Partisan cycles and the consumption volatility puzzle

Standard real business cycle theory predicts that consumption should be smoother than output, as observed in developed countries. In emerging economies, however, consumption is more volatile than income. In this paper the authors provide a novel explanation of this phenomenon, the ‘consumption volatility puzzle,’ based on political frictions. They develop a dynamic stochastic political economy model where parties that disagree on the size of government (right-wing and left-wing) alternate in power and face aggregate uncertainty. While productivity shocks affect only consumption through responses to output, political shocks (switches in political ideology) change the composition between private and public consumption for a given output size via changes in the level of taxes. Since emerging economies are characterized by less stable governments and more polarized societies, the effects of political shocks are more pronounced. For a reasonable set of parameters the authors confirm the empirical relationship between political polarization and the ratio of consumption volatility to output volatility across countries.Business cycles ; Developing countries

Psychopaths and Symmetry: A Reply to Nelkin

An agent is morally competent if she can respond to moral considerations. There is a debate about whether agents are open to moral blame only if they are morally competent, and Dana Nelkin’s “Psychopaths, Incorrigible Racists, and the Faces of Responsibility” is an important contribution to this debate. Like others involved in this dispute, Nelkin takes the case of the psychopath to be instructive. This is because psychopaths are similar to responsible agents insofar as they act deliberately and on judgments about reasons, and yet psychopaths lack moral competence. Nelkin argues that, because of their moral incompetence, vices such as cruelty are not attributable to psychopaths. It follows that psychopaths are not open to moral blame since their behavior is only seemingly vicious. I have three aims in this reply to Nelkin. First, I respond to her claim that psychopaths are not capable of cruelty. Second, I respond to the related proposal—embedded in Nelkin’s “symmetry argument”—that a “pro-social psychopath” would not be capable of kindness. My responses to these claims are unified: even if the psychopath is not capable of “cruelty,” and the pro-social psychopath is not capable of “kindness,” the actions of these agents can have a significance for us that properly engages our blaming and praising practices. Finally, I argue that Nelkin’s strategy for showing that moral competence is required for cruelty supports a stronger conclusion than she anticipates: it supports the conclusion that blameworthiness requires not just moral competence, but actual moral understanding

A column based variance analysis approach to static reservoir model upgridding

The development of coarsened reservoir simulation models from high resolution geologic models is a critical step in a simulation study. The optimal coarsening sequence becomes particularly challenging in a fluvial channel environment where the channel sinuosity and orientation can result in pay/non-pay juxtaposition in many regions of the geologic model. The optimal coarsening sequence is also challenging in tight gas sandstones where sharp changes between sandstone and shale beds are predominant and maintaining the pay/non-pay distinction is difficult. Under such conditions, a uniform coarsening will result in mixing of pay and non-pay zones and will likely result in geologically unrealistic simulation models which create erroneous performance predictions. In particular, the upgridding algorithm must keep pay and non-pay zones distinct through a non-uniform coarsening of the geologic model. We present a coarsening algorithm to determine an optimal reservoir simulation grid by grouping fine scale geologic model cells into effective simulation cells. Our algorithm groups the layers in such a way that the heterogeneity measure of an appropriately defined static property is minimized within the layers and maximized between the layers. The optimal number of layers is then selected based on an analysis resulting in a minimum loss of heterogeneity. We demonstrate the validity of the optimal gridding by applying our method to a history matched waterflood in a structurally complex and faulted offshore turbiditic oil reservoir. The field is located in a prolific hydrocarbon basin offshore South America. More than 10 years of production data from up to 8 producing wells are available for history matching. We demonstrate that any coarsening beyond the degree indicated by our analysis overly homogenizes the properties on the simulation grid and alters the reservoir response. An application to a tight gas sandstone developed by Schlumberger DCS is also used in our verification of our algorithm. The specific details of the tight gas reservoir are confidential to Schlumberger's client. Through the use of a reservoir section we demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm by visually comparing the reservoir properties to a Schlumberger fine scale model

Drone Warfare, Civilian Deaths, and the Narrative of Honest Mistakes

In this chapter, we consider the plausibility and consequences of the use of the term “honest errors” to describe the accidental killings of civilians resulting from the US military’s drone campaigns in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. We argue that the narrative of “honest errors” unjustifiably excuses those involved in these killings from moral culpability, and reinforces long-standing, pernicious assumptions about the moral superiority of the US military and the inevitability of civilian deaths in combat. Furthermore, we maintain that, given the knowledge-distorting practices within the US military’s organizational structure, few if any civilian deaths from drone strikes meet the criteria of a genuinely morally excusing “honest mistake”. Instead, these accidental killings often reflect objectionable attitudes of relative disregard for the safety of civilians. These attitudes are, we argue, sufficient to warrant the attribution of blame and moral responsibility, both with respect to certain individual actions and with respect to the US military as an institution. In light of this, we propose incorporating a Principle of the Moral Equality of Non-combatants into military assessments of what counts as “acceptable risk” to civilians. This would go some way, we argue, to redressing the ongoing injustice inflicted on the victims of civilian killings by the failure of the US military and US political leadership to take moral responsibility for unjustified civilian deaths