The Great Recession and the financial crisis of 2007-09 prompted ca lls for fundamental reforms of economic theory. The role of theory in economics and in recent economic events is considered in light of two recen t books: the sociologist Richard Swedberg's The Art of Social Theory and the...

The Great Recession and the financial crisis of 2007-09 prompted ca lls for fundamental reforms of economic theory. The role of theory in economics and in recent economic events is considered in light of two recen t books: the sociologist Richard Swedberg's The Art of Social Theory and the...

The article explores the relationship between the main approaches to causality in economics dividing them into reductionist and structuralist accounts. The approaches of the Cowles Commission, Granger-causality, causality as invariance under interventions, and graph-theoretic approaches to...

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 "The Art of Social Theory" and the...

Although Cournot's mathematical economics was generally neglected until the mid-1870s, he was taken up and carefully studied by the Scientific Club of Cambridge, Massachusetts even before his “discovery” by Walras and Jevons. The episode is reconstructed from fragmentary manuscripts of the...

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 statistical hypotheses (specification tests) in...