How justified is the charge that ideology strongly influences the allegedly objective opinions of economists? An analysis of a new survey of AEA members and of surveys of labour economists and public economists shows that value judgments and judgments about the government's efficacy have some...

Data mining occurs because most economic hypotheses do not have a unique empirical interpretation but allow the econometrician much leeway in selecting conditioning variables, lags, functional forms, and sometimes the sample. The resulting problems are of interest not only to methodologists and...