Der Aufsatz befaßt sich mit der Frage, wie Theoreme der mathematischen Ökonomie getestet werden können und welche Rolle unrealistische Annahmen bei diesen Tests spielen. Als Beispiel dienen die bekannten Theoreme der neoklassischen Außenhandelstheorie, das Faktorpreisausgleichstheorem und...

The rhetoric of economics has long claimed scientific objectivity, however the late, great economist Joan Robinson argued that 'the purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.' This...

This paper considers factor estimation from heterogenous data, where some of the variables are noisy and only weakly informative for the factors. To identify the irrelevant variables, we search for zero rows in the loadings matrix of the factor model. To sharply separate these irrelevant...

This paper argues that mainstream economics does not follow the positivist research tradition it (often implicitly) claims to follow and expresses some serious doubt that econometrics in particular can make economics a hard science. Mathematical rigour and sophisticated statisti-cal techniques...