Lars P. Syll

The ’empirical revolution’ in economics — some critical perspectives Most research in economics nowadays involves empirical work … It is therefore odd to find a great deal of economic reasoning still starting from “standard theory”. Whilst it does generate predictions that can be tested empirically, it does not have an empirical foundation, but rather is based on a story about universal human nature … It remains true that the traditional models retain a...

Threats to substantive relevance of natural experiments External validity poses a challenge for most kinds of research designs, of course. In true experiments in the social sciences, the study group is not usually a random sample from some underlying population. Often, the study group consists instead of a convenience sample, that is, a group of units that have been “drawn” through some nonrandom process from an underlying population. In other studies, one...

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Why economics is in such a mess .[embedded content] Modern economics has become increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. In his seminal book Economics and Reality (1997), Tony Lawson traced this irrelevance to the failure of economists to match their deductive-axiomatic methods with their subject. The critique is — sad to say — as relevant today as it was twenty-five years ago. It is still a fact that within mainstream economics...

The two statistics books every social scientist should read Mathematical statistician David Freedman‘s Statistical Models and Causal Inference (Cambridge University Press, 2010)  and Statistical Models: Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2009) are marvellous books. They ought to be mandatory reading for every serious social scientist — including economists and econometricians — who doesn’t want to succumb to ad hoc assumptions and unsupported...

Real-World Economics Review at 100 This journal began by accident. In the summer of 2000, I was ‘surfing the web’ when I clicked onto a site called Autisme-économie. It told how French students had launched a rebellion against the obsolescence of their economics curriculum …  Now, after 22 years and with Jamie Morgan as my co-editor, it continues. But with an enormous difference. Fears that were in the background then are now in the foreground. Natural...

Going up the country .[embedded content] Spending some lovely summer days at our summer residence in the Karlskrona​ archipelago with youngest daughter and dog. Pure energy for the soul.

Hur kan vi återskapa förtroendet för nationalekonomi som vetenskap? Nationalekonomin som vetenskap har världen över förlorat otroligt mycket i prestige och status under senare år. Inte minst på grund av dess oförmåga att analysera och förklara ekonomiska och finansiella kriser och på grund av dess avsaknad av konstruktiva och hållbara förslag på att ta oss ur dessa kriser. Hur återskapar vi förtroendet för nationalekonomin? Fem förändringar är helt...

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Neyman vs Fisher on causal inference .[embedded content]