Contempt's Evaluative Presentation and Connection to Accountability

In this chapter, I defend a novel account of contempt’s evaluative presentation by synthesizing relevant psychological work (Rozin et al. 1999; Fischer and Roseman 2007; Fischer 2011; Hutcherson and Gross 2011) with philosophical insights (Mason 2003; Bell 2005; Abramson 2009; Bell 2013). I then show how a concern about contempt’s status as an emotion involved in holding people accountable can be helpfully addressed. Finally, I gesture at an account of why, when we feel contemptuous toward people, our accountability responses involve withdrawal and exclusion rather than approach and confrontation

The recession, the recovery, and the productivity slowdown

Business cycles ; Economic conditions - United States ; Econometric models ; Gross national product ; Recessions ; Labor productivity

Monetary policy and long-term real interest rates

Interest rates ; Monetary policy - United States

Monetary policy in a low inflation regime

Inflation (Finance) ; Monetary policy - United States

Commentary on "Optimal monetary policy under uncertainty: a Markov jump-linear-quadratic approach"

Monetary policy ; Econometric models

Rolling Back the Luck Problem for Libertarianism

I here sketch a reply to Peter van Inwagen’s Rollback Argument, which suggests that libertarian accounts of free agency are beset by problems involving luck. Van Inwagen imagines an indeterministic agent whose universe is repeatedly ‘rolled back’ by God to the time of her choice. Since the agent’s choice is indeterministic, her choices are sometimes di erent in the imaginary rollback scenarios. I show that although this is true, this need not impair her control over what she does. I develop an account of when and why the fact that an agent would choose di erently impairs control, which provides a novel response to the Rollback Argument

Interpreting the term structure of interest rates

Interest rates ; Government securities

Fortifying the Self-Defense Justification of Punishment

David Boonin has recently advanced several challenges to the self-defense justification of punishment. Boonin argues that the self-defense justification of punishment justifies punishing the innocent, justifies disproportionate punishment, cannot account for mitigating excuses, and does not justify intentionally harming offenders as we do when we punish them. In this paper, I argue that the self-defense justification, suitably understood, can avoid all of these problems. To help demonstrate the self-defense theory’s attraction, I also develop some contrasts between the self-defense justification, Warren Quinn’s better known ‘auto-retaliator’ argument, and desert-based justifications of punishment. In sum, I show that the self-defense justification of punishment is more resilient than commonly supposed and deserves to be taken seriously as a justification of punishment

Time variation in the dynamics of worker flows:evidence from North America and Europe

Vector autoregressive methods have been used to model the interrelationships between job vacancy rates, job separation rates and job-finding rates using tools such as impulse response analysis. We investigate whether such impulse responses change across the business cycle or over time, by estimating time-varying parameter–vector autoregressions for data from North America (the USA and Canada) and Europe (France, Spain and the UK). While the adjustment process of the labour market to shocks in Canada and the USA is similar, we find the adjustment process differs much more across the European countries, with greater persistence in shocks relative to the USA and Canada

Adapting to instability in money demand: forecasting money growth with a time-varying parameter model

Conventional money demand models appear to be unstable, and this complicates the problem of conducting monetary policy. One way to deal with parameter instability is to learn how to adapt quickly when parameters shift. This paper applies a time-varying-parameter estimator to conventional money demand models and evaluates its usefulness as a forecasting tool. In relative terms, the time-varying-parameter estimator improves significantly on ordinary least squares. In absolute terms, we continue to have difficulty tracking money demand through turbulent periods.Monetary policy - United States ; Money theory ; Demand for money