Whatever happened to meaning? Commentary on Millikan: A common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds

Even in infancy, concept formation has to do with creating meaning, not with tracking substances. Preverbal infants can identify a substance such as a dog, but their first concept of this substance is not dog but animal. It is difficult to account for such global concepts by the perceptual processes involved in object identification, yet these concepts are the foundation on which later concepts are built

Free will for everyone - with flaws

Wegner's refutation of the notion of a conscious free will is addressed to a general reader. Despite a wide ranging and instructive survey and a conclusion acceptable to current psychological thinking, it is flawed by terminological confusions and lack of attention to relevant evidence and previous psychological approaches. It is suggested that psychology best drop the term will altogether

Accessible Pareto-Improvements: Using Market Information to Reform Inefficiencies

We study Pareto improvements whose implementation requires knowledge of only market prices and traded quantities, not utility and demand functions. Quantity stabilizations (for example, the Lau, Qian, and Roland model of dual-track reform) give agents the right to repeat their earlier trades and hence require policymakers to know the quantities agents previously exchanged. While reasonable in some partial equilibrium contexts, such knowledge is implausible in general equilibrium. To diminish informational requirements further, we also consider price stabilizations, which hold constant the relative prices that consumers face. Although price stabilizations do not achieve first-best efficiency, they lead to Pareto-improvements and production efficiency. Moreover, the production efficiency advantage persists under price stabilization but not under quantity stabilization when some firms are not profit-maximizes; this difference can be critical in transition policies for planned economies. In addition to planning, we consider several other applications of quantity and price stabilization, both partial equilibrium and general equilibrium: removal of rent controls, deregulation of a cross-subsidizing public utility, and the entry of an autarkic economy into world trade. Not surprisingly, the most plausible candidates for quantity or price stabilization occur in partial equilibrium settings. Finally, we discuss some difficulties specific to general equilibrium models of transition economies. When the state completely rations trades under planning, it will usually need to operate at a deficit. Under reform, the state must raise revenue to close this deficit, and that will frequently prevent quantity stabilizations from achieving a Pareto improvement. But ex ante deficits do no pose a problem for price stabilization reform strategies.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39782/3/wp398.pd

The Taylor Rule and Interest Rate Uncertainty in the U.S. 1970-2006

This paper shows how to estimate forecast uncertainty about future short-term interest rates by combining a time-varying Taylor rule with an unobserved components model of economic fundamentals. Using this model I separate interest rate uncertainty into economically meaningful components that represent uncertainty about future economic conditions and uncertainty about future monetary policy. Results from estimating the model on U.S. data suggest important changes in uncertainty about future short-term interest rates over time and highlight the relative importance of the different elements which underlie interest rate uncertainty for the U.S.Monetary policy, reaction functions, state-space models, output-gap forecasts, inflation forecasts

The influence of local governance on agricultural advisory services in Tajikistan

The present article investigates the influence of local governance on agricultural advisory services in Tajikistan. The Central Asian Republic of Tajikistan is an agricultural country that has been described as a hybrid state, where local governance tends to be dominated by a few powerful actors. Local governance processes do have a strong influence on the agriculture practise and on the exchange of the knowledge. Agricultural advisory services claim various effects in the country. Especially in regions that are dominated by monocultures, advisory services have limited success. Therefore the present article assumes that the nexus of knowledge and innovation in Tajik agriculture is largely dependent on the decision-making of local governance processes. The article outlines the important role of local governance for distribution and use of knowledge in rural areas and emphasizes the context of agricultural advisory services in Tajikistan. --Tajikistan,Agriculture,Advisory service,Local governance,Elites

Regime-dependent effects of monetary policy shocks. Evidence from threshold vector autoregressions

This paper studies regime dependence in the effects of monetary policy shocks for the U.S. using a threshold vector autoregressive model. In a high inflation regime the standard results from the literature obtain. In a low inflation regime output shows no significant response to monetary policy while the inflation response is negative. The paper endogenously determines two distinct regimes, while the literature thus far only considers alternative subsamples.monetary policy shocks, threshold vector autoregression

Are there gains from including monetary aggregates and stock market indices in the monetary policy reaction function? A simulation study of recent U.S. monetary policy

We study how the inclusion of growth rates of monetary aggregates or changes in stock market indices affects the stabilization performance of optimal monetary policy rules when there is uncertainty about the structure of the economy. With a simulation model of the U.S. economy we show that the performance of monetary policy rules that include these variables deteriorates much stronger than that of rules without them if the true economic structure deviates from the one used to derive the rule. We also investigate whether money growth and changes in stock market indices help explaining the Fed's recent monetary policy.optimal monetary policy; monetary policy reaction function; robust monetary policy

Macroeconomic dynamics and inflation regimes in the U.S. Results from threshold vector autoregressions

This paper studies regime dependence in macroeconomic dynamics in the U.S. using a threshold vector autoregressive model in which endogenous regime switches are triggered by the inflation rate. The model separates a high from a low inflation regime with both regimes being strongly persistent. Generalized impulse response functions highlight important across-regime differences in the responses of the economy to monetary policy and inflation shocks. Simulating both regimes with individual structural equations interchanged shows a change in inflation dynamics to be the most important source of the transition of the U.S. economy from the high into the low inflation state while the change in the monetary policy reaction functions has only very little effect. Our results indicate that favorable changes in the economic structure and less frequent and smaller shocks are important explanations for the observed decline in U.S. macroeconomic volatility since the mid 1980s.threshold vector autoregression, Great Moderation

Compromises Between Cardinality and Ordinality in Preference Theory and Social Choice

By taking sets of utility functions as a primitive description of agents, we define an ordering over assumptions on utility functions that gauges their implicit measurement requirements. Cardinal and ordinal assumptions constitute two types of measurement requirements, but several standard assumptions in economics lie between these extremes. We first apply the ordering to different theories for why consumer preferences should be convex and show that diminishing marginal utility, which for complete preferences implies convexity, is an example of a compromise between cardinality and ordinality. In contrast, the Arrow-Koopmans theory of convexity, although proposed as an ordinal theory, relies on utility functions that lie in the cardinal measurement class. In a second application, we show that diminishing marginal utility, rather than the standard stronger assumption of cardinality, also justifies utilitarian recommendations on redistribution and axiomatizes the Pigou-Dalton principle. We also show that transitivity and order-density (but not completeness) characterize the ordinal preferences that can be induced from sets of utility functions, present a general cardinality theorem for additively separable preferences, and provide sufficient conditions for orderings of assumptions on utility functions to be acyclic and transitive.Cardinal utility, ordinal utility, measurement theory, utilitarianism