17,040 research outputs found
Measurement in Economics and Social Science
The paper discusses measurement, primarily in economics, from both analytical and historical perspectives. The historical section traces the commitment to ordinalism on the part of economic theorists from the doctrinal disputes between classical economics and marginalism, through the struggle of orthodox economics against socialism down to the cold-war alliance between mathematical social science and anti-communist ideology. In economics the commitment to ordinalism led to the separation of theory from the quantitative measures that are computed in practice: price and quantity indexes, consumer surplus and real national product. The commitment to ordinality entered political science, via Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’, effectively merging it with economics, and ensuring its sterility. How can a field that has as its central result the impossibility of democracy contribute to the design of democratic institutions?
The analytical part of the paper deals with the quantitative measures mentioned above. I begin with the conceptual clarification that what these measures try to achieve is a restoration of the money metric that is lost when prices are variable. I conclude that there is only one measure that can be embedded in a satisfactory economic theory, free from unreasonable restrictions. It is the Törnqvist index as an approximation to its theoretical counterpart the Divisia index.
The statistical agencies have at various times produced different measures for real national product and its components, as well as related concepts. I argue that all of these are flawed and that a single deflator should be used for the aggregate and the components. Ideally this should be a chained Törnqvist price index defined on aggregate consumption.
The social sciences are split. The economic approach is abstract, focused on the assumption of rational and informed behavior, and tends to the political right. The sociological approach is empirical, stresses the non-rational aspects of human behavior and tends to the political left. I argue that the split is due to the fact that the empirical and theoretical traditions were never joined in the social sciences as they were in the natural sciences. I also argue that measurement can potentially help in healing this split
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Econometrics: A bird's eye view
As a unified discipline, econometrics is still relatively young and has been transforming and expanding very rapidly over the past few decades. Major advances have taken place in the analysis of cross sectional data by means of semi-parametric and non-parametric techniques. Heterogeneity of economic relations across individuals, firms and industries is increasingly acknowledge and attempts have been made to take them into account either by integrating out their effects or by modeling the sources of heterogeneity when suitable panel data exists. The counterfactual considerations that underlie policy analysis and treatment evaluation have been given a more satisfactory foundation. New time series econometric techniques have been developed and employed extensively in the areas of macroeconometrics and finance. Non-linear econometric techniques are used increasingly in the analysis of cross section and time series observations. Applications of Bayesian techniques to econometric problems have been given new impetus largely thanks to advances in computer power and computational techniques. The use of Bayesian techniques have in turn provided the investigators with a unifying framework where the tasks and forecasting, decision making, model evaluation and learning can be considered as parts of the same interactive and iterative process; thus paving the way for establishing the foundation of the "real time econometrics". This paper attempts to provide an overview of some of these developments
Geometric factors in the Bohr--Rosenfeld analysis of the measurability of the electromagnetic field
The Geometric factors in the field commutators and spring constants of the
measurement devices in the famous analysis of the measurability of the
electromagnetic field by Bohr and Rosenfeld are calculated using a
Fourier--Bessel method for the evaluation of folding integrals, which enables
one to obtain the general geometric factors as a Fourier--Bessel series. When
the space region over which the factors are defined are spherical, the
Fourier--Bessel series terms are given by elementary functions, and using the
standard Fourier-integral method of calculating folding integrals, the
geometric factors can be evaluated in terms of manageable closed-form
expressions.Comment: 21 pages, REVTe
Uncertainty quantification of coal seam gas production prediction using Polynomial Chaos
A surrogate model approximates a computationally expensive solver. Polynomial
Chaos is a method to construct surrogate models by summing combinations of
carefully chosen polynomials. The polynomials are chosen to respect the
probability distributions of the uncertain input variables (parameters); this
allows for both uncertainty quantification and global sensitivity analysis.
In this paper we apply these techniques to a commercial solver for the
estimation of peak gas rate and cumulative gas extraction from a coal seam gas
well. The polynomial expansion is shown to honour the underlying geophysics
with low error when compared to a much more complex and computationally slower
commercial solver. We make use of advanced numerical integration techniques to
achieve this accuracy using relatively small amounts of training data
Parallelization of adaptive MC Integrators
Monte Carlo (MC) methods for numerical integration seem to be embarassingly
parallel on first sight. When adaptive schemes are applied in order to enhance
convergence however, the seemingly most natural way of replicating the whole
job on each processor can potentially ruin the adaptive behaviour. Using the
popular VEGAS-Algorithm as an example an economic method of semi-micro
parallelization with variable grain-size is presented and contrasted with
another straightforward approach of macro-parallelization. A portable
implementation of this semi-micro parallelization is used in the xloops-project
and is made publicly available.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX2e, 1 pstricks-figure included and 2 eps-figures
inserted via epsfig. To appear in Comput. Phys. Commu
Using Simulation-Based Inference with Panel Data in Health Economics
Panel datasets provide a rich source of information for health economists, offering the scope to control for individual heterogeneity and to model the dynamics of individual behaviour. However the qualitative or categorical measures of outcome often used in health economics create special problems for estimating econometric models. Allowing a flexible specification of individual heterogeneity leads to models involving higher order integrals that cannot be handled by conventional numerical methods. The dramatic growth in computing power over recent years has been accompanied by the development of simulation estimators that solve this problem. This review uses binary choice models to show what can be done with conventional methods and how the range of models can be expanded by using simulation methods. Practical applications of the methods are illustrated using on health from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS)Econometrics, panel data, simulation methods, determinants of health
Using Simulation-based Inference with Panel Data in Health Economics
Panel datasets provide a rich source of information for health economists, offering the scope to control for individual heterogeneity and to model the dynamics of individual behaviour. However the qualitative or categorical measures of outcome often used in health economics create special problems for estimating econometric models. Allowing a flexible specification of the autocorrelation induced by individual heterogeneity leads to models involving higher order integrals that cannot be handled by conventional numerical methods. The dramatic growth in computing power over recent years has been accompanied by the development of simulation-based estimators that solve this problem. This review uses binary choice models to show what can be done with conventional methods and how the range of models can be expanded by using simulation methods. Practical applications of the methods are illustrated using data on health from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS).
Techniques for computing two-loop QCD corrections to b-->c transitions
We have recently presented the complete O(alpha_s^2) corrections to the
semileptonic decay width of the b quark at maximal recoil. Here we discuss
various technical aspects of that calculation and further applications of
similar methods. In particular, we describe an expansion which facilitates the
phase space integrations and the treatment of the mixed real-virtual
corrections, for which Taylor expansion does not work and the so-called eikonal
expansion must be employed. Several terms of the expansion are given for the
O(alpha_s^2) QCD corrections to the differential semileptonic decay width of
the b --quark at maximal recoil. We also demonstrate how the light quark loop
corrections to the top quark decay rate can be obtained using the same methods.
We briefly discuss the application of these techniques to the calculation of
the O(alpha_s^2) correction to zero recoil sum rules for heavy flavor
transitions.Comment: 22 pages, revte
On hyperlogarithms and Feynman integrals with divergences and many scales
It was observed that hyperlogarithms provide a tool to carry out Feynman
integrals. So far, this method has been applied successfully to finite
single-scale processes. However, it can be employed in more general situations.
We give examples of integrations of three- and four-point integrals in
Schwinger parameters with non-trivial kinematic dependence, involving setups
with off-shell external momenta and differently massive internal propagators.
The full set of Feynman graphs admissible to parametric integration is not yet
understood and we discuss some counterexamples to the crucial property of
linear reducibility. Furthermore we clarify how divergent integrals can be
approached in dimensional regularization with this algorithm.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables, explicit results in ancillary file
"results" and on http://www.math.hu-berlin.de/~panzer/ (version as in JHEP;
link corrected
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