What is the state of macroeconomics? We answer this question by hand collecting information about the epistemological approaches, theoretical and empirical methods, and data sources used by macroeconomists in their research. During the past 40 years there has been an increasing reliance on...

This paper discusses a longstanding debate between two empirical approaches to macroeconomics: the econometrics program represented by Lawrence R. Klein, and the statistical economics program represented by Milton Friedman. I argue that the differences between these two approaches do not consist...

This paper asks the question: Why has the "general-to-specific" cointegrated VAR approach as developed in Europe had only limited success in the US as a tool for doing empirical macroeconomics, where what might be called a "theory comes first" approach dominates? The reason this paper highlights...

This paper argues that the DSGE approach to macroeconometrics is the dominant approach because it meets the institutional needs of the replicator dynamics of the profession, not because it is necessarily the best way to do macroeconometrics. It further argues that this 'DSGE theory-first'...