La lutte contre la pauvreté à l'épreuve des essais cliniques. Réflexion sur l'approche expérimentale de l'économie du développement

URL des Documents de travail : http://ces.univ-paris1.fr/cesdp/cesdp2014.htmlDocuments de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 2014.26 - ISSN : 1955-611XBy trying to guarantee that the fight against poverty is based on evidence, randomized experiments, essentially developed by Esther Duflo within the J-PAL, offer a new way to fight poverty. The originality of such approach is to import the methodology of clinical trials in development economics. In order to stress the main epistemological issues of Esther Duflo's methodology, this paper aims to interrogate this new approach in development economics through the philosophical analysis of Georges Canguilhem in medicine. Afterwards, we show that such approach struggles to produce efficient remedies against poverty; instead, it offers a global view of poverty symptoms.Les évaluations randomisées développées par Esther Duflo au sein du J-PAL ont transformé la lutte contre la pauvreté, cherchant à en faire une lutte " rigoureuse " fondée sur des preuves " scientifiques ". Cette approche tire son originalité d'une volonté de se rapprocher de la méthodologie d'un essai clinique médical, afin d'aboutir à une démarche neutre et impartiale. Cet article questionne la méthodologie du J-PAL en la rapprochant de celle des essais cliniques médicaux. Pour cela, nous utiliserons l'analyse de Georges Canguilhem, afin de pointer les principaux enjeux épistémologiques de l'approche du J-PAL. Nous montrons ensuite que cette approche peine à produire des remèdes efficaces contre la pauvreté et qu'elle ne peut, de ce fait, offrir qu'un panorama des symptômes de la pauvreté

Introduction

avec Olivier Faverea

Hector, a fast simulator for the transport of particles in beamlines

Computing the trajectories of particles in generic beamlines is an important ingredient of experimental particle physics, in particular regarding near-beam detectors. A new tool, Hector, has been built for such calculations, using the transfer matrix approach and energy corrections. The limiting aperture effects are also taken into account. As an illustration, the tool was used to simulate the LHC beamlines, in particular around the high luminosity interaction points (IPs), and validated with results of the Mad-X simulator. The LHC beam profiles, trajectories and beta functions are presented. Assuming certain forward proton detector scenarios around the IP5, acceptance plots, irradiation doses and chromaticity grids are produced. Furthermore, the reconstruction of proton kinematic variables at the IP (energy and angle) is studied as well as the impact of the misalignment of beamline elements.Comment: 40 pages, 20 figures; added references, corrected typos ; submitted to JINS

High energy photon interactions at the LHC

Experimental prospects for studying high-energy photon-photon and photon-proton interactions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are discussed. Cross sections are calculated for many electroweak and beyond the Standard Model processes. Selection strategies based on photon interaction tagging techniques are studied. Assuming a typical LHC multipurpose detector, various signals and their irreducible backgrounds are presented after applying acceptance cuts. Prospects are discussed for the Higgs boson search, detection of supersymmetric particles and of anomalous quartic gauge couplings, as well as for the top quark physics.Comment: 17 pages, 16 tables and 14 figure

DELPHES 3, A modular framework for fast simulation of a generic collider experiment

The version 3.0 of the DELPHES fast-simulation is presented. The goal of DELPHES is to allow the simulation of a multipurpose detector for phenomenological studies. The simulation includes a track propagation system embedded in a magnetic field, electromagnetic and hadron calorimeters, and a muon identification system. Physics objects that can be used for data analysis are then reconstructed from the simulated detector response. These include tracks and calorimeter deposits and high level objects such as isolated electrons, jets, taus, and missing energy. The new modular approach allows for greater flexibility in the design of the simulation and reconstruction sequence. New features such as the particle-flow reconstruction approach, crucial in the first years of the LHC, and pile-up simulation and mitigation, which is needed for the simulation of the LHC detectors in the near future, have also been implemented. The DELPHES framework is not meant to be used for advanced detector studies, for which more accurate tools are needed. Although some aspects of DELPHES are hadron collider specific, it is flexible enough to be adapted to the needs of electron-positron collider experiments.Comment: JHEP 1402 (2014

Modernidad, post-modernidad, historia entrevista al profesor Julio Retamal Favereau

Indexación: Revista UNA

The Economics of Convention: From the Practice of Economics to the Economics of Practice

There would not have been an economics of convention (EC) without the use of the word "convention" in chapter 12 of the "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money" (1936) by Keynes, and without the book "Convention. A Philosophical Study" (1969), by the philosopher and mathematician David Lewis. But representatives of EC reinterpret the usual reading of those two texts. They extract from the first one the idea of a convention as regulating a professional community (the financial one and the academic one in economics). As for the second one, they privilege the final revision of Lewis' initial game-theoretic definition, which puts non-observable "beliefs" on a par with observable "actions." The coherence between both elements can only be produced by the emergence of a "(social) practice." Therefore a very different practice of economics is promoted by EC (for instance reunifying coordination and reproduction). Following Foucault who studied states as a practice (through the notion of "governmentality"), we study business firms as a practice. Because of the gap between the legal person (corporation whose members are the share-holders) and the economic organization (with all its stake-holders), the firm as a practice needs to be regulated by a convention, in order to make the inequality not unbearable for workers. Otherwise the working of the firm as a dispositive of collective creation would be blocked. We conclude that conventions, practices, and dispositives belong to the same analytical space

Top Partner Discovery in the T→tZT\to tZ channel at the LHC

In this paper we study the discovery potential of the LHC run II for heavy vector-like top quarks in the decay channel to a top and a $Z$ boson. Despite the usually smaller branching ratio compared to charged-current decays, this channel is rather clean and allows for a complete mass reconstruction of the heavy top. The latter is achieved in the leptonic decay channel of the $Z$ boson and in the fully hadronic top channel using boosted jet and jet substructure techniques. To be as model-independent as possible, a simplified model approach with only two free parameters has been applied. The results are presented in terms of parameter space regions for $3\sigma$ evidence or $5\sigma$ discovery for such new states in that channel.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, version 2 updated to JHEP 01 (2015) 08