[Note: askblog had an existence prior to the virus crisis. I still schedule occasional posts like this one.]
In this article, I say that Edward Leamer deserves a Nobel Prize.
Edward Leamer deserves the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for launching the movement to examine critically the uses of statistical methods in empirical research. The movement has had repercussions that go beyond econometrics. It has affected medicine and epidemiology, where John P. A. Ioannidis has been a leading figure in pointing out methodological failures (Ioannidis 2005; 2016; Begley and Ioannidis 2015). It has impelled psychology and behavioral economics to confront what has become known as the ‘replication crisis’ (Camerer et al. 2018).
. . .After Leamer pointed out problems inherent in the multiple-regression
approach and the inevitable specification searching that it involves, economists
have turned to quasi-experimental methods
The policy of Econ Journal Watch is not to allow the author to give acknowledgments to editorial staff, but Brendan Beare and Jason Briggeman did a great deal to improve the essay.
This question is not about the main point of the article, but it is so simple that it should be easy for someone to answer.
Leamer is quoted as saying, in the same place, both that “[o]ur understanding of causal effects in macroeconomics is virtually nil”, and that in the preceding 27 years “much progress has been made in economic theory”. I would have thought that economic theory was about causal relationships. Did he mean that progress had been made in (only) microeconomic theory, or is there some other kind of progress that was made?