Lars P. Syll

Erdogan und die andere Türkei  [embedded content] Advertisements

Instrumentalvariabler och heterogenitet — en kommentar (wonkish) Användandet av instrumentalvariabler används numera flitigt bland ekonomer och andra samhällsforskare. Inte minst när man vill försöka gå bakom statistikens ‘korrelationer’ och också säga något om ‘kausalitet.’ Tyvärr brister det ofta rejält i tolkningen av de resultat man får med hjälp av den vanligaste metoden som används för detta syfte — statistisk regressionsanalys. Ett exempel från...

RBC — nothing but total horseshit! They try to explain business cycles solely as problems of information, such as asymmetries and imperfections in the information agents have. Those assumptions are just as arbitrary as the institutional rigidities and inertia they find objectionable in other theories of business fluctuations … I try to point out how incapable the new equilibrium business cycles models are of explaining the most obvious observed facts of...

[embedded content] Economics may be an informative tool for research. But if its practitioners do not investigate and make an effort of providing a justification for the credibility of the assumptions on which they erect their building, it will not fulfil its task. There is a gap between its aspirations and its accomplishments, and without more supportive evidence to substantiate its claims, critics — like yours truly — will continue to consider its ultimate arguments as a...

Keynes e il ruolo dello stato nell’economia  [embedded content] Advertisements

Regression analysis — a constructive critique As a descriptive exercise, all is well. One can compare the average salary of men and women, holding constant potential confounders. The result is a summary of how salaries differ on the average by gender, conditional on the values of one or more covariates. Why the salaries may on the average differ is not represented explicitly in the regression model … Moving to causal inference is an enormous step that needs...

Why capitalism​ always will create bullshit jobs  [embedded content] Advertisements

In mainstream economics, there is a lot of talk about ‘economic laws.’ The crux of these laws that allegedly do exist in economics, is that they only hold ceteris paribus. That fundamentally means that these laws only hold when the right conditions are at hand for giving rise to them. Unfortunately, from an empirical point of view, those conditions are only at hand in artificially closed nomological models purposely designed to give rise to the kind of regular associations...

Why does someone have to die? [embedded content] Sad, sad, sad, news reached me today of my oldest and dearest friend. No more blogging this week. [embedded content] Advertisements

The mainstream-heterodoxy divide in Swedish economics In situations with a dominant style of thought and marginal heterodoxies, this creates an exclusionary mechanism that tends to favour the dominant style. I have shown how this is expressed in the analysed evaluation reports through the consensus on a disciplinary conception of quality that aligns with the disciplinary style of reasoning … Sometimes, reviewers are even explicit about work being outside of...