Math & Statistics

Assessing the Peculiarities of Economics from Two Scientometric Perspectives

The World Economic Roundtable seeks to help the business, investment, and policy communities understand ongoing changes in the world economy and to promote a discussion of ideas that can advance the goal of a widely shared global prosperity.

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

This paper considers the estimation problem in linear regression when endogeneity is present, that is, when explanatory variables are correlated with the random error, and also addresses the question of a priori testing for potential endogeneity.

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.

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.

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

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.

Is moving away from coal and into shale - rather than directly into renewables - a worthy move from an economic as well as environmental point of view?

Private data is leaked more and more in our society. Wikileaks, Facebook, and identity theft are just three examples. Network defenses are constantly under attack from cyber criminals, organized hacktivists, and even disgruntled ex-employees.

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 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.

This research project employs ideas from statistical physics to deal with income and wealth inequality, financial instability, and the distribution of energy consumption around the world.

The forthcoming Institute for New Economic Thinking conference will focus on innovation and its impact on economics and society. When we think about innovation we tend to imagine the future. But as with so many subjects in economics, it’s also useful to examine the past.

This research project uses statistical physics and network analysis to understand and explain the contagion and panic effects associated with crises that are unexplained in standard economic models.

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

The recent debate about the reproducibility of the results published by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff offers a showcase for the importance of replication in empirical economics.

This research project provides the mathematics for a second marginal revolution enabling the natural modeling of heterogeneous agents with unstable beliefs, fully dynamic preferences, and allowances for an increased level of self-inconsistency.

Has the servant’s servant become the master’s master?

How representation of data can contribute to, or dispel the false certainty of statistical and econometric technique.

This research project develops a monograph on divergent stochastic time series that permits the modeling of capital, inventory, and financial capital in economies.

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?

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.