative splicing forms and an algorithm to pair orthologous introns, which we call Introndeuce...