Unpredictability arises from intrinsic stochastic variation, unexpected instances of outliers, and unanticipated extrinsic shifts of distributions. We analyze their properties, relationships, and different effects on the three arenas in the title, which suggests considering three associated...

Unpredictability arises from intrinsic stochastic variation, unexpected instances of outliers, and unanticipated extrinsic shifts of distributions. We analyze their properties, relationships, and different effects on the three arenas in the title, which suggests considering three associated...

Economies are so high dimensional and non-constant that many features of models cannot be derived by prior reasoning, intrinsically involving empirical discovery and requiring theory evaluation. Despite important differences, discovery and evaluation in economics are similar to those of science....

Economic theories are often fitted directly to data to avoid possible model selection biases. We show that embedding a theory model that specifies the correct set of m relevant exogenous variables, x{t}, within the larger set of m+k candidate variables, (x{t},w{t}), then selection over the...