Macroeconomics faced substantial internal and external criticism related to the 2007-09 financial crisis. Much of it was based on the unsustainable idea that its goal could or should be unconditional forecasting of business cycles. Critics specially singled out dynamic, stochastic...

One of the more striking features of the debate over the Coase theorem is the wide variety of models and theoretical frameworks used to discuss, evaluate, or otherwise analyze Coase’s result - an artifact of an ambiguity in Coase’s reasoning. Some framed Coase’s result in a bargaining...

Best known as a monetary economist and prominent proponent of monetarism, Karl Brunner was deeply knowledgeable about the philosophy of science and attempted to explicitly integrate logical empiricist thinking, derived in some measure from his engagement with the work of the philosopher Hans...

Standard histories of economics usually treat the "marginal revolution" of the midnineteenth century as both supplanting the "classical" economics of Smith and Ricardo and as advancing the idea of economics as a mathematical science. The marginalists - especially Jevons and Walras - viewed...

Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists' engagements with other disciplines - e.g. mathematics, statistics,...

In October 1956, the RAND Corporation establis hed the Logistics Systems Laboratory (LSL) with the goal of using simulation to translate the broad findings of normative microeconomics into detailed, implementable pr ocedures for US Air Force oper ations. The laboratory was housed in the training...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans - social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the 18th century Scots...

While historians of economics have noted the transition toward empirical work in economics since the 1970s, less understood is the shift toward "quasi-experimental" methods in applied microeconomics. Angrist and Pischke (2010) trumpet the wide application of these methods as a "credibility...

This draft chapter for the Elgar International Handbook on Teaching and Learning Economics is intended to give advice to instructors who might be teaching a history of economic thought course to undergraduates for the first time or who have perhaps been teaching for a while but would like to...

This paper discusses a longstanding debate between two empirical approaches to macroeconomics: the econometrics program represented by Lawrence R. Klein, and the statistical economics program represented by Milton Friedman. I argue that the differences between these two approaches do not consist...