Causal Comparisons

Focusing on the multiple meanings of the statement A was a more important cause of C than was B, Professor Strassfeld considers the feasibility of comparative causation as a means of apportioning legal responsibility for harms. He concludse that by combining two different interpretations of more important cause --judgments of comparative counterfactual similarity and the Uniform Comparative Fault Act approach of comparative responsibility--we can effectively make causal comparisons and avoid the effort to compare such incommensurables as the defendant\u27s fault under a strict liability standard and the plaintiff\u27s failt for failure to exercise reasonable care

Dragline comparisons

The presenting company provided data on the performance of a dragline over a four-week period during which four different buckets were used. The Study Group examined this data and suggested a method of analysing data from such comparative studies

Pairwise Comparisons Simplified

This study examines the notion of generators of a pairwise comparisons matrix. Such approach decreases the number of pairwise comparisons from $n\cdot (n-1)$ to $n-1$. An algorithm of reconstructing of the PC matrix from its set of generators is presented.Comment: 15 pages, two figure

Progressivity comparisons

Analysts should correct for distributional differences before undertaking local progressivity comparisons between income tax or tax and benefit schedules. A transplant-and-compare procedure is advocated, involving 'importation' of the schedule from one regime into another, or from both into a reference scenario. The residual progression ordering over transplanted schedules then assures a global ordering of original regimes by Lorenz or Suits curves. The algorithm is advocated for use only when transplantation functions are isoelastic, and is illustrated for the Canadian, Israeli and UK tax and benefit systems.

Appendix D: Curriculum Comparisons

Curriculum Comparisons listed by year and semester, includes 1945-46, 1965-66, 1985-86, and 1994-95

European Railway Comparisons: Final Report

The Institute for Transport Studies (ITS), University of Leeds and the British Railways Board (BRB) carried out a major comparative study of Western European railways in the late 1970s (BRB and University of Leeds, 1979). Follow-up work was carried out by ITS financed by the Social Science Research Council and reported by Nash (1985). It was deaded to revive this work at ITS for a number of reasons: It is over ten years since the last set of comparisons (for 1981) were made at ITS and therefore a review of the changes in costs and productivity may be timely. There has been a number of technical developments that make the use of statistical cost analysis more promising. These developments include the use of more flexible functional forms such as the translog, and the development of comprehensive total factor productivity indices (see, for example, Dodgson, 1985 and, more recently, Hensher and Waters, 1993). There is increasing interest in the organisational structure of railway industries as a result of the 1988 Transport Act in Sweden, the EC directive 91/4-40 and the publication of proposals for privatising British Rail in July 1992 (see, for example, ECMT, 1993). Given the explosion in information technology, there were some hopes that data availability would have improved. (Continues..

European Railway Comparisons – Company Profiles

This work was undertaken as part of a project sponsored by the British Railways Board entitled `European Railway Comparisons'. The aims of this project are as follows: (i)To compare the current efficiency of European railway operators and examine recent trends at both aggregate and disaggregate levels. (ii)To assess the effects of economies of scale and economies of density on European rail operations. (iii)To make an exploratory assessment of the potential for further disaggregation by market type (InterCity, Commuter, Freight) in order to make detailed comparisons of market shares. The main methods employed to carry out this study are as follows: (i)A review of the literature on railway cost and productivity analysis. Preliminary findings are given in Working Paper 354 and a paper presented to the World Conference on Transport Research (Nash, C.A. and Preston, J.M. (1992) "Assessing the Performance of European Railways"). (ii)Collation of published data for 13 European State Railway Operators. (iii)Face to face interviews with managers at the 13 State Railway companies in order to check our understanding of published data sources, gain more infomation at a disaggregate level (administered by a self completion questionnaire) and obtain an understanding of the institutional background. This report summarises some of the background information that was obtained from the interviews undertaken in the summer of 1992. A company profile is developed for each operator under four main headings: Objectives and Management, Finance, the Freight Market and the Passenger Market