Lars P. Syll

Endogeneity bias — fiction in a fictitious world (wonkish) The bivariate model base and its a priori closure destines ‘endogeneity bias’ to a fictitious existence. That existence, in turn, confines applied research in a fictitious world. The concept loses its grip in empirical studies whose findings rely heavily on forecasting accuracy, e.g. a wide range of macro-modelling research as mentioned before. It remains thriving in areas where empirical results...

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My favourite statistics books 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 statistical conclusions! How...

Paul Romer explains what went wrong with economics Economists cannot simply dismiss as “absurd” or “impossible” the possibility that our profession has imposed total costs that exceed total benefits. And no, building a model which shows that it is logically possible for economists to make a positive net contribution is not going to make questions about our actual effect go away. Why don’t we just stipulate that economists are now so clever at building...

Rejecting positivism — the case of statistics Rejecting positivism requires re-thinking the disciplines related to data analysis from the foundations. In this paper, we consider just one of the foundational concepts of statistics. The question we will explore is: What is the relationship between the numbers we use (the data) and external reality? The standard conception promoted in statistics is that numbers are FACTS. These are objective measures of...

Basically, the classical model is a model for a corn economy: households decide whether to consume the corn or to save it. If it is saved it can be supplied to investors who sow the grains, repaying to the households one period later the credit amount plus interest. In the Keynesian model the ‘funds’ exchanged on the capital market are made up of money—‘funds’ are bank deposits. Funds are not created here by a renunciation of consumption but by the banks granting credit … In...

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What is truth in economics? In my view, scientific theories are not to be considered ‘true’ or ‘false.’ In constructing such a theory, we are not trying to get at the truth, or even to approximate to it: rather, we are trying to organize our thoughts and observations in a useful manner. Robert Aumann What a handy view of science … How reassuring for all of you who have always thought that believing in the tooth fairy make you understand what happens to...

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