According to Guy Routh, econometrics is nothing but “mock empiricism, with statistics subjected to econometric torture until they admit to effects of which they are innocent.” Similarly, Mark Blaug in his The Methodology of Economics argued that econometric testing is like “playing tennis with the net down.” Although these are rather harsh judgments, I believe […]
Statistics & Econometrics
. Good overview — but one thing one ought to pay more attention to is the following: Even if both sampling and assignment are made in an ideal random way, performing standard randomised experiments only gives you averages. The problem here is that although we may get an estimate of the ‘true’ average causal effect, […]
It’s true — as Sander Greenland notes in a comment on an earlier post of mine — that the potential outcomes and the interventionist accounts of causality should not be “seen as identical.” But — although they differ in emphasis and formalism, the connection between them is both strong and conceptually intertwined. Guido Imbens, a […]
Mainstream economists often hold the view that criticisms of econometrics are the conclusions of sadly misinformed and misguided people who dislike and do not understand much of it. This is really a gross misapprehension. To be careful and cautious is not the same as to dislike. Any perusal of the mathematical-statistical and philosophical works of Nancy […]
When econometric and statistical textbooks present simple (and multiple) regression analysis for cross-sectional data, they often do it with regressions like “regress test score (y) on study hours (x)” and get the result y = constant + slope coefficient*x + error term. When speaking of increases or decreases in x in these interpretations, we have […]
Mainstream economists often hold the view that Keynes’ criticism of econometrics resulted from a sadly misinformed and misguided person who disliked and did not understand much of it. This is, however, nothing but a gross misapprehension. To be careful and cautious is not the same as to dislike. Keynes did not misunderstand the crucial issues […]
A popular idea in quantitative social sciences is to think of a cause (C) as something that increases the probability of its effect or outcome (O). That is: P(O|C) > P(O|-C) However, as is also well known, a correlation between two variables, say A and B, does not necessarily imply that one is a cause […]