The M2 monetary aggregate is monitored by the Federal Reserve, using a broad brush theoretical analysis and an informal empirical analysis. This paper illustrates empirical identification of an eleven-variable system, in which M2 and the factors that the Fed regards as causes and effects are...

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 Leamer's extreme-bounds analysis is reexamined. In a realistic Monte Carlo experiment in...

This paper is a substantially revised version of our earlier working paper, "Truth and Robustness in Cross-country Growth Regressions." The most important revisions concern the handling of missing observations in the cross-country data set. In the earlier paper, these had been handled through...

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...

We re-examine studies of cross-country growth regressions by Levine and Renelt (American Economic Review, Vol. 82, 1992, pp. 942-963) and Sala-i-Martin (American Economic Review, Vol. 87, 1997a, pp. 178-183; Economics Department, Columbia, University, 1997b). In a realistic Monte Carlo experiment,...

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...

In this paper, the sufficiency of superexogeneity for control causality is exploited in the case of monetary policy and real output. The superexogeneity of the formulation of monetary policy for the real output gap is tested and found to be true implying a causal link from monetary policy to the...