When Stephen Perez and I first began our Monte Carlo studies of the efficacy of general-to-specific search methodologies in 1995, we were keenly aware of our limited ability to capture the tacit knowledge of the skilled ...

Causality is viewed as a matter of control. Controllability is captured in Simon’s analysis of causality as an asymmetrical relation of recursion between variables in the unobservable data-generating process. Tests of ...

Causal relations between federal expenditure and taxation are analyzed using an approach based on the invariance of econometric relationships in the face of structural interventions. Institutional evidence for interventions ...

The dominant view among macroeconomists is that macroeconomics reduces to microeconomics - both in the sense that all macroeconomic phenomena arise out of microeconomic phenomena and in the sense that macroeconomic theory ...

The causal and theoretical presuppositions of four episodes in which economists the 20th century attempted to measure changes in the value of money are examined. The episodes are: Smith’s “Digression Concerning the Variations ...

In a recent issue of "The American Economic Review (1983), William Frazer and Lawrence Boland present Milton Friedman's methodology as instrumentalism. The purpose of article is not to question Frazer and Boland's ...

Christina and David Romer’s paper ‘Does Monetary Policy Matter?’ advocates the so-called ‘narrative’ approach to causal inference. We demonstrate that this method will not sustain causal inference. First, it is impossible ...

Causality has long been regarded among economists as a metaphysical mine'eld, best to be avoided. Yet, at the same time, the notion of cause and e*ect structures our ordinary lives and seems essential for understanding ...

Through most of the history of economics, the most influential commentators on methodology were also eminent practitioners of economics. And even not so long ago, it was so. Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Trygve Haavelmo, ...