Math & Statistics

Assessing the Peculiarities of Economics from Two Scientometric Perspectives

I’ve been thinking a bit more about Roland Fryer’s working paper on police use of force, prompted by this thread by Europile and excellent posts by Michelle Phelps and Ezekeil Kweku.

Notes from the Institute’s Director of Research on some significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric 

In the past month, analysts from all disciplines have tried to make sense out of shooting deaths of blacks by police and also ambush attacks of police.

Since Aristotle the question about the potential relationship between economic inequality and democratic changes has been studied and debated – but scientifically our ability as researchers to assess and understand how such complex social phenomena may be related is much more limited than recognised.

Human economic interactions spontaneously express themselves in the quantitative form of prices and transactions quantities. Thismakes it difficult to avoid quantitative reasoning in political-economic research altogether

Modern economics can benefit significantly both from a radical reorientation at the level of method, as well as from a greater input from appropriate branches of philosophy.

This paper, which is prepared for the Inagural Conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking in King’s College, Cambridge, 8-11 April 2010, questions the preeminence of theory over empirics in economics and argues that empirical econometrics needs to be given a more important and independent role in economic analysis, not only to have some confidence in the soundness of our empirical inferences, but to uncover empirical regularities that can serve as a basis for new economic thinking.

This paper asks, how empirical evidence does or does not influence economic thinking and theory. In particular, which role do calibration, statistical inference, and structural change play?

This research project explores the underlying limits—especially of the social and economic sciences—in identifying causalities including, among other aspects, the strong epistemological and statistical limitations of and assumptions behind the methods applied.

This project brings new mathematical tools and ideas from high-dimensional statistics to bear on the problem of creating reliable macroeconomic forecasting models.

This research project improves the mathematical capabilities of non-Neoclassical economics and uses modern techniques from nonlinear dynamical systems to model the expansion and contraction of credit and its effect on real economic output and asset prices.