Tag Archives: prediction

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Claudia Goldin charts a century of women in the workforce I’ve heard these days in medicine there’s a glut of papers that are all essentially “[thing I was doing already] + in the time of COVID,” which seems like is true of all fields now. The German Development Institute for Evaluation (DEval) has a helpful roundup of several useful new hubs for evidence, research, and methodology resources for dev/social science. A few weeks ago...

There is a big difference between predicting and forecasting. Scientific theory is about causal explanation and prediction through formulating testable hypothesis that challenge the theory rigorously based on experimental evidence. Forecasting is making educated guesses based on limited and variable information information. The former applies chiefly to ergodic systems and the latter to non-ergodic, or if the system is actually ergodic, not enough it known about it to construct a rigorous...

When most people think about macroeconomics, what they want is the ability to forecast economic outcomes. However, economists' (of all stripes) reputation as forecasters is not particularly high. My view is that this is not too surprising: what we want forecasters to accomplish is probably impossible. (I am hardly the first person to note this, as variants of this idea go back at least to Keynes; I could not hope to offer a history of this idea.) However, I think if we want to approach...

By Marc Chandler (this post first appeared on Marc to Market) There is nothing quite like a falling dollar to spur take of the erosion of the greenback’s reserve status.  There has been talk for several months that China is preparing in yuan-denominated oil contract (with an embedded gold option).  It has not been launched yet, but some observers see it as a blow to the dollar’s role. We are...

In-depth analysis on Credit Writedowns Pro. By Michael Pettis originally written on 31 Jul 2015 I plan to post a new entry very soon but before doing so I wanted to say a few things about the stock markets, which continue to be insane (but not unexpectedly so) and then repost a blog entry that is nearly five years old. By the time I published my latest (July 17) blog entry Beijing had managed to stop the panic with the use of what I called “brute force”, by which I meant that there was...