There is a systematic and suggestive analogy between grounding and causation. In my view, this is no coincidence: grounding and causation resemble one another because grounding is a type of causation. I defend the identification of grounding with metaphysical causation from some initial objections, and I draw on the causation literature to explore connections between grounding and counterfactua...

Several authors have argued that causes differ in the degree to which they are ‘specific’ to their effects. Woodward has used this idea to enrich his influential interventionist theory of causal explanation. Here we propose a way to measure causal specificity using tools from information theory. We show that the specificity of a causal variable is not well-defined without a probability distribu...

Undilatable coronary lesions, due to coronary calcification, are encountered with increasing frequency. Percutaneous intervention of such lesions comes with the risk of stent underexpansion, which increases the risk of stent thrombosis and restenosis. A variety of techniques and devices are available to assist the interventionist in the treatment of calcified lesions. The OPN NC (SIS-Medical AG...

This paper argues that the greater the liberalization of imports in a Sub-Saharan African country, the more significant is the decline in its rate of growth due to the recession in high income economies during the late eighties and early nineties. This could be explained by the fact that when industrial countries are suffering from recession, the terms of trade may move in favor of developing c...

LLAN MELTZER HAS PRESENTED a paper that rescues Milton Friedman’s 1953 defense of flexible exchange rates from its critics and presents an impressive amount of empirical evidence against today’s received opinion favoring fixed exchanges. Nothing is more bracing than the refutation of conventional wisdom nor more satisfying than the vindication of the simple faith that the market is always right...

In the present work, the problem associated to the firm energy evaluation is treated as a non linear optimization model, which allows the representation of the productivity variation of the hydro plants. The proposed model takes into account the individualized representation of the plants and the historical series of flows since the month of January of 1931. The proposed optimization problem wi...

Using a variety of different results from the literature, I show how causal discovery with experiments is limited unless substantive assumptions about the underlying causal structure are made. These results undermine the view that experiments, such as randomized controlled trials, can independently provide a gold standard for causal discovery. Moreover, I present a concrete example in which cau...

The use of mobile technologies to support medical care is often referred to as mHealth. In this paper we will look at how a mHealth knowledge sharing environment can support local communities in Ethiopia, by placing them in the solution space to fight communicable diseases. The research will use an interventionist action research approach to a community's problem. As such it will identify the k...

Analysis of the equity premium puzzle has focused on private sector capital markets. The object of this paper is to consider the welfare and policy implications of each of the broad classes of explanations of the equity premium puzzle. As would be expected, the greater the deviation from the first-best outcome implied by a given explanation of the equity premium puzzle, the more interventionist...

inference is of course appealing. However, pragmatism cannot be really considered as a scientific method; it is essentially a practice. Further, this approach remains relatively vague, which is problematic as there is no point in estimating a causal effect that is not well defined, especially for ‘policy makers who will be unable to translate [this vague causal effect] into effective interventi...