"Handbook of Computational Econometrics examines the state of the art of computational econometrics and provides exemplary studies dealing with computational issues arising from a wide spectrum of econometric fields including such topics as bootstrapping, the evaluation of econometric software,...

This paper argues that mainstream economics does not follow the positivist research tradition it (often implicitly) claims to follow and expresses some serious doubt that econometrics in particular can make economics a hard science. Mathematical rigour and sophisticated statisti-cal techniques...