Counterfactual Hypotheses Research Articles

And if Freddie had been... a new study of the influence of driving and putting on PGA Tour performances

In recent years, many experts in the economic analysis of golf have been interested in the skills/earnings relationship with regard to the PGA Tour. In most cases, their results are similar: putting is a determining aspect of the game with regard to winning. Despite these results, many experts still put the emphasis on driving distance. Accordingly, to address this issue from a different angle, we chose to proceed in two stages. As a first step, we established the results of Fred Couples, if he had been a good putter throughout his career (the counterfactual hypothesis). This first analysis confirms most of the results obtained in other research on this topic. It also shows the need to distinguish different types of putts influencing results (scores) and earnings (rankings on money list) on the PGA Tour. As a second step, we built a series of models, based on our results, which assessed more precisely the influence of different types of putts on PGA Tour earnings. Our conclusion: to achieve superior performance on the PGA Tour it is better to belong to the category of “money putters”. In other words, avoid failures on short putts and sink a significant percentage of putts over 25 feet.

Why did French Savers buy Foreign Assets before 1914? A Methodological Approach to the Decomposition of the Benefits from Diversification.

This paper examines the question as to whether, before 1914, French savers bought foreign assets to gain higher foreign returns or because of low correlation. Using tools of the Modern Portfolio Theory, the benefit from international diversification is decomposed into these two components, using a counterfactual hypothesis of perfect correlation between two assets. This approach allows an original measure of the respective share of the higher foreign returns and the low correlation in the benefit of diversification. The argument is put forward that French investors were mainly attracted by weak foreign correlation, rather than higher returns, since a higher risk-return portfolio was achievable in the domestic market.

Reframing the Past: Thoughts about Business Leadership and Decision Making under Uncertainty

How do business leaders make decisions in the face of uncertainty? More important, how do business and economic historians write a narrative that links a business problem, its proposed solution, and the outcome of this action without allowing the success or failure of the decision to determine the trajectory of the story? Counterfactual hypotheses and contextual analysis provide two tools that can help historians minimize the distortions of hindsight and recover a sense of the contingency that surrounds all decisions.

Reframing the Past: Thoughts about Business Leadership and Decision Making under Uncertainty

How do business leaders make decisions in the face of uncertainty? More important, how do business and economic historians write a narrative that links a business problem, its proposed solution, and the outcome of this action without allowing the success or failure of the decision to determine the trajectory of the story? Counterfactual hypotheses and contextual analysis provide two tools that can help historians minimize the distortions of hindsight and recover a sense of the contingency that surrounds all decisions.

Karl Popper and the Copenhagen interpretation

Popper conceived an experiment whose analysis led to a result that he deemed absurd. Popper wrote that his reasoning was based on the Copenhagen interpretation and therefore invalidated it. Many authors who have examined Popper's analysis have found in it various technical flaws which are briefly summarized here. However, the aim of the present article is not technical. My concern is to redress logical flaws in Popper's argument: the terminology he uses is ambiguous, his analysis involves counterfactual hypotheses, and it violates Bohr's complementarity principle. Therefore, the absurdity of Popper's result only confirms Bohr's approach.

Violence and the paradox of democratic renewal: A preliminary assessment

Jefferson's famous dictum that the ‘tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants’ is examined using a counterfactual argument and empirical and normative analysis. If Jefferson is right and there is an inescapable connection between democracy and violence, his dictum must contain a paradox since democracy in the first instance also predicates the creation and maintenance of institutional mechanisms for non‐violent resolution and management of conflict. What if Jefferson was wrong and the ‘blood of patriots and tyrants’ can destroy rather than fertilize the tree of liberty? Positing the counterfactual suggests (and permits analysis of) three derivative subhypotheses: (1) that democracies born in violence are more prone to periodic ‘violent challenges’ than those born peacefully; (2) that periodic violent challenges in democracies leave them less, rather than more, stable; and (3) that when democracies break down they usually do so when a culture of violence is created. Overall, the analysis tends to confirm the counterfactual hypothesis.

A Dynamic Model of Loss, Retirement, and Tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives

This article analyzes the relative importance of falling electoral loss rates and retirement rates in creating the structure of tenure in the modern Congress. We develop a dynamic model in which electoral loss and voluntary retirement determine a unique long-run equilibrium (or steady-state) tenure profile, which is the fraction of members in each term of service. The model is then used to derive steady-state tenure profiles for the period 1870 to 1930 and to compare them to profiles that are simulated under different counterfactual hypotheses about loss and retirement. We briefly consider more recent congresses as well. We find that declining retirement accounts for 75% of the total long-run change in turnover from 1870 to 1930. However, declining electoral loss accounts for 82% of the total long-run change in turnover from the period of "pre-incumbency" (1926-1946) to the 1980s (1982-1988).

Ending the War with Japan: Paul Nitze's "Early Surrender" Counterfactual

The most important foundation for attacks on the decision of President Harry S. Truman to use atomic bombs againstJapan is the claim that conventional bombing and naval blockade had brought Japan to the point of by the summer of 1945, that Truman knew this, and that he dropped the bombs to intimidate the Soviet Union, not to end the war. This early surrender counterfactual hypothesis comes from publications of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS). The USSBS was headed in Japan, and its official reports edited and controlled, by Paul H. Nitze. This article examines the evidence on which Nitze claims to have based his early surrender hypothesis. The USSBS began as an effort by strategic bombing advocates to establish their craft as the ultimate arbiter of all future

Population Growth and Economic Development - General Equilibrium Simulations

The paper presents a demographic-economic simulation model DEM-CEM system. Our efforts at building the DEM-CEM system focus on the construction of an age, sex, region, educational attainment level and skill level specified, five dimensional population model—DEM. And integrate the DEM to a Computable general equilibrium model (CGE model) of economic development—CEM. The DEM-CEM system relates population dynamics to economic development of a representative developing country.The simulation's major intended output is illustration of different dynamic path of the economy subject to alternative policy choices. The demographic factor as a policy variable reflects both the quantity and the quality change of the population and labor force over time, and influences the national economic development through channels of the formation of human capital, e.g. formal education system, on-the-job training program, health services etc. Simulations constructed under various historical and policy counterfactual hypotheses, are reported. The results were compatible with much of the earlier literature and certain new results offer a useful foundation for furture quantitative work of policy counterfacutal study.

The Control of Inflation: Lessons from East European Experience

Economics is difficult enough, even if one manages to avoid studies in applied economics. Such efforts are inherently unreliable and incoinclusive. It is much simpler to model any single set of institutions and functional relations, using the data they generate to test hypotheses derived from the model, than to compare two different environments with each other in any useful way. With a model, one has an essential extra degree of freedom-one constructs it oneself. In applied economics, however, everything is given, and we are reduced to counterfactual hypotheses analogous to those of history; e.g., how would a policy directed towards narrowing wage differentials as in the USSR work in some other country?-supposing we do know, more or 1Pss, what has actually happened in the USSR. It is therefore easier to apply the analytical tools of Western economics to the socialist centrally planned economics (CPEs), whatever the data problems and the need to adapt our models, than to seek any lessons. One is especially reluctant to hypothesize the introduction of some CPE institutional pattern into a capitalist mixed economy. In our present circumstances, however, this is perhaps academic self-indulgence. Whether or not we are yet moving towards any international order, the old one surely has broken down; whether or not we can discern the future outlines of our own domestic system, the existing one isn't working very well. To proclaim a crisis of capitalism-or of orthodox economics-may be rhetorical excess, but in fact both are being seriously challenged, so far more by events than by new ideas. So it may be useful to put unfamiliar alternatives before a wider public, with a view to evaluating them and drawing implications, both positive and negative, for our own institutions and policies. At least this form of applied economics has some potential value, in contrast with comparative systems, which typically juxtaposes idealized models bearing little relation to actual economies; and it may not be so open to misinterpretation as East-West comparisons of growth rates and efficiency (see the critique in Hanson, 1971). I shall deal with the CPEs of Eastern Europe as a group. There are some significant differences between them in institutions and levels of development, but all allocate resources centrally in physical terms, and all have similar monetary systems. The USSR stands out for its size, Hungary for its market-oriented economic reforms of 1968, which took it partly outside the CPE category. Yugoslavia deliberately rejected central planning over two decades ago, but it is a socialist economy, and its workers' control and inflation justify a brief discussion (Section VIII).

The French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the Counterfactual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence Henry Gipson and John Shy

The French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the Counterfactual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence Henry Gipson and John Shy

Counterfactual Hypotheses, Laws, and Dispositions

Counterfactual Hypotheses, Laws, and Dispositions