Monthly wages in the Swiss Household Panel

This paper describes the construction of monthly income from employment and self employment in the Swiss Household Panel (SHP). It documents the assumptions that have to be taken and addresses possibilities and difficulties when relating monthly income variables with the number of working hours. Finally, some descriptive statistics of the monthly wages are provided from 1999 to 2008. These show a high correlation of wages across the years, which is higher than correlation from yearly wages. This underlies the suitability of these variables on monthly wages for labour market research with the SHP. Median and average hourly wages have increased slightly from 2002 to 2008. The inequality of wages has remained stable for the total population.

Identification and analysis of functional elements in 1% of the human genome by the ENCODE pilot project.

We report the generation and analysis of functional data from multiple, diverse experiments performed on a targeted 1% of the human genome as part of the pilot phase of the ENCODE Project. These data have been further integrated and augmented by a number of evolutionary and computational analyses. Together, our results advance the collective knowledge about human genome function in several major areas. First, our studies provide convincing evidence that the genome is pervasively transcribed, such that the majority of its bases can be found in primary transcripts, including non-protein-coding transcripts, and those that extensively overlap one another. Second, systematic examination of transcriptional regulation has yielded new understanding about transcription start sites, including their relationship to specific regulatory sequences and features of chromatin accessibility and histone modification. Third, a more sophisticated view of chromatin structure has emerged, including its inter-relationship with DNA replication and transcriptional regulation. Finally, integration of these new sources of information, in particular with respect to mammalian evolution based on inter- and intra-species sequence comparisons, has yielded new mechanistic and evolutionary insights concerning the functional landscape of the human genome. Together, these studies are defining a path for pursuit of a more comprehensive characterization of human genome function.