Data mining occurs because most economic hypotheses do not have a unique empirical interpretation but allow the econometrician much leeway in selecting conditioning variables, lags, functional forms, and sometimes the sample. The resulting problems are of interest not only to methodologists and...

The principle that theories should be tested by the accuracy of their predictions but not by the realism of their assumptions needs to be qualified. As a practical matter we often need to evaluate the applicability of theories to cases for which they have not been tested by their predictions....

Friedman's 1956 essay, 'The Quantity Theory of Money: A Restatement', in his Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money should be read in the context of the prevailing Keynesian consensus of the time. His primary task had to be to convince economists to reconsider this theory. This required an...

One way of inducing economists to pay more attention to methodology is for methodologists to take up problems that practicing economists will see as relevant to their work and discuss them in a non-technical manner. The paper provides some examples of how methodologists could aid practicing...

How justified is the charge that ideology strongly influences the allegedly objective opinions of economists? An analysis of a new survey of AEA members and of surveys of labour economists and public economists shows that value judgments and judgments about the government's efficacy have some...