In an article titled "Field Experiments in Economics: The Past, the Present, and the Future," Levitt and List (2009) make three important claims about the history, philosophy, and future of field experiments in economics. They claim that field experiments in economics began in the 1920s and...

Many know the Chicago School of Economics and its association with Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Ronald Coase and Gary Becker. But few know the School's history and the full scope of its scholarship. In this Companion, leading scholars examine its history and key figures, as well as provide...

In economics and other sciences, "statistical significance" is by custom, habit, and education a necessary and sufficient condition for proving an empirical result. The canonical routine is to calculate what's called a t-statistic and then to compare its estimated value against a theoretically...

Significance testing as used has no theoretical justification. Our article in the Journal of Economic Literature (1996) showed that of the 182 full-length papers published in the 1980s in the American Economic Review 70% did not distinguish economic from statistical significance. Since 1996 many...

Statistical significance as used in economics has weak theoretical justification. In particular it merges statistical and substantive significance. The 182 papers using regression analysis in the American Economic Review in the 1980s were tested against 19 criteria for the accepted use of...