This essay reviews progress in empirical economics since Leamer's (1983) critique. Leamer highlighted the benefits of sensitivity analysis, a procedure in which researchers show how their results change with changes in specification or functional form. Sensitivity analysis has had a salutary but...

In this paper we introduce a family of minimum distance from independence estimators, suggested by Manski's minimum mean square from independence estimator. We establish strong consistency, asymptotic normality and consistency of resampling estimates of the distribution and variance of these...

Reduced rank regression procedures in error correction models (ECM's) permit consistent estimation of the cointegration space but do not provide consistent estimates of individual structural relations when the dimension of the cointegration space is greater than one. Indeed, individual...

The common approach to evaluating a model in the structural VAR literature is to compare the impulse responses from structural VARs run on the data to the theoretical impulse responses from the model. The Sims-Cogley-Nason approach instead compares the structural VARs run on the data to...

This paper analyzes whether inclusion of a statistically independent random walk in a vector autoregression can result in spurious inference. The problem was raised originally by Ohanian (1988). In a Monte Carlo simulation based on the VAR's estimated by Sims (1980b, 1982), Ohanian found that...

The central finding of the recent structural vector autoregression (SVAR) literature with a differenced specification of hours is that technology shocks lead to a fall in hours. Researchers have used this finding to argue that real business cycle models are unpromising. We subject this SVAR...

We propose two new estimators for a wide class of panel data models with nonseparable error terms and endogenous explanatory variables. The first estimator covers qualitative choice models and both estimators cover models with continuous dependent variables. The first estimator requires the...

Instrumental variables (IV) estimation of a demand equation using time series data is shown to produce a weighted average derivative of heterogeneous potential demand functions. This result adapts recent work on the causal interpretation of two-stage least squares estimates to the simultaneous...

Many water utilities use outdoor watering restrictions based on assigned weekly watering days to promote conservation and delay costly capacity expansions. We find that such policies can lead to unintended consequences - customers who adhere to the prescribed schedule use more water than those...

In this paper we introduce a family of semi-parametric estimators, suggested by Manski's minimum mean-square distance from independence estimator. We establish the strong consistency, asymptotic normality and consistency of bootstrap estimates of the sampling distribution and the asymptotic...