The paper focuses on establishing causation in regression analysis in observational settings. Simple static regression analysis cannot establish causality in the absence of a priori theory on possible causal mechanisms or controlled and randomized experiments. However, two regression based...

Do citations accumulate too slowly in the social sciences to be used to assess the quality of recent articles? I investigate whether this is the case using citation data for all articles in economics and political science published in 2006 and indexed in the Web of Science. Surprisingly,...

We carry out a meta-analysis of the very large literature on Granger causality tests between energy use and economic output to determine if there is a genuine effect in this literature or whether the large number of apparently significant results is due to publication and misspecification bias....

Academic economists appear to be intensely interested in rankings of journals, institutions, and individuals. Yet there is little discussion of the uncertainty associated with these rankings. To illustrate the uncertainty associated with citations-based rankings, I compute the standard error of...

Ecological economics is a relatively new interdisciplinary field concerned with the relationship between economic systems and the biological and physical world. This article covers the following topics: A discussion of views on whether ecological economics is just a field or approach within...