Empirical Methods and Progress in Macroeconomics

(Quote)The blow-up over the Reinhart-Rogoff results reminds me of a point I’ve been meaning to make about our ability to use empirical methods to make progress in macroeconomics. This isn’t about the computational mistakes that Reinhart and Rogoff made, though those are certainly important, especially in small samples, it’s about the quantity and quality of the data we use to draw important conclusions in macroeconomics. Everybody has been highly critical of theoretical macroeconomic models, DSGE models in particular, and for good reason. But the imaginative construction of theoretical models is not the biggest problem in macro – we can build reasonable models to explain just about anything. The biggest problem in macroeconomics is the inability of econometricians of all flavors (classical, Bayesian) to definitively choose one model over another, i.e. to sort between these imaginative constructions. We like to think or ourselves as scientists, but if data can’t settle our theoretical disputes – and it doesn’t appear that it can – then our claim for scientific validity has little or no merit. There are many reasons for this. For example, the use of historical rather than “all else equal” laboratory/experimental data makes it difficult to figure out if a particular relationship we find in the data reveals an important truth rather than a chance run that mimics a causal relationship.(unquote)