Ernesta Orlovaitė

Although economists have broadened their interests considerably since Robert Lucas equated economic development with income growth, the ultimate objective of development is hitherto often defined in monetary terms. Amartya Sen’s capability approach offers a much richer account of a good life and has influenced development debates in academia and beyond. Nevertheless, mainstream economists appear reluctant to embrace Sen’s ideas due to their immense complexity, explicit treatment of values, and… Mehr zeigen

Although economists have broadened their interests considerably since Robert Lucas equated economic development with income growth, the ultimate objective of development is hitherto often defined in monetary terms. Amartya Sen’s capability approach offers a much richer account of a good life and has influenced development debates in academia and beyond. Nevertheless, mainstream economists appear reluctant to embrace Sen’s ideas due to their immense complexity, explicit treatment of values, and operationalisation challenges. The aim of this dissertation is to propose a novel operationalisation of the capability approach, one that is sufficiently precise and simple to be applied at scale, yet at the same time remains true to the spirit of Sen’s ideas. The proposal is based on the concept of human flourishing borrowed from the emerging field of positive psychology. In particular, the dissertation addresses two objectives. First, it demonstrates that flourishing is a theoretically sound operationalisation of the capability approach by critically analysing the concept in terms of the four requirements proposed by Comim (2008). Second, it demonstrates that flourishing can offer novel and useful insights about development to economics by evaluating existing evidence on the correlates and antecedents of flourishing using a rapid literature review. Taken together, the findings of this dissertation strongly suggest that flourishing could be employed as an overarching objective of development in economics. The conclusion has exciting implications for development research and practice. Weniger anzeigen

The paper introduces a new automatic cognate identification approach that can take as input orthographic word lists and produce both pairwise and group-based decisions. While the initial goal of the project was to reproduce the (Hauer & Kondrak, 2011) cognate discovery method, several weaknesses of the model were discovered. The approach introduced here addresses these issues and follows the comparative method more closely. First, instead of choosing string similarity measures that appear to be… Mehr zeigen

The paper introduces a new automatic cognate identification approach that can take as input orthographic word lists and produce both pairwise and group-based decisions. While the initial goal of the project was to reproduce the (Hauer & Kondrak, 2011) cognate discovery method, several weaknesses of the model were discovered. The approach introduced here addresses these issues and follows the comparative method more closely. First, instead of choosing string similarity measures that appear to be reasonable, feature selection is employed, leading to eight best-performing attributes. Second, different aspects of cognateness are captured by also incorporating part-of-speech, letter correspondence, and language family information into the model. Third, strings are selectively preprocessed using either vowel removal or sound class substitution in order to reduce the gap between letters and phonemes, and to only penalize word differences if they are unlikely to appear in cognates. Finally, logistic regression is employed instead of SVM, using probabilities of cognateness as distance measures in hierarchical agglomerative clustering. The reproduced (Hauer & Kondrak, 2011) approach, the new method, and three rule-based baselines are tested using the 95-language 200-meaning Comparative Indo-European Database from (Dyen, Kruskal, & Black, 1992). The new approach performs significantly better than the other four models in terms of both classification and clustering. Weniger anzeigen

We investigate whether the hypothesis of money illusion can explain the negative or non-existent stock returns and inflation co-movement, and lead to deviations from the CAPM-implied risk-return relation in ten Central Eastern European (CEE) markets. We employ the Cohen, Polk and Vuolteenaho (2005) methodology which allows us to test the hypothesis by utilizing the cross-sectional implications of the Modigliani and Cohn (1979) proposition, and thus avoids the need to discriminate between… Mehr zeigen

We investigate whether the hypothesis of money illusion can explain the negative or non-existent stock returns and inflation co-movement, and lead to deviations from the CAPM-implied risk-return relation in ten Central Eastern European (CEE) markets. We employ the Cohen, Polk and Vuolteenaho (2005) methodology which allows us to test the hypothesis by utilizing the cross-sectional implications of the Modigliani and Cohn (1979) proposition, and thus avoids the need to discriminate between competing rational explanations. The hypothesis of no money illusion cannot be rejected in any of the researched CEE equity markets. Conversely, we find no significant inflationary effect on the Security Market Line (SML) in eight markets, indicating that the stock return and inflation relationship requires alternative explanations. In Lithuania and Poland inflation positively affects the SML, making safe (risky) stocks relatively underpriced (overpriced) in comparison to the market. Weniger anzeigen