Lars P. Syll

In the real world, it’s my impression that almost all the mediation analyses that people actually fit in the social and medical sciences are misguided: lots of examples where the assumptions aren’t clear and where, in any case, coefficient estimates are hopelessly noisy and where confused people will over-interpret statistical significance … So how to do it? I don’t think traditional path analysis or other multivariate methods of the...

To Ukraine with love .[embedded content] This one is for all my brothers and sisters in Ukraine, fighting oppression and risking your lives on your long walk to freedom. May God be with you. Never give in. Never give up.

Naive Bayes (student stuff) .[embedded content]

‘I sit and talk to God and he just laughs’ .[embedded content]

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IV regression and the difficult art of mimicking randomization We need relevance and validity. How realistic is validity, anyway? We ideally want our instrument to behave just like randomization in an experiment. But in the real world, how likely is that to actually happen? Or, if it’s an IV that requires control variables to be valid, how confident can we be that the controls really do everything we need them to? In the long-ago times, researchers were...

Why economists need to study history .[embedded content]

.[embedded content] Vangelis (1943-2022). Thanks for all the great music that brought us to eternity and beyond. RIP

Axel Leijonhufvud In Memoriam   I first came across Axel’s writing as an undergraduate student at Manchester University where we were taught from his doctoral dissertation, Keynes and the Keynesians; a book that shot Axel to intellectual rock stardom. He argued in that book that Keynes’ General Theory had nothing to do with sticky wages and prices but was instead about inter-temporal coordination failure … Although Axel recognized the importance...

It is now widely recognised that observation is not theory-neutral but theory-laden, and that theory does not merely ‘order facts’ but makes claims about the nature of its object. So, in evaluating observations we are also assessing particular theoretical concepts and existential claims. A common response to this shattering of innocent beliefs in the certainty and neutrality of observation has been the development of idealist (especially conventionalist and rationalist)...