Journal ArticleJournal of Economic Literature · September 1, 2023
The leadership structure of the American Economic Association is documented using a biographical database covering every officer and losing candidate for AEA offices from 1950 to 2019. The analysis focuses on institutional affiliations by education and emp ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Economic Methodology · January 1, 2023
Critics argued that the 2007–09 financial crisis was failure of macroeconomics, locating its source in the dynamic, stochastic general-equilibrium model and calling for fundamental re-orientation of the field. Critics exaggerated the role of DSGE models in ...
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Journal ArticleSynthese · June 1, 2021
In the eyes of its practitioners, economics is both a deductive science and an empirical science. The starting point of its deductions might be thought of as first principles. But what is the status of such principles? The tension between foundationalism, ...
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Journal ArticleEconometrics · March 1, 2021
The author would like to make the following correction to the article by Hoover (2020): The symbol “↦”, first defined as “is weakly exogenous for” in the first line of the third paragraph of Section 4.3, was inadvertently and systematically converted in pr ...
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Journal ArticleEuropean Journal of the History of Economic Thought · January 1, 2021
In the 1870 s and 1880 s, the scientist, logician, and pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce possessed an advanced knowledge of mathematical economics, having mastered and criticised Cournot as early as 1871. In 1884 he engaged in a multi-round debate w ...
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Journal ArticleTransactions of the Charles S Peirce Society · September 1, 2020
Standard histories of economics usually treat the “marginal revolution” of the mid- 19th century as both supplanting the “classical” economics of Smith and Ricardo and as advancing the idea of economics as a mathematical science. The marginalists -especial ...
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Journal ArticleEconometrics · September 1, 2020
The relation between causal structure and cointegration and long-run weak exogeneity is explored using some ideas drawn from the literature on graphical causal modeling. It is assumed that the fundamental source of trending behavior is transmitted from exo ...
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Journal Article · January 1, 2018
Caldwell’s Beyond Positivism was a key publication that helped precipitate the consolidation of the methodology of economics into a distinct subfield within economics. Reconsidering it after 35 years, it is striking for its antina-turalism (i.e., its lack ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Economic Literature · December 1, 2016
The Great Recession and the financial crisis of 2007-09 prompted calls for fundamental reforms of economic theory. The role of theory in economics and in recent economic events is considered in light of two recent books: the sociologist Richard Swedberg's ...
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Journal ArticleEuropean Journal of the History of Economic Thought · July 3, 2016
Abstract: Modern growth theory derives mostly from Solow's “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth” (1956). Solow's own interpretation locates its origins in his view that Harrod's growth model implied a tendency toward progressive collapse of the ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophy of Science · October 1, 2015
Macroeconomists overwhelmingly believe that macroeconomics requires microfoundations, typically understood as a strong eliminativist reductionism. Microfoundations aims to recover intentionality. In the face of technical and data constraints macroeconomist ...
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Journal ArticleEconometric Theory · June 27, 2015
The paper provides a careful, analytical account of Trygve Haavelmo's use of the analogy between controlled experiments common in the natural sciences and econometric techniques. The experimental analogy forms the linchpin of the methodology for passive ob ...
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Chapter · March 26, 2015
The history of modern macroeconomics begins when much older economic questions were reclassified by Ragnar Frisch under the headings 'microeconomics' and 'macroeconomics.' The history of macroeconomics related here is importantly a history of the relations ...
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Journal ArticleEmpirical Economics · March 1, 2014
The price puzzle, an increase in the price level associated with a contractionary monetary shock, is investigated in a rich, 12-variable SVAR in which various factors that have been mooted as solutions are considered jointly. SVARs for the pre-1980 and pos ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of the History of Economic Thought · January 1, 2014
The significance of Haavelmo's The Probability Approach in Econometrics (1944), the foundational document of modern econometrics, has been interpreted in widely different ways. Some regard it as a blueprint for a provocative (but ultimately unsuccessful) p ...
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Journal ArticleMacroeconomic Dynamics · July 1, 2013
The transcript of a panel discussion marking the 50th anniversary of John Muth's Rational Expectations and the Theory of Price Movements (Econometrica 1961). The panel consisted of Michael Lovell, Robert Lucas, Dale Mortensen, Robert Shiller, and Neil Wall ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2013
Recent debates over the nature of causation, casual inference, and the uses of causal models in counterfactual analysis, involving inter alia Nancy Cartwright (Hunting Causes and Using Them), James Woodward (Making Things Happen), and Judea Pearl (Causatio ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2013
THE RELATIONSHIP between theory and data has been, from the beginning, a central concern of the new-classical macroeconomics. This much is evident in the title of Robert E. Lucas’s and Thomas J. Sargent’s landmark edited volume, Rational Expectations and E ...
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Book · January 1, 2013
Real Business Cycle theory combines the remains of monetarism with the new classical macroeconomics, and has become one of the dominant approaches within contemporary macroeconomics today. This volume presents: * the authoritative anthology in RBC. The wor ...
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Journal ArticleHistory of Political Economy · December 1, 2012
Macroeconomists have observed business cycle fluctuations over time by constructing and manipulating models in which shocks have increasingly played a greater role. Shock is a term of art that pervades modern economics appearing in nearly one-quart ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences · December 2012
Economics prefers complete explanations: general over partial equilibrium, microfoundational over aggregate. Similarly, probabilistic accounts of causation frequently prefer greater detail to less as in typical resolutions of Simpson's paradox. Strategies ...
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Journal ArticleUniv. of Copenhagen Dept. of Economics Discussion Paper · November 5, 2012
The paper provides a careful, analytical account of Trygve Haavelmo's unsystematic, but important, use of the analogy between controlled experiments common in the natural sciences and econometric techniques. The experimental analogy forms the linchpin of t ...
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Journal ArticleCHOPE Working Paper · January 18, 2012
A review essay of Roman Frydman & Michael D. Goldberg’s Beyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price Swings, Risk, and the Role of the State. ...
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Journal ArticleCHOPE Working Paper · January 18, 2012
The paper is a keynote lecture from the Tilburg-Madrid Conference on Hypothesis Tests: Foundations and Applications at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) Madrid, Spain, 15-16 December 2011. It addresses the role of tests of statistica ...
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Chapter · September 22, 2011
The structural account of causation derives inter alia from Herbert Simon's work on causal order and was developed in Hoover's Causality in Macroeconomics and earlier articles. The structural account easily connects to, enriches, and illuminates graphical ...
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Journal ArticleErkenntnis · November 1, 2010
The dominant view among macroeconomists is that macroeconomics reduces to microeconomics, both in the sense that all macroeconomic phenomena arise out of microeconomic phenomena and in the sense that macroeconomic theory-to the extent that it is correct-ca ...
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Chapter · September 2, 2009
The typical concerns of macroeconomics-such as national output, employment and unemployment, inflation, interest rates, and the balance of payments-are among the oldest in economics, having been dominant among the problems addressed by both the mercantilis ...
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Chapter · September 1, 2009
The M2 monetary aggregate is monitored by the Federal Reserve, using a broad brush theoretical analysis and an informal empirical analysis. This chapter illustrates empirical identification of an eleven-variable system, in which M2 and the factors that the ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2009
The God of Abraham; the methodology of Marshall The philosopher Bas Van Fraassen opens his Terry Lectures (published as The Empirical Stance) with an anecdote: “When Pascal died, a scrap of paper was found in the lining of his coat. On it was written ‘The ...
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Journal ArticleOxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics · August 1, 2008
Graph-theoretic methods of causal search based on the ideas of Pearl (2000), Spirtes et al. (2000), and others have been applied by a number of researchers to economic data, particularly by Swanson and Granger (1997) to the problem of finding a data-based ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Journal of Economics and Sociology · July 1, 2008
In the Vanity of the Philosopher, Sandra Peart and David Levy reconsider "postclassical" economics from the vantage point of Adam Smith's "analytical" egalitarianism. Analytical egalitarianism is assumed, not proved; and Peart and Levy's criticisms of many ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Economic Methodology · March 1, 2008
For more than 20 years, Deidre McCloskey has campaigned to convince the economics profession that it is hopelessly confused about statistical significance. She argues that many practices associated with significance testing are bad science and that most ec ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2007
Kevin Hoover (1955–) received a D.Phil. in economics from Oxford University after an undergraduate major in philosophy, and his work reflects this dual competence. He has contributed both to contemporary economics (especially macroeconomics) and to economi ...
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Journal Article · January 1, 2007
As I observed in the first lecture, I chose Pissarides’s model as a paradigm of the modern macroeconomic model for a variety of reasons: the clarity of its goals and exposition; the manner in which it attempted to relate its theoretical construction to emp ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2006
The popular image of the scientific revolution usually pits young revolutionaries against old conservatives. Freeman Dyson (2004, p. 16) observes that, in particle physics in the mid twentieth century, something had to change. But in the revolution of quan ...
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Journal Article · January 1, 2006
THEORY AND PRACTICE For the greater part of his professional life, John Maynard Keynes was known as a practical man: the author of topical tracts on current economic questions, an adviser to, and an emissary from, the British Treasury, a successful player ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2006
Keynes distinguishes between long-term and short-term expectations (G. T.: 46-7). The distinction mirrors Marshall's distinction between the long run, in which factors of production are all variable, and the short run, in which the firm's capital equipment ...
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Journal ArticleOxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics · January 1, 2004
We re-examine studies of cross-country growth regressions by Levine and Renelt (American Economic Review, Vol. 82, 1992, pp. 942-963) and Sala-i-Martin (American Economic Review, Vol. 87, 1997a, pp. 178-183; Economics Department, Columbia, University, 1997 ...
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Journal ArticleOxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics · December 1, 2003
We provide an accessible introduction to graph-theoretic methods for causal analysis. Building on the work of Swanson and Granger (Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 92, pp. 357-367, 1997), and generalizing to a larger class of models, w ...
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Journal ArticleBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science · January 1, 2003
Elliot Sober ([2001]) forcefully restates his well-known counterexample to Reichenbach's principle of the common cause: bread prices in Britain and sea levels in Venice both rise over time and are, therefore, correlated; yet they are ex hypothesi not causa ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Econometrics · January 1, 2003
Some of the well-posed causal aspects from macroeconomics were discussed. The causal lessons were supported by the vector-autoregression (VAR) framework of macroeconomics which was analogous to the panel-data approach. The analysis of causality in a VAR fr ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Economic Methodology · January 1, 2000
'Data mining' refers to a broad class of activities that have in common, a search over different ways to process or package data statistically or econometrically with the purpose of making the final presentation meet certain design criteria. We characteriz ...
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Journal ArticleOxford Economic Papers · January 1, 2000
Causal relations between US federal taxation and expenditure are analyzed using an approach based on the invariance of econometric relationships in the face of structural interventions. Institutional evidence for interventions or changes of regime and econ ...
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Journal ArticleOxford Review of Economic Policy · January 1, 1997
The real business cycle model dominates business cycle research in the new classical tradition. Typically, real business cycle modellers both offer the bold conjecture that business cycles are equilibrium phenomena driven by technology shocks and also nove ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Monetary Economics · January 1, 1994
Christina and David Romers' reply to our article 'Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc Once More' misses the point. Our argument was never that monetary policy did not matter, but that their methods could not provide useful evidence that it did. Yet, they offer addit ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Monetary Economics · January 1, 1994
Christina and David Romer's paper 'Does Monetary Policy Matter?' advocates the so-called 'narrative' approach to causal inference. We demonstrate that this method will not sustain causal inference. First, it is impossible to distinguish monetary shocks fro ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Monetary Economics · January 1, 1991
Causality is viewed as a matter of control. Controllability is captured in Simon's analysis of causality as an asymmetrical relation of recursion between variables in the unobservable data-generating process. Tests of the stability of marginal and conditio ...
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Journal ArticleEconomics and Philosophy · January 1, 1990
This article is extracted from my earlier paper, “The Logic of Causal Inference: With anApplication to Money and Prices” (Working Papers in the Research Program in AppliedMacroeconomics and Macro Policy, No. 55, Institute of Governmental Affairs, Universit ...
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