The present financial and economic crisis has revealed a systemic failure of academic economics and emphasized the need to re-think how to model economic phenomena. Lawson (2009) seems concerned that critics of standard models now will fill academic journals with contributions that make the same...

When it comes to finding whether a firm has violated antitrust law, economists are often called upon as expert witnesses by the parties involved in litigation. This paper focuses on a challenge that economists may face when appearing as expert witnesses in US federal courts, namely to comply...

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...

The FMP model exemplifies the Keynesian models later criticized by Lucas, Sargent and others as conceptually flawed. For economists in the 1960s such models were “big science”, posing organizational as well as theoretical and empirical problems. It was part of an even larger industry in...

The economic and financial crisis that emerged in 2008 also initiated an intense discussion on macroeconomic research and the role of economists in society. The debate focuses on three main issues. Firstly, it is argued that economists failed to predict the crisis and to design early warning...

The primary aim of the paper is to place current methodological discussions in macroeconometric modeling contrasting the 'theory first' versus the 'data first' perspectives in the context of a broader methodological framework with a view to constructively appraise them. In particular, the paper...

The primary aim of the paper is to place current methodological discussions on empirical modeling contrasting the 'theory first' versus the 'data first' perspectives in the context of a broader methodological framework with a view to constructively appraise them. In particular, the paper focuses...

We study the construction of the macroeconometric model of the Committee on Economic Stability (CES) of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in the early 1960s using the CES's archival records. Building this model was central not only to set the bases for the subsequent construction of...

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...