Tag Archives: methodology

This is important but may be too wonkish for those who are not intimately familiar with econometrics. So let me try to simplify it and universalize it. The basic idea in logical reasoning is that an argument is sound if and only if the premises are true and the logical form is valid.  Then the conclusion follows as necessarily true. This is the basis of scientific reasoning. In modeling, a set of assumptions, both substantive and procedural, is stipulated, that is, assumed to be...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. At IPA even our water spills our normally distributed (or Halloween-themed, depending on your perspective)David McKenzie has updated an amazing list of all of the Development Impact Blog’s methodology posts, categorized by topic.A reminder for the academic interview fly-out season that I’ve seen a few people mention: don’t assume grad students can afford to put travel on their credit cards and wait to be reimbursed; offer to book...

My paper is a survey of the huge amount of solid empirical evidence against the utility maximization hypothesis that is at the core of all microeconomics currently being taught today in Economics textbooks at universities all over the world. It is obviously important, because if what it says is true, the entire field of microeconomics needs to be re-constructed from scratch. Nonetheless, it was summarily rejected by a large number of top journals, before being eventually published by Jack...

Short and important.Economic Sociology and Political EconomyThe Sociology of Quantification: Seeing like Numbers Oleg Komlik | founder and editor-in-chief of the ES/PE, Chairman of the Junior Sociologists Network at the International Sociological Association, a PhD Candidate in Economic Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, and a Lecturer in the School of Behavioral Sciences at the College of Management Academic StudiesSee alsoStatistical...

In my macro critique, I mentioned "meta-narratives" — what did I mean by that? Noah Smith has a nice concise description of one of them today in Bloomberg that helps illustrate what I mean: the wage-price spiral. The narrative of the 1960s and 70s was that the government fiscal and monetary policy started pushing unemployment below the "Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment" (NAIRU), causing inflation to explode. The meta-narrative is the wage-price spiral: unemployment that is...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. “Economists have now settled down into RCTs as just one tool,” Glennerster told Devex. Among academics, the kind J-PAL works to connect with the world’s policymakers, she said, “the trend toward using RCTs is simply part of this bigger movement in economics to care more about where we can really pin down what is causing what we see.” Any critique I’ve seen of RCTs as a method apply in one way or another to any empirical study...

AbstractIn science publishing and many areas of research, the status quo is a lexicographic decision rule in which any result is first required to have a p-value that surpasses the 0.05 threshold and only then is consideration—often scant—given to such factors as prior and related evidence, plausibility of mechanism, study design and data quality, real world costs and benefits, novelty of finding, and other factors that vary by research domain. There have been recent proposals to change the...