23^rd univie: summer school – Scientific World Conceptions (USS-SWC)

THE HISTORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY OF ECONOMETRICS

Vienna, July 7-11, 2025

For further information, visit: https://summerschool-ivc.univie.ac.at

Course Description

Models and their econometric estimation play an increasingly important role in modern economic and political life. From macroeconomic policy and financial regulation to public health and climate policy, models contribute to shaping policies. The generation of ever more data is likely to support the proliferation of models and econometrics. Research resources in academia focus on the theoretical foundations of the underlying model and on the statistical methods of econometrics; much less attention is devoted to the epistemological challenges of the underlying concepts, the normative challenges of the everyday work with econometrics, and the application of its results in policy decisions and evaluation.

The objective of this program is to increase attention amongst philosophers of science, academic economists, and empirical economists in policy institutions (eg, central banks) to these issues. The course is also structured around a particular point of view – namely, that economics is a science of models and that most of the main features of econometrics relate generally to the role of models in science.

Topics will be selected reflecting participants’ interests and may include:

• History of econometrics to frame the philosophical issues to be discussed in the course

• The Vienna Circle and econometrics

• Values and Ethical Pitfalls in econometric research• Key philosophical issues of how models relate to the world and how they relate to each other

• Data: observation, classification, and measurement of economic variables from a modeling point of view

• Conceptual issues related to modeling randomness

• The identification problem: how possibly, if at all possible, to map descriptive relations onto theoretical variables?

• Issues related to optional stopping, search methodologies, and the proper interpretation of results obtained through search

• Different approaches to the nature of causation and different strategies of causal inference

• The conceptual basis of graphical causal modeling and controlled, natural, and field experiments

• The conceptual issues surrounding the problem of model uncertainty, as well as some of the strategies economists use to address it

• https://summerschool-ivc.univie.ac.at