Search results for "Counterfactual"
showing 10 items of 22 documents
Causal Inference and Statistical Fallacies
2001
Fallacies are defined as plausible-seeming arguments that give the wrong conclusion. The article concentrates on those with some connection with causality. The classical definition of causality involving a necessary and sufficient condition for an effect is rejected and three possible definitions discussed. The first is that of a statistical association that cannot be explained away as the effect of admissible alternative features. To make this more precise, Markov graphical representations are introduced and the important distinction between pairs of variables on an equal footing and those in a potential explanatory-response relation described. The roles of unobserved confounders and of ra…
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…
Guises and their Existence
1996
According to H-N. Castafieda, a guise the very thin individual which lies at the bottom of the ontological furniture of the world is indifferent to existence in a Meinongian way, in the sense that it remains the same whether it exists or not. Moreover, its existence does not alter its intentional character, as it is the very same individual which is thought of regardless of its being real or not. ~ In what follows, I will attempt to show that with regards to guises both theses are illegitimate, unless one introduces the notion of an existentiallyconditioned property as a counterfactual property which a guise has prior to its actual existence. To do so means to work out an amendment to Casta…
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.
Modality and Injunctive in Homeric Greek: The role of epistemic particles and adverbs in counterfactual constructions
2020
Structurally, unaugmented aorists and imperfects belong to the oldest layer of verbal forms attested in Greek, which continue the so-called Indo-European ‘injunctive’. The latter was inflectionally underspecified as regards verbal categories such as tense or mood (Hoffmann 1967; Kiparsky 1968). Thus, the question arises as to how the attitude of the speaker toward the content of his utterance was expressed. The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of epistemic particles and adverbs co-occurring with injunctives in the Iliad and the Odyssey, focusing in particular on past counterfactual constructions. Crosslinguistic studies have shown that such modal constructions reflect the univer…
Probabilistic inferences from conjoined to iterated conditionals
2017
Abstract There is wide support in logic, philosophy, and psychology for the hypothesis that the probability of the indicative conditional of natural language, P ( if A then B ) , is the conditional probability of B given A, P ( B | A ) . We identify a conditional which is such that P ( if A then B ) = P ( B | A ) with de Finetti's conditional event, B | A . An objection to making this identification in the past was that it appeared unclear how to form compounds and iterations of conditional events. In this paper, we illustrate how to overcome this objection with a probabilistic analysis, based on coherence, of these compounds and iterations. We interpret the compounds and iterations as cond…
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.
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…
On the Determinants of Distribution Dynamics
2013
n this paper we propose a novel approach to identify the impact of growth determinants on the distribution dynamics of productivit y. Our approach integrates counterfactual analysis with the estima tion of stochastic kernels. The counterfactuals are constructed from a semi-parametric growth regression, in which the cross-section heterogeneity in the growth determinants is removed. The methodology also allows us to test for potential distributional effects in the residuals. We illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology by an application to a cross-section of countries, which highlights the significant impact on inequality and polarization in the world productivity distribution of …
Causal Models for Monitoring University Ordinary Financing Fund
2012
Recently iterated decreasing government transfers and an increasing proportion of budget allotted basing on competitive performances, took Italian Universities started struggling with competition for funds, in particular for the University Ordinary Financing Fund (FFO). Aim of this paper is monitoring variables responsible for FFO indicators, where monitoring means: describing, analysing retrospectively, predicting and intervening on variables responsible for indicators. All this aims can be achieved by statistical techniques that should be theoretically equipped with the distinction between predicting under observation and predicting under intervention, in order to provide correct answers …