In his own view, economic theory was important to Keynes’s work as an economists. Aside from the General Theory, most of his economic writings, however policy oriented make explicit reference to theory. Nevertheless, Keynes’s theoretical style is so far from what contemporary economics...

Typically real-business-cycle models are assessed by their ability to mimic the covariances and variances of actual business cycle data. Recently, however, advocates of RBC models have used them to fit the historical path of real GDP using the Solow residual as a driving process. We demonstrate...

Vector autoregressions (VARs) are economically interpretable only when identified by being transformed into a structural form (the SVAR) in which the contemporaneous variables stand in a well-defined causal order. These identifying transformations are not unique. It is widely believed that...

The effectiveness of one aspect of the London School of Economics (LSE) approach to econometrics is assessed in a simulation study. The paper uses a data set and nine models analogous to those in Lovell''s (1983) study of data mining. A simplified general-to-specific algorithm is tested in a...

Post-Walrasian economics is not a doctrine, but a slogan announcing that something has to change. In this paper, I explore a conservative version of post-Walrasian economics that can be summarized as back to the methodology of Alfred Marshall’s – particularly to his essay, “The Present...

The work of Levine and Renelt (1992) and Sala-i-Martin (1997a, b) which attempted to test the robustness of various determinants of growth rates of per capita GDP among countries using two variants of Edward Leamerâ??s extreme-bounds analysis is reexamined. In a realistic Monte Carlo experiment...

Woodford’s Interest and Prices is considered from a methodological point of view. While innovative as a work of macroeconomic theory, it is decidedly in the mainstream methodologically. As such, it provides a good example of the methodological puzzles posed by modern macroeconomics: first, the...

Starting with a realist ontology the economic methodologist, Tony Lawson, argues that econometrics is a failed project. Apparently more sympathetic to econometrics, the philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, again from a realist perspective, nonetheless argues for conditions of applicability...

Graph-theoretic methods of causal search based in the ideas of Pearl (2000), Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (2000), and others have been applied by a number of researchers to economic data, particularly by Swanson and Granger (1997) to the problem of finding a data-based contemporaneous causal...

The 1970s and early 1980s witnessed two main approaches to the analysis of monetary policy. The first is the early new classical approach of Lucas, based on the assumptions of rational expectations and market clearing. The second is the a theoretical econometrics of Simsâ??s VAR program. Both...