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...

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...

High dimensional general unrestricted models (GUMs) may include important individual determinants, many small relevant effects, and irrelevant variables. Automatic model selection procedures can handle more candidate variables than observations, allowing substantial dimension reduction from GUMs...