Lars P. Syll

A whiter shade of pale  [embedded content]

Guest appearances in Denmark and Germany. Regular blogging will be resumed next week.

The pitfalls of econometrics Ed Leamer’s Tantalus on the Road to Asymptopia is one of my favourite critiques of econometrics, and for the benefit of those who are not versed in the econometric jargon, this handy summary gives the gist of it in plain English: Most work in econometrics and regression analysis is made on the assumption that the researcher has a theoretical model that is ‘true.’ Based on this belief of having a correct specification for an...

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Paul Krugman — finally — admits he was wrong! Paul Krugman has never suffered fools gladly. The Nobel Prize-winning economist rose to international fame—and a coveted space on the New York Times op-ed page—by lacerating his intellectual opponents in the most withering way. In a series of books and articles beginning in the 1990s, Krugman branded just about everybody who questioned the rapid pace of globalization a fool who didn’t understand economics very...

Frey & Osborne on the future of employment In 2013 the economist Carl Frey and the ML coder Michael Osborne, both at Oxford, published the working paper, ‘The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?’. The headline finding of the paper was that in the near future 47 per cent of total US employment was at high risk of displacement by AI and robotics, and 33 per cent at low risk … In 2015, responding to Frey and Osborne, the Bank...

Econometrics — the danger of calling your pet cat a dog Since econometrics doesn’t content itself with only making optimal predictions, but also aspires to explain things in terms of causes and effects, econometricians need loads of assumptions — most important of these are additivity and linearity. Important, simply because if they are not true, your model is invalid and descriptively incorrect.  And when the model is wrong — well, then it’s wrong. The...

‘Nobel prize’ winners fail to explain real causes of poverty  [embedded content]

Few volumes in contemporary economics have been more lauded, and have summarised a zeitgeist, as much as Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics … The implicit premise of the book is that interventions that work in one place can be expected to work in another. This presumes not only that the results of such “micro” interventions are substantially independent of the “macro” context, but also that a focus on such interventions, as opposed to those which reshape that...

Är randomisering verkligen svaret på nationalekonomins alla frågor? Med årets ‘Nobelpris’ i ekonomi har fokus i den internationella ekonomidebatten kommit att handla mycket om hypen kring randomiseringsdesign i modern samhällsvetenskap. Detta är bra och ett ypperligt tillfälle att också ventilera några kritiska synpunkter — här med utgångspunkt från ett kapitel i boken Nationalekonomins frågor (2017) där effektutvärderingar inom samhällsvetenskaplig...