Chris Coyne and Pete Boettke talk Robust Political Economy

|Peter Boettke|

Another interview from our visit to UFM.

 

 

Comments

[Luis Eduardo Barrueto]

Thanks for sharing Pete.

[Daniel Kuehn]

A couple thoughts/questions:

1. For Pete: would you consider Friedman and Schwartz's Monetary History in the same methodological tradition that you're describing? I seem to recall McCloskey once citing Friedman as an example of good modern, mainstream economics that takes narrative history seriously. I think the Monetary History stands out for its ability to balance narrative with what you call "cliometrics". It's not clear to me that the two are really juxtaposed - the point is sometimes one is better positioned to do the job than the other.

2. For Chris: Without too much familiarity with your work, I guess I'll just ask - it seems like the sort of thing you're doing with testing the impact of occupation would have really bad endogeneity problems. Presumably we go into situations that are predisposed to collapsing and failing. Usually we don't think of pre-post analyses as sufficient for determining a true impact in these sorts of cases. Do you address these issues at all?

3. Also for Chris - even if we can deal with the endogeneity problem, I'm not entirely clear on why establishing stable democracies is an expected outcome of occupations anyway. That woudl be nice, obviously. We may try to shoot for that, obviously. But presumably that's not the primary reason why we're there in most cases.