Economics is not only a social science, it is a genuine science. Like the physical sciences, economics uses a methodology that produces refutable implications and tests these implications using solid statistical techniques. In particular, economics stresses three factors that distinguish it from...

The analysis of historical natural experiments has profoundly impacted economics research across fields. We trace the development and increasing application of the methodology, both from the perspective of economic historians and from the perspective of economists in other subdisciplines. We...

Behavioral economics identifies myriad deviations from classical economic assumptions about consumer decision-making, but lacks evidence on how its diverse phenomena fit together and whether they are amenable to modeling as low-dimensional constructs. We pursue such parsimony on three fronts,...

This paper examines potential tradeoffs between research methods in answering important questions versus providing more cleanly identified estimates on problems that are potentially of lesser interest. The strengths and limitations of experimental and quasi-experimental methods are discussed and...

The paper revisits Harper, Berndt and Wood (1989) and calculates Canadian reproducible capital services aggregates under alternative assumptions about the form of depreciation, the opportunity cost of capital and the treatment of capital gains. Five different models of depreciation are...

This paper provides a framework for understanding the cross- section and time series approaches which have been used to test the convergence hypothesis. First, we present two definitions of convergence which capture the implications of the neoclassical growth model for the relationship between...

Propositions about long run neutrality are at the heart of most macroeconomic models. Yet, since the 1970's when Lucas and Sargent presented powerful critiques of traditional neutrality tests, empirical researchers have made little progress on testing these propositions. In this paper we show...

A number of recent papers have examined the role of environmental variables in accounting for economic growth, and have concluded that net measures of national product are superior to gross measures in portraying the outcome of the growth process. This paper argues that the two measures are not...

This paper discusses the scientific methods that guided the economic research of Simon Kuznets, with particular stress on his approach to measurement and theory. The paper closes with the transcription of a brief autobiographical talk by Kuznets at a dinner in honor of his eightieth birthday

This essay sets out a framework for evaluating empirical work in terms of the ability of the data to provide adequate parameter estimates and hypothesis tests about the true underlying structure. Problems of aggregation, representativeness and structural change are discussed in detail. These...