This paper examines circumstances under which subjectivity enhances the effectiveness of inductive reasoning. We consider agents facing a data generating process who are characterized by inference rules that may be purely objective (or data-based) or may incorporate subjective considerations....

There is a fast growing literature that partially identifies structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) by imposing sign restrictions on the responses of a subset of the endogenous variables to a particular structural shock (sign-restricted SVARs). To date, the methods that have been used are...

Contemporaneous inference from economic data releases for policy and business decisions has become increasingly relevant in the high pace of the information age. The released data are typically filtered to eliminate seasonal patterns to reveal underlying trends and cycles. The nature of economic...

This paper studies nonparametric series estimation and inference for the effect of a single variable of interest x on an outcome y in the presence of potentially high-dimensional conditioning variables z. The context is an additively separable model E[y|x, z] = g₀ (x) h₀ (z). The model is...

Endogeneity of the labour market slack in reduced-form Phillips Curves (PCs) is usually addressed either by including proxies for omitted supply shocks, or by using instrumental variables. Using the Kiviet (2020) Kinky Least Squares estimator, we find evidence that supply-shock proxies should...

There is a fast growing literature that set‐identifies structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) by imposing sign restrictions on the responses of a subset of the endogenous variables to a particular structural shock (sign‐restricted SVARs). Most methods that have been used to construct...

We discuss statistical inference problems associated with identification and testability in econometrics. We consider inference in non-parametric models and weakly identified structural models (weak instruments). We point out that many ill-defined statistical problems, such as non-testable...