This paper concerns a neglected aspect of Lucas's work: his methodological writings, published and unpublished. Particular attention is paid to his views on the relationship between theory and ideology. I start by setting out Lucas's non-standard conception of theory: to him, a theory and a...

This paper concerns a neglected aspect of Lucas's work: his methodological writings, published and unpublished. Particular attention is paid to his views on the relationship between theory and ideology. I start by setting out Lucas's non-standard conception of theory: to him, a theory and a...

In this review, I argue that Forder makes a fine job in debunking the story told by Friedman in his Nobel prize lecture about the Phillips curve yet fails to assess the validity of Phelps's and Friedman's contributions to the Phillips curve theory.

The aim of this paper is to recount the ebbs and flows of Keynesianism over the history of macroeconomics. The bulk of the paper consists of a discussion of the main episodes of the unfolding of macroeconomics (Keynesian macroeconomics, monetarism, new classical macroeconomics, real business...

The explicit concepts of a central bank and monetary policy were not fully articulated until the 20th century, although, with some degree of circumspection, they can be used retrospectively in regard to earlier times. The oldest central banks were hardly central banks in the modern sense at...

The 1970s and early 1980s witnessed two main approaches to the analysis of monetary policy. The first is the early new classical approach of Lucas, based on the assumptions of rational expectations and market clearing. The second is the a theoretical econometrics of Simsâ??s VAR program. Both...

The work of Levine and Renelt (1992) and Sala-i-Martin (1997a, b) which attempted to test the robustness of various determinants of growth rates of per capita GDP among countries using two variants of Edward Leamerâ??s extreme-bounds analysis is reexamined. In a realistic Monte Carlo experiment...

Vector autoregressions (VARs) are economically interpretable only when identified by being transformed into a structural form (the SVAR) in which the contemporaneous variables stand in a well-defined causal order. These identifying transformations are not unique. It is widely believed that...

Woodford's Interest and Prices is considered from a methodological point of view. While innovative as a work of macroeconomic theory, it is decidedly in the mainstream methodologically. As such, it provides a good example of the methodological puzzles posed by modern macroeconomics: first, the...

Graph-theoretic methods of causal search based in the ideas of Pearl (2000), Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (2000), and others have been applied by a number of researchers to economic data, particularly by Swanson and Granger (1997) to the problem of finding a data-based contemporaneous causal...