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...

A power law is the form taken by a large number of surprising empirical regularities in economics and finance. This article surveys well-documented empirical power laws concerning income and wealth, the size of cities and firms, stock market returns, trading volume, international trade, and...

The past half-century has seen economic research become increasingly empirical, while the nature of empirical economic research has also changed. In the 1960s and 1970s, an empirical economist's typical mission was to "explain" economic variables like wages or GDP growth. Applied econometrics...

Advances in the study of partial identification allow applied researchers to learn about parameters of interest without making assumptions needed to guarantee point identification. We discuss the roles that assumptions and data play in partial identification analysis, with the goal of providing...

Galí and Gertler (1999) developed a hybrid variant of the New Keynesian Phillips curve that relates inflation to real marginal cost, expected future inflation and lagged inflation. GMM estimates of the model suggest that forward looking behavior is dominant: The coefficient on expected future...

This paper investigates the precision of conventional and unconventional estimates of the natural rate of unemployment (the 'NAIRU'). The main finding is that the NAIRU is imprecisely estimated: a typical 95% confidence interval for the NAIRU in 1990 is 5.1% to 7.7%. This imprecision obtains...

Two often-divergent U.S. GDP estimates are available, a widely-used expenditure side version, GDPE, and a much less widely-used income-side version GDPI . We propose and explore a "forecast combination" approach to combining them. We then put the theory to work, producing a superior combined...

Practitioners of empirical health economics might be forgiven for paying little heed to the recent 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important papers in its methodological heritage: James Tobin's widely-cited 1958 Econometrica paper that developed what later became known as...

This paper uses the marginal treatment effect (MTE) to unify the nonparametric literature on treatment effects with the econometric literature on structural estimation using a nonparametric analog of a policy invariant parameter; to generate a variety of treatment effects from a common...