Routledge Handbook of Macroeconomic Methodology

Jesper Jespersen is professor emeritus at Roskilde University, Denmark. His research interests include the economics of Keynes and macroeconomic methodology. Victoria Chick is professor emeritus at University College London, UK. She has written extensively on macroeconomics and the economics of Keynes. Bert Tieben is researcher at SEO Amsterdam Economics, the Netherlands. He also teaches history of economic thought at Amsterdam University College. His research focuses on economic methodology and the history of economic thought.

Introduction: The scope and content of the Handbook I. Philosophy of Science Perspectives I.1. Methodological Individualism and Macroeconomics I.2. Deduction, Induction and Abduction I.3. Instrumentalism I.4 From positivism to naturalism in macroeconomics I.5. Holism & Fallacy of Composition I.6. Macroeconomics and Ethics II. Concepts II.1 Time in Macroeconomics II.2 Uncertainty and Macroeconomic Methodology II.3 Path dependency II.4 Equilibrium II.5 Causality and macroeconomics II.6 Microeconomic foundation of macroeconomics II.7 Open and closed systems II.8. Money and Macroeconomic Methodology III. Schools of Thought III.1. Classical Political Economy III.2. Neoclassical Macroeconomics III.3. Keynes’s Macroeconomic Method III.4. Post Keynesian Methodology III.5. The Austrian Denial of Macroeconomics III.6. What was Marx’s Method, actually? III.7. Methodological Pluralism in Macroeconomics IV. Models, Econometrics and Measurement IV.1. Use of Mathematics in macroeconomic analysis IV.2. Explanation and Forecasting IV.3. Using macroeconomic models in policy practice IV.4. Traditional Methods of Macroeconometrics IV.5. Macroeconometrics: Cointegrated VAR Method IV.6. National Accounts and Macroeconomic Methodology V. Communicating Macroeconomics V.1. The rhetorical perspective on macroeconomics V.2. Teaching Macroeconomic Methodology