In the 1870s and 1880s, the scientist, logician, and pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce possessed an advanced knowledge of mathematical economics, having mastered and criticized Cournot as early as 1871. In 1884 he engaged in a multi-round debate with the editors of The Nation over the...

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 Leamer's extreme-bounds analysis is reexamined. In a realistic Monte Carlo experiment in...

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' VAR program. Both have...

The role of first principles in economics is examined through the lens of dominant methodological approaches of the classical and neoclassical periods. First principles are most clearly displayed in pure deductive systems. The tension between first principles as the basis for deductivist...

Each chapter of Macroeconometrics is written by respected econometricians in order to provide useful information and perspectives for those who wish to apply econometrics in macroeconomics. The chapters are all written with clear methodological perspectives, making the virtues and limitations of...

The paper provides a careful, analytical account of Trygve Haavelmo's unsystematic, but important, use of the analogy between controlled experiments common in the natural sciences and econometric techniques. The experimental analogy forms the linchpin of the methodology for passive observation...

The substantial questions of macroeconomics itself are very old, going back to the origins of economics itself. But professional self-consciousness of the distinction between macroeconomics and microeconomics dates only to the 1930s. The distinction was drawn quite independently of Keynes, yet...

The price puzzle is the association in a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) of a contractionary shock to monetary policy with persistent increases in the price level. Various explanations have been investigated separately in the framework of small SVARs without any common set of variables...