Is Russell's vicious circle principle false or meaningless?

P. Vardy asserts the thesis that the vicious circle principle has the same structure as Russell's paradox. But structure is not the thing itself. It is the thing objectivated from the wiewpoint of a mathematician. So this structure can be expressed in a mathematical formalism, e. g. the Λ-calculus. Russell's paradox is understood as a result of the error of taking purely logical concepts, like negation, as lkiewise formalisable without change of meaning. The illusion of meaning in the liar's proposition: Yl'am telling a lie can also be explained be the formalisable self-referential structure of this proposition. Yet it remains an illusion because the logical intention cannot follow the structure

Essays on Fiscal Rule Design and its implications

The three chapters of this thesis examine different aspects of the design of fiscal rules and their implications on the effects of policy interventions and how policy reacts to the economy.Chapter 1 focuses on the design of fiscal rules in DSGE models, which has been shown to matter crucially in identifying the effects of policy interventions and analyses two mechanically distinct components of fiscal policy rules: fiscal rule interactions and multimodality.In a first exercise, a set of alternative fiscal rules is considered for the benchmark Leeper, Plante and Traum (2010) model, with the main design feature being across budget block (expenditure vs taxation) interactions. The models are compared using the Bayesian data density. The results show that the Leeper, Plante and Traum (2010) model is competitive in the set but may be improved by including across-budget component interaction with taxes ordered first. Mechanically, the budget component interactions trickle down to how policy interventions are financed, showing increased coordination across blocks. In the benchmark, a government consumption shock raises the federal government's expenditures, and along the path, taxation increases to bring the debt level back to the steady state. In the recursive block models, budget impacts can be temporarily purely expansionary in that expenditure increases and taxation is reduced. Combining both aspects, it seems to reflect a temporary but coordinated approach to raise output across the expenditure and taxation categories.Secondly, I explore the role of multimodality in fiscal rules. Herbst and Schorfheide (2016) showed that fiscal parameters in the aforementioned model can become multimodal, leading to multimodal impulse responses. In essence, what that means is that fiscal policy may have varied impacts depending on the exact posterior parameter draw. For the Leeper, Plante and Traum (2010) model, I argue using graphs and demonstrate that the source of multimodality in the model is likely the structural design of the rules. Furthermore, building on the analysis in Herbst and Schorfheide (2016), I apply bi-modal regions to the highest posterior density regions as intervals tend to overestimate uncertainty of bi-modal distributions. The results show that the effects of consumption taxation shocks not only predict different scenarios depending on the mode but also disjointed impact scenarios. In particular, for consumption taxation shocks, the average effect of a structural shock is not a particularly likely event by itself.In Chapter 2, I explore how fiscal policy decisions relate to the business cycle and, building on that, how the effects of policy interventions may vary depending on when policy is conducted in the business cycle. To assess this, I estimate a small to medium-sized DSGE model with expressive non-linear fiscal and monetary rules using a higher-order approximation.The estimation procedure employed in this chapter combines several existing approaches developed by Herbst and Schorfheide (2016), Jasra et al. (2010), Buchholz, Chopin and Jacob (2021) and Amisano and Tristani (2010) to trade off computation time and inference quality. The model is estimated using Sequential Monte Carlo techniques to estimate the posterior parameter distribution and particle filter techniques to estimate the likelihood. Together, the estimation procedure reduces the estimation from weeks to days by up to 94%, depending on the comparison basis.To assess the behaviour of the effects of fiscal policy interventions, I sample impulse responses conducted along the historical data. The results present time-varying policy rules in which the effects of fiscal shocks go through deep cycles depending on the initial conditions of the economy. Among the set of fiscal instruments, government consumption goes through the most persistent cycles in its effectiveness in stimulating output. In particular, the effects of government consumption stimulus are estimated to be more effective during the financial crisis and, later, the Covid crisis, while being less effective in periods of above steady state output like the early 2000s.Relating the effects of specific stimulating shocks to the initial conditions using regression techniques, I show that fiscal policy is more effective at stimulating output if the interest rate and debt are low. Furthermore, the effects of government consumption are estimated to be increasing in output while tax cuts are decreasing.As a last contribution of Chapter 2, I explore how the behaviour of the central bank and government varies depending on the business cycle by analysing sampled policy rule gradients constructed on historical data. For the central bank, the results show that in phases of high output growth, the central bank puts more emphasis on controlling inflation and less on output. As the economy shifts into crisis, the central bank reduces its focus on inflation and shifts towards bringing output growth back to target. For the fiscal side, the behaviour is heavily governed by the current debt level, and, for example, during the high debt periods of the 1990s, labour taxation became increasingly responsive to debt to stabilize the budget.Chapter 3 applies the model developed in Chapter 2 to a forecasting exercise using the DSGE-VAR framework. The analysis confirms previous results of the literature that the DSGE-VAR framework and, by extension, DSGE models are frequently useful in aiding forecasting performance for output compared to standard models. Furthermore, I show that DSGE-VAR models can help aid forecasting performance of governmental variables like government consumption and debt quite significantly. However, there seems to be no single best methodology across all data series and forecasting settings considered, similar to the results in Gürkaynak, Kısacıkoğlu and Rossi (2014). Rather, the best-performing methodology may depend on factors like sample selection, modelling framework and potentially others.In a novel exercise, I explore the utility of a variation of the Chapter 2 model with a Zero Lower Bound constraint for forecasting. Overall, the model performs well but is not necessarily competitive with the much simpler DSGE-VAR. However, the ZLB model does show some strength in forecasting fiscal variables

Patient Satisfaction with Telehealth Services Compared to In-Office Visits: A Systematic Literature Review

Telehealth is changing the current paradigm of healthcare. As an emerging mode of healthcare delivery, telehealth stands to help alleviate the shortage of primary care and specialty care providers especially patients in rural areas. In addition to increasing access of healthcare, this service allows for flexibility, convenience and has the potential to decrease healthcare costs while improving patient outcomes. The objective of this literature review was to examine patient satisfaction with telehealth compared to in-office visits. A systematic search was conducted and a total of 17 articles that met inclusion criteria were examined. Data and factors evolving around patient satisfaction with telehealth were extracted and descriptively synthesized from the inclusion articles. Multiple factors were identified that impacted patient satisfaction with telehealth including travel time/convenience, access to healthcare, cost savings, clinical outcomes, provider relationship, and inhibiting influences of telehealth. The overall findings are in consensus that patients are equally, if not more, satisfied with telehealth when compared to inoffice visits. Despite this, there is a paucity of high-quality research related to this topic. Telehealth is a growing role for advanced practice registered nurses, therefore adding to the importance of prioritizing the understanding of the identified themes within this literature review and how they impact patient satisfaction with telehealth

The Effect of Loan Debt on Graduation by Department: a Bayesian Hierarchical Approach

Using data from three cohorts at the University of Delaware, this study investigates the effects of student loan debt on six-year graduation by department over five years. The effects are estimated from five Bayesian hierarchical models, one model for each year. The Bayesian hierarchical model uses a partial pooling technique to address the over-fitting issue when estimating the effects of loan debt, and this technique is especially beneficial to departments with small enrollments. Similar to the observation that financial aid has different effects by racial and ethnic groups, and socioeconomic groups, findings suggest a pronounced department-level loan debt effect for first-year students that diminishes as students progress through their academic career. These findings suggest that a strategy that considers a students’ academic department when designing a financial aid policy would optimize the efficiency of institutional financial resources. Moreover, universities exploring differential financial aid policies by department should start with randomized trials using first-year students

Addressing Food Insecurity in the United States During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Role of the Federal Nutrition Safety Net

Food insecurity has been a direct and almost immediate consequence of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and its associated ramifications on unemployment, poverty and food supply disruptions. As a social determinant of health, food insecurity is associated with poor health outcomes including diet related chronic diseases, which are associated with worst COVID-19 outcomes (e.g., COVID-19 patients of all ages with obesity face higher risk of complications, death). In the United States (US), the federal nutrition safety net is predominantly made up of the suite of 15 federal nutrition assistance programs that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) administers and the Older American Act Nutrition Program that the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) administers (See Table 1). Both made significant adaptations to help ensure Americans have safe, secureand healthy foods and beverages during this national emergency. This essay briefly discusses the successes and shortcomings of these adaptations by critical life stages and puts forth recommendations for strengthening the public health impacts of our federal nutrition safety net in the near- and longterm

Seasonality in the alpine water logistic system on a regional basis

International audienceIn this study the water logistic system is defined as the interaction of the subsystems water resources, water supply and water demand in terms of water flow. The analysis of a water balance in alpine regions is strongly influenced by both temporal and spatial seasonal fluctuations within these elements, the latter due to the vertical dimension of mountainous areas. Therefore the determination of different seasons plays a key role within the assessment of alpine water logistic systems. In most studies a water balance for a certain region is generated on an annual, monthly or classic 4-seasonal basis. This paper presents a GIS-based multi criteria method to determine an optimal winter and summer period, taking into account different water demand stakeholders, alpine hydrology and the characteristic present day water supply infrastructure of the Alps. Technical snow-making and (winter) tourism were identified as the two major seasonal water demand stakeholders in the study area, which is the Kitzbueheler region in the Austrian Alps. Based upon the geographical datasets mean snow cover start and end date, winter was defined as the period from December to March, and summer as the period from April to November

Interactive Non-Malleable Codes Against Desynchronizing Attacks in the Multi-Party Setting

Interactive Non-Malleable Codes were introduced by Fleischhacker et al. (TCC 2019) in the two party setting with synchronous tampering. The idea of this type of non-malleable code is that it "encodes" an interactive protocol in such a way that, even if the messages are tampered with according to some class F of tampering functions, the result of the execution will either be correct, or completely unrelated to the inputs of the participating parties. In the synchronous setting the adversary is able to modify the messages being exchanged but cannot drop messages nor desynchronize the two parties by first running the protocol with the first party and then with the second party. In this work, we define interactive non-malleable codes in the non-synchronous multi-party setting and construct such interactive non-malleable codes for the class F^s_bounded of bounded-state tampering functions

Legislative and Executive Branch Developments Affecting the United States Department of Agriculture Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

For more than forty years, the United States Department of Agriculture Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly Food Stamps) has offered nutrition assistance to nearly forty million eligible individuals and families each month. This article first provides a brief overview of the evolution of the United States’ largest domestic food security and nutrition safety net program. Then, the article reviews Congressional actions taken regarding SNAP during the 2018 Farm Bill deliberations, appropriations for fiscal years 2017 through 2020, and oversight (in)activities. The article focuses on Congressional activities regarding block grants; participant eligibility; benefit adequacy, issuance, and redemption; and strengthening SNAP’s nutritional impacts. Next, the article discusses a variety of executive orders, administrative actions, initiatives, nominations, budget proposals, and tweets with SNAP implications put forth thus far by President Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States. These actions include the America’s Harvest Box, natural disaster responses, the public charge rule, tariffs on Chinese imports, and various agency relocations and reorganizations. The article reflects on how each of these legislative and executive developments might impact SNAP\u27s organization, operations at the federal, tribal, state and retailer levels, and, ultimately, eating patterns and health of participating and eligible children and families, persons with disabilities, and elders