This paper asks the question: Why has the ?general-to-specific? cointegrated VAR approach as developed in Europe had only limited success in the US as a tool for doing empirical macroeconomics, where what might be called a ?theory comes first? approach dominates? The reason this paper highlights...

This paper analyzes some of the elements of the new economy. What is really new is first of all the technological innovation. In economic terms what is new is a new product. The new IT product brought about by the new technology means two different things: a new device to handle data and to...

Over the past 15 years there has been remarkable progress in the specification and estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Central banks in developed and emerging market economies have become increasingly interested in their usefulness for policy analysis and...

The primary aim of the paper is to place current methodological discussions on empirical modeling contrasting the 'theory first' versus the 'data first' perspectives in the context of a broader methodological framework with a view to constructively appraise them. In particular, the paper focuses...

The purpose of this note is to introduce the technique and main findings of meta-analysis to the reader, who is unfamiliar with the field and has the usual objections. A meta-analysis is a quantitative survey of a literature reporting estimates of the same parameter. The funnel showing the...

This paper presents the results of a text based exploratory study of over 20,000 academic articles published in seven top research journals from 1960-2010. The goal is to investigate the general research foci of economists over the last fifty years, how (if at all) they have changed over time,...

This paper concerns a neglected aspect of Lucas's work: his methodological writings, published and unpublished. Particular attention is paid to his views on the relationship between theory and ideology. I start by setting out Lucas's non-standard conception of theory: to him, a theory and a...

We present a preference foundation for Chance Theory (CT), a model of decision making under uncertainty where the evaluation of an act depends distinctively on its lowest outcome. This outcome is evaluated with the riskless value function u and the potential increments over it are evaluated by...

According to the harmonic sequence paradox (Blavatskyy 2006), an expected utility decision maker's willingness-to-pay for a gamble whose expected payoffs evolve according to the harmonic series is finite if and only if his marginal utility of additional income becomes zero for rather low payoff...