26 questions · 11 almanac · 1 findings

Econometrics

Statistical methods for testing economic theories.

Almanac Describing the Economy as a Machine
  • What did Ragnar Frisch contribute to founding the field of econometrics?
  • How did Jan Tinbergen's macroeconometric models try to describe a national economy?
Almanac Scarcity, Solved in a Filing Cabinet
  • What problem was Leonid Kantorovich solving for a Soviet plywood trust when he invented linear programming?
  • Why was Kantorovich's work on resource allocation classified and ignored by Soviet planners?
  • How did Tjalling Koopmans arrive at similar mathematics through wartime shipping logistics?
Almanac An Economy, Written as Equations
  • How did Lawrence Klein turn Keynesian macroeconomic theory into a system of equations that could model an entire national economy?
  • What was the Wharton Econometric Forecasting model, and who ended up using it?
  • What limitation did Klein himself recognize about econometric models of national economies?
Almanac Economics Learns to Admit Its Own Noise
  • What was the core statistical problem with how early twentieth-century economists fit curves to data?
  • What did Haavelmo mean by treating economic relationships as 'stochastic from the start'?
  • How did Haavelmo's 1944 monograph become the methodological foundation for modern econometrics?
Almanac History Was Data, If You Counted It
  • What did Robert Fogel's cliometric analysis conclude about the economic necessity of American railroads?
  • What uncomfortable conclusion did Fogel's research reach about the profitability of slavery?
Almanac Making Sense of Data That Won't Sit Still
  • What is selection bias and why does it corrupt empirical economic data?
  • What problem did the Heckman correction solve for non-random samples?
  • How did Daniel McFadden's discrete choice models change transport and urban planning?
Almanac Markets Have Moods That Persist
  • What is the ARCH model, and what market behavior did Robert Engle design it to capture?
  • What problem did Clive Granger's cointegration methods solve for economists studying time-series data?
Almanac An Economy That Anticipates Its Own Policy
  • What is Vector Autoregression and how does it let data reveal causality without a prior theory?
  • How do Sargent's and Sims's approaches complement each other in macroeconomic analysis?
Almanac New Jersey Ran the Experiment for Us
  • What did David Card's New Jersey minimum wage study find about fast-food employment?
  • Why can't economists run controlled experiments on entire societies?
  • How did Angrist and Imbens formalize the mathematics behind natural experiments?