Departing from a comment by Charles Peirce, this paper suggests a very broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic (hereafter, “AT”) propensity theory of probability applicable to work in economics. This paper suggests that insights suggested by C.S. Peirce can be transposed into a metaphysically and...

The first meeting of the Econometric Society took place in 1931 on the initiative of Ragnar Frisch. The meeting initiated the formation of an econometric community which influenced the transformation of economics through internationalization and mathematization. The article gives a documentary...

A recent VOX article by M. Fioramanti and R. Waldmann criticises the way the European Commission estimates the unemployment gap for EU countries and especially the gap for Italy. This economic brief refutes the criticism and, in turn, argues that the implicitly suggested approach from Fioramanti...

While historians of economics have noted the transition toward empirical work in economics since the 1970s, less understood is the shift toward "quasi-experimental" methods in applied microeconomics. Angrist and Pischke (2010) trumpet the wide application of these methods as a "credibility...

This paper studies linearized spatial structural gravity models of bilateral trade à la Behrens, Ertur and Koch (2012). We show that these models do in fact not require spatial econometric methods for estimation. This result follows from the nature of the specific spatial weights matrix, and...

The interaction matrix, or spatial weight matrix, is the fundamental tool to model cross-sectional interdependence between observations in spatial econometric models. However, it is most of the time not derived from theory, as it should be ideally, but chosen on an ad hoc basis. In this paper,...

Network and spatial econometric models commonly embody a so-called W matrix which defines the connectivity between nodes of a network. The reason for the existence of W is that it facilitates parsimonious parametrization of inter-nodal interaction which would otherwise be very difficult to...

In economics and finance, test statistics and confidence regions are typically probabilistically dependent on previously-used data. However, the Bayesian and classical justifications for usual tests and confidence regions are known to be invalid in this case. Given the success of empirical...

In this paper nonnested tests are used to contrast the performance of the capital asset pricing (CAPM) and consumption capital asset pricing (CCAPM) theories in describing the U.S. stock market. The procedures employed include the N-test, the NT-test, the W-test, the J-test, and the Encompassing...