Macroeconomics: science or faith based discipline?

Bill Russell ()

No 276, Dundee Discussion Papers in Economics from Economic Studies, University of Dundee

Abstract: Whether or not macroeconomics is a science depends on the scientific nature of macroeconomic theories and how the discipline responds when the empirical evidence fails to match the underlying assumptions and predictions of the theories. By way of an example, four conditions for macroeconomics to be a science are developed and used to examine the ‘modern’ theories of the Phillips curve. It is found that while the discipline in general maintains one condition it routinely violates the other three. This suggests the macroeconomics discipline has some way to go before it can call itself a ‘pure science’.

Keywords: Methodology; Phillips curve; inflation; structural breaks; nonstationary data; macroeconomics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B41 C20 E31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2013-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/media/dundeewebsite/econom ... cussion/DDPE_276.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.dundee.ac.uk/media/dundeewebsite/economicstudies/documents/discussion/DDPE_276.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.dundee.ac.uk/media/dundeewebsite/economicstudies/documents/discussion/DDPE_276.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Macroeconomics: Science or Faith Based Discipline? (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dun:dpaper:276

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Dundee Discussion Papers in Economics from Economic Studies, University of Dundee Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrzej Kwiatkowski ().