The paper focuses on how the traditional textbook approach to econometrics, by conflating statistical and substantive information, has contributed significantly to the mountains of untrustworthy evidence accumulated over the last century. In a nutshell, the problem is that when one's favorite...

Since the 1990s, the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and its various modifications/extensions, including BIC, have found wide applicability in econometrics as objective procedures that can be used to select parsimonious statistical models. The aim of this paper is to argue that these model...

The problem of omitted variables is commonly viewed as a statistical misspecification issue which renders the inference concerning the influence of X t on yt unreliable, due to the exclusion of certain relevant factors W t . That is, omitting certain potentially important factors W t may...

The classical approach for specifying statistical models with binary dependent variables in econometrics using latent variables or threshold models can leave the model misspecified, resulting in biased and inconsistent estimates as well as erroneous inferences. Furthermore, methods for trying to...