Inductive Constructions In Logic And Graph Theory

Just as much as mathematics is about results, mathematics is about methods. This thesis focuses on one method: induction. Induction, in short, allows building complex mathemati- cal objects from simple ones. These mathematical objects include the foundational, like logical statements, and the abstract, like cell complexes. Non-mathematicians struggle to find a common thread throughout all of mathematics, but I present induction as such a common thread here. In particular, this thesis discusses everything from the very foundations of mathematics all the way to combina- torial manifolds. I intend to be casual and opinionated while still providing all necessary formal rigor. This way, the content can be as readable as possible while still being complete

The first poverty line? Davies and Eden’s investigation of rural poverty in late 18th-century England

Two important and well-known surveys of the household budgets of the English rural labouring poor were produced by David Davies and Frederick Eden in the 1790s. We revisit these from the point of view of their original rationale — an investigation of the characteristics and extent of poverty in the countryside. We argue that Davies' standard of ‘tolerable comfort’ can lay claim to being the first poverty line based upon the application of a minimum consumption standard to household income. We find that the majority of households fall below this standard, although those in the south of England were worst off, that family size was the largest coefficient and poverty reduced as the age of the first child increased. The incidence of poverty was not highly correlated with the absence of a woman wage earner

Nudging or Fudging: The World Development Report 2015

The 2015 World Development Report, Mind Society and Behaviour (World Bank, 2015), seeks a redesign of development policy on the basis of insights emerging from behavioural economics. This paper offers a critical assessment of the Report across four dimensions. First, it situates the Report within the broader and evolving knowledge role of the Bank. Second, the paper locates the Report in the context of the evolution of economics as a discipline and how this informs the evolution of the Bank’s development economics. Third, the Report is critically assessed for its narrow take on behavioural economics itself. Finally, the practical significance of the promotion of behavioural economics is considered through reference to its use in interventions in health in general and in response to HIV/AIDS in particular. It is argued that the Report suggests a dramatic and flawed reduction of what development is about, in that it foregoes any analysis of the structural problems facing developing countries and fails to propose major reforms to tackle these

Shaping cash transfer impacts through “soft-conditions”: evidence from Lesotho

Cash transfer programmes have been shown to have positive effects on a variety of outcomes. While much of the literature focuses on the role of conditionality in achieving desired impact, this paper focuses on the role of ‘soft conditionality’ implemented through both ‘labelling’ and ‘messaging’ in evaluating the impact of the Child Grants Program in Lesotho, an unconditional cash transfer programme targeting poor households with orphans and vulnerable children. Beneficiary households received a clear message that the transfer should be spent on the interest and needs of children. Our findings suggest that ‘soft conditionality’ does play a role in increasing expenditure for children, especially on education, clothing and footwear. Results indicate in fact that transfer income is spent differently from general income as it exerts both an income and a substitution effect. This behavioural change is confirmed by comparing the ex-ante expected behaviours with the ex-post actual response to the programme. We find that for expenditure categories linked to the well-being of children the expost response was much higher than the ex-ante expected behaviour

US inflation and consumption: A long-term perspective with a level shift

This article examines the existence and stability of the consumption function in the United States of America (US) beginning in the 1950s. In order to obtain a stable long run relationship, we have introduced two innovative elements into the analysis of the life-cycle of the consumption function with wealth effects: 1) a shift level break in the cointegrating relationship, and 2) using inflation as an additional explanatory variable. By implementing a well structured estimation strategy, we found that after taking the level shift into account, a cointegrating equation, including inflation, exists and is more stable for the critical sub-samples than traditional consumption function models