Search results for "Counterfactual thinking"
showing 10 items of 13 documents
The Tax Returns of Public Spending on Universities: An Estimate with Monte Carlo Simulations
2015
Pastor J. M. and Peraita C. The tax returns of public spending on universities: an estimate with Monte Carlo simulations, Regional Studies. This paper proposes a methodology based on counterfactual scenarios and the existence of uncertainty to estimate the tax returns of public spending of regional governments on their public universities. The introduction of differences in the time spent by the students at university and the proportion of the total public expenditure implies making assumptions about uncertainty. The paper applies Monte Carlo simulations incorporating stochastic elements to estimate the tax returns of public spending in the University of the Basque Country (Spain). The resu…
Editorial – About a ‚PLATO‘
2017
While learning has constantly been an object of research in manifold disciplines and fields, it has generally been understood in a positive sense. In the Age of Information, we are witnessing an increasing number of phenomena in the context of knowledge construction and accumulation that we describe as “negative learning”. This includes, for example, the deliberate circulation of counterfactual knowledge leading to negative learning outcomes, i.e., deficient decision-making and acting, like medical errors.
The effects of wage flexibility on activity and employment in Spain
2018
Abstract In this paper we estimate the macroeconomic effects of the greater wage and firms’ internal flexibility promoted by the economic policies implemented since 2012, which changed markedly Spanish labour regulations. To do so, we propose a structural VAR that allows us to break down changes in main macroeconomic variables into different structural shocks. From a policy perspective, the estimation of the structural shocks allows us to simulate a counterfactual scenario, whereby we conclude that the effects of less rigid labour market are positive and significant. Our results suggest that, if these policies were implemented at the beginning of the crisis, they could have avoided a signif…
Perceptual presence without counterfactual richness
2014
In this commentary, I suggest that non-visual perceptual modalities provide counterexamples to Seth's claim that perceptual presence depends on counterfactual richness. Then I suggest a modification to Seth's view that is not vulnerable to these counterexamples.
Place-based policy in southern Italy: evidence from a dose-response approach
2021
This paper evaluates the effectiveness at a territorial level of a place-based policy for southern Italy, that is, territorial integrated projects (TIPs). We combine classical counterfactual designs and the construction of a dose–response function to assess the impact of the infrastructural interventions on the municipalities involved in a target region (Sicily). The results are robust enough to show policy effectiveness on both the number of workers and the number of plants. In the latter case, we also identify a significant and increasing dose–response function highlighting the positive relationship between funding intensity and the growth of plants.
Joint Audit, Audit Market Structure, and Consumer Surplus
2017
We use a structural application of the discrete choice model to investigate how the introduction of a joint audit policy would affect audit market structure and consumer surplus. We perform this policy evaluation by identifying demand fundamentals in a joint audit regime and applying them to a single audit regime. We find that a joint audit requirement has the potential to change the audit market structure substantially but that the effects are sensitive to the specific policy design. For example, small audit firms gain market share in a joint audit regime but only if an equal sharing of the workload between the two joint auditors is not required. Our counterfactual analysis reveals that th…
Labor Productivity Growth: Disentangling Technology and Capital Accumulation
2014
We adopt a counterfactual approach to decompose labor productivity growth into growth of Technological Productivity (TEP), growth of the capital-labor ratio and growth of Total Factor Productivity (TFP). We bring the decomposition to the data using international countrysectoral information spanning from the 1960s to the 2000s and a nonparametric generalized kernel method, which enables us to estimate the production function allowing for heterogeneity across all relevant dimensions: countries, sectors and time. As well as documenting substantial heterogeneity across countries and sectors, we nd average TEP to account for about 44% of labor productivity growth and TEP gaps with respect to the…
Procedural semantics, metarepresentation, and some particles in Behdini Kurdish
2012
Contemporary studies in the linguistic semantics of particles have been greatly influenced by two ideas: that these items trigger pragmatic processing procedures rather than provide purely conceptual content, and that the procedures that some of them trigger relate to the recovery of metarepresentations. Recent developments in the theory of procedural semantics have introduced some refinements, notably the claim that these procedures may not all relate primarily to comprehension per se but may also relate to the epistemic assessment of communicated claims. This paper discusses three particles in Behdini Kurdish in the light of these theoretical developments: the speech-act particle ka often…
Estimating the long-term economic impacts of Spanish universities on the national economy
2015
In contrast to previous studies on the economic impact of universities that focus on the demand side, this study centres on universities' effects on the supply side of the economy. Through a case study of the Spanish University System, this paper proposes a methodology based on counterfactual scenarios and growth accounting to estimate the long-term impacts of universities on their regional economies. Our study evaluates the stylized impacts of universities' activities on human capital, salaries and occupation of the working age population, on generation of technological capital and, finally, on the GDP growth of the Spanish economy in the period 1989–2010.
Obligations and Conditionals
2015
The paper considers two kinds of medieval obligational disputations (positio, rei veritas) and the medieval genre of sophismata in relation to the kinds of inferences accepted in them. The main texts discussed are the anonymous Obligationes parisienses from the early 13th century and Richard Kilvington’s Sophismata from the early 14th century. Four different kinds of warranted transition from an antecedent to a consequent become apparent in the medieval discussions: (1) the strong logical validity of basic propositional logic, (2) analytic validity based on conceptual containment, (3) merely semantic impossibility of the antecedent being true without the consequent, and (4) intuitively true…