Edward E. Leamer

The story of this book began with my dif?cult transition from teaching international economics and econometrics in Economics Ph. D. programs at Harvard and UCLA to teaching in the MBA programs at the Anderson School at UCLA. On the basis of 20 years of apparent teaching success in Ph. D. education, I arrived at the Anderson School in 1990 with a self-image as a star teacher, but I was greeted with highly disturbingmediocreteachingevaluations. Facedwithadatasetthatwasinconsistent with my view of reality, I did what analysts usually do – I formulated a theory why the data were misleading. Here is how I thought about it. Two aspects of the course – content and amu- ment – drive numerical course evaluations. If you rank courses by the average of the content score and the amusement score, then the component that can be measured most accurately will determine the ranking. Do you understand why? It is what - eraging does: it eliminates the noise. Suppose, for example, that a student cannot tell anything about the content, and the content score is simply a random number, varying from student to student. Those random numbers will average out across students to about the same number for each course. As the average course content score is about the same for every course, it is the amusement score that will drive the rankings.

Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories

James Levinsohn

Abstract: This paper provides a critical look at recent empirical work in international trade theory. The paper addresses the issue of why empirical work in international trade has perhaps not been as influential as it could have been. The paper also provides several suggestions on directions for future empirical research in international trade.

The Evidence

International Trade Theory

Laurence J. Kotlikoff

Recent changes in patterns of international trade and growth have rekindled interest in the relationships among trade, growth, and the international distribution of income. Three alternative models can serve as a theoretical foundation for an empirical analysis of these relationships. The first is the standard Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson (Ho) trade model with equalnumbers of factors and goods and incomplete specialization. The second model allows complete specialization and more goods than factors. The third model posits short run capital immobility. Each of these models has quite different implications for the determination of wage levels and growth rates. The conclusions that we draw from this research are rather mixed. Each of the models perform well on certain criteria and poorly on others. While the standard HO model clearly fails to satisfy certain cross-equation constraints, national endowments are remarkably good predictors of the locus of international production. There are, however, significant nonlinearities in the relationship between factor allocations and national endowments. Such nonlinearities are predicted by the uneven version of the HO model. At odds with both of these models is our finding that lagged values of inputs providean important explanation of current factor demands. Such correlations are suggested by the adjustment cost model.

Empirical Tests of Alternative Models of International Growth

A review of the Heckscher–Ohlin framework prompts a noted economist to consider the methodology of economics. In this spirited and provocative book, Edward Leamer turns an examination of the Heckscher–Ohlin framework for global competition into an opportunity to consider the craft of economics: what economists do, what they should do, and what they shouldn't do. Claiming “a lifetime relationship with Heckscher–Ohlin,” Leamer argues that Bertil Ohlin's original idea offered something useful though vague and not necessarily valid; the economists who later translated his ideas into mathematical theorems offered something precise and valid but not necessarily useful. He argues further that the best economists keep formal and informal thinking in balance. An Ohlinesque mostly prose style can let in faulty thinking and fuzzy communication; a mostly math style allows misplaced emphasis and opaque communication. Leamer writes that today's model- and math-driven economics needs more prose and less math. Leamer shows that the Heckscher–Ohlin framework is still useful, and that there is still much work to be done with it. But he issues a caveat about economists: “What we do is not science, it's fiction and journalism.” Economic theory, he writes, is fiction (stories, loosely connected to the facts); data analysis is journalism (facts, loosely connected to the stories). Rather than titling the two sections of his book Theory and Evidence, he calls them Economic Fiction and Econometric Journalism, explaining, “If you find that startling, that's good. I am trying to keep you awake.”

Edward E. Leamer

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