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 Leamerâ??s extreme-bounds analysis is reexamined. In a realistic Monte Carlo experiment...

Woodford’s Interest and Prices is considered from a methodological point of view. While innovative as a work of macroeconomic theory, it is decidedly in the mainstream methodologically. As such, it provides a good example of the methodological puzzles posed by modern macroeconomics: first, the...

Starting with a realist ontology the economic methodologist, Tony Lawson, argues that econometrics is a failed project. Apparently more sympathetic to econometrics, the philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, again from a realist perspective, nonetheless argues for conditions of applicability...

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...

The 1970s and early 1980s witnessed two main approaches to the analysis of monetary policy. The first is the early new classical approach of Lucas, based on the assumptions of rational expectations and market clearing. The second is the a theoretical econometrics of Simsâ??s VAR program. Both...

Milton Friedman is usually regarded as an instrumentalist on the basis of his infamous claim that economic theories are to be judged by their predictions and not by the realism of their assumptions. This interpretation sits oddly with Friedman’s empirical work – e.g., Friedman and...

Causal relations between U.S. federal taxation and expenditure are analyzed using an approach based on the invariance of econometric relationships in the face of structural inverventions. Institutional evidence for interventions or changes of regime and econometric tests for structural breaks...

The 1970s and early 1980s witnessed two main approaches to the analysis of monetary policy. The first is the early new classical approach of Lucas, based on the assumptions of rational expectations and market clearing. The second is the atheoretical econometrics of Sims’s VAR program. Both...

The price puzzle, an increase in the price level associated with a contractionary monetary shock, is investigated in a rich, 12-variable SVAR in which various factors that have been mooted as solutions are considered jointly. SVARs for the pre-1980 and post-1990 periods are identified...