Lars P. Syll

This was my finest hour In September 2003, Swedish citizens were asked if they wanted to join the eurozone. Of the more than 80 % of registered voters participating in the referendum close to 57 % said NO. Yours truly participated actively in the fight against the euro — and it’s still something I’m immensely proud of. New figures from Eurostat shows that the unemployment rate in many of the eurozone countries are still in double digits. This is of course...

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The true nature of saving An act of individual saving means — so to speak — a decision not to have dinner to-day. But it does not necessitate a decision to have dinner or to buy a pair of boots a week hence or a year hence or to consume any specified thing at any specified date. Thus it depresses the business of preparing to-day’s dinner without stimulating the business of making ready for some future act of consumption. It is not a substitution of future...

Rational expectations — knowing what you see can’t be there …  [embedded content]

Top 10 RCT critiques •Basu, Kaushik (2014) Randomisation, Causality and the Role of Reasoned Intuition •Cartwright, Nancy  (2010) What are randomised controlled trials good for? •Cartwright, Nancy & Hardie, Jeremy (2012) Evidence-Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better •Deaton, Angus (2009 ) Instruments of development: Randomization in the tropics, and the search for the elusive keys to economic development •Deaton, Angus &...

Truth — not unbiasedness — is what we should aim for Econometricians usually aim for unbiased estimates. And in econometrics textbooks you learn that if it’s not BLUE, it’s not good. But if you really think about it, there is no real unbiased estimates. As soon as you weigh in the fact that in all econometric applications you always get your ‘unbiased’ estimates based on non-ideal randomized samples, measurement errors, non-additive and non-linear...

Post-model-selection inference problems (wonkish) It has long been recognized by some that when any parameter estimates are discarded, the sampling distribution of the remaining parameter estimates can be distorted … For example, suppose the model a researcher selects depends on the day of the week. On Mondays it’s model A, on Tuesdays it’s model B, and so onup to seven different models on seven different days. Each model, therefore,is the “final” model with...

The problem of nonexcitation (wonkish) Modern econometrics is fundamentally based on assuming — usually without any explicit justification — that we can gain causal knowledge by considering independent variables that may have an impact on the variation of a dependent variable. This is however, far from self-evident. Often the fundamental causes are constant forces that are not amenable to the kind of analysis econometrics supplies us with. As Stanley...

Swedish-Eritrean journalist and writer Dawit Isaak has been held in Eritrean prison for 15 years without trial. He is the only Swedish citizen held as a prisoner of conscience. [embedded content]

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