Econometricians have been claiming proudly since World War II that significance testing is the empirical side of economics. In fact today most young economists think that the word “empirical” simply means “collect enough data to do a significance test”. Tjalling Koopmans’s influential...

Stephen Ziliak and D. N. McCloskey have sharply criticized the prevailing use of significance tests. Their work has, in turn, come under vigorous attack. The vehemence of the debate may induce readers to wrongly dismiss it as a “he said-she said” debate, or else to take sides in an unbending...

In several dozen journal reviews and in many other comments we have received—from, for example, four Nobel laureates, the statistician Dennis Lindley (2012), the statistician Arnold Zellner (2004), the mathematician Olle Häggström (2010), the sociologist Steve Fuller (2008), and the...

There is growing concern that much of the empirical research in labor economics and other applied areas may not be reproducible. Correspondingly, recent years have seen an increase in replication studies published in economics journals. Despite this increase, there are many unresolved issues...

Investors sometimes have strong convictions that a distinctive economic regime will prevail in the period ahead and therefore would like to form a portfolio that reflects the expected returns, standard deviations, and correlations of assets during such a regime. To do so, they typically isolate...

The present paper puts forward a new hypothesis about the economic circuit, which is a product of Marx’s “period of production” and Keynes’s determination order between investment and savings. It leads to a new definition of profit which excludes any remaining competition between savings...

This paper analyzes the higher-order properties of nested pseudo-likelihood (NPL) estimators and their practical implementation for parametric discrete Markov decision models in which the probability distribution is defined as a fixed point. We propose a new NPL estimator that can achieve...

This paper presents a general statistical framework for estimation, testing, and comparison of asset pricing models using the unconstrained distance measure of Hansen and Jagannathan (1997). The limiting results cover both linear and nonlinear models that could be correctly specified or...

We provide an in-depth analysis of the theoretical and statistical properties of the Hansen-Jagannathan (HJ) distance that incorporates a no-arbitrage constraint. We show that for stochastic discount factors (SDF) that are spanned by the returns on the test assets, testing the equality of HJ...

Focussing on the prime example of CO2 emissions, we discuss several important theoretical and econometric problems that arise when studying environmental Kuznets curves (EKCs). The dominant theoretical approach is given by integrated assessment modelling, which consists of economic models that...