Summer School
Call for Applications
(Deadline: February 15, 2025)
23rd univie: summer school – Scientific World Conceptions (USS-SWC)
The History and Epistemology of Econometrics
Vienna, July 7-11, 2025
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
Main Lecturers:
Kevin D. Hoover (Duke University)
Kevin D. Hoover is Professor of Economics and Philosophy and Senior Fellow of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. He is the editor of the journal History of Political Economy and a past editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology. His current research addresses causality, causal inference in economics, the history of macroeconomics, philosophical issues related to the microfoundations of macroeconomics, and the engagement with economics of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles. S. Peirce. He is the author of The New Classical Macroeconomics, the Methodology of Empirical Macroeconomics, Causality in Macroeconomics, Applied Intermediate Macroeconomics, as well as many articles in monetary and macroeconomics, the history of economics, the philosophy of economics, and applied econometrics.
Jennifer Jhun (Duke University)
Jennifer Jhun is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Duke University, as well as a Senior Fellow of the Center for the History of Political Economy. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. Her main research interests are in the philosophy of science, especially philosophy of economics, but also in issues in other areas, such as psychology and physics. She is currently engaged on a project that investigates antitrust from a historical and philosophy-of-science perspective: “What’s the Point of ceteris Paribus? or, How to Understand Supply and Demand Curves.” Philosophy of Science 85, no. 2 (2018): 271-292; “Economics, Equilibrium Methods, and Multi-scale Modeling.” Erkenntnis 86, no. 2 (2021): 457-472; “Multi-Model Reasoning in Economics: The Case of COMPASS.” Philosophy of Science 90, no. 4 (2023): 836-854; “Implied Market Shares and Antitrust Markets as Fuzzy Sets.” Forthcoming at The Antitrust Bulletin. (Joint with Matthew Panhans, Federal Trade Commission)
Guest Lecturer:
Marcel Boumans (University of Utrecht)
Marcel Boumans is historian and philosopher of science at Utrecht University. His main research focus is on understanding empirical research practices in science outside the lab from a philosophy of science-in-practice perspective. He is particularly interested in the practices of measurement and modelling and the role of mathematics in social science. The first step in these practices is to make sense of the available data. Visualisations play an important role in this. His current research project Vision and Visualisation is nearing completion with a book manuscript Shaping the Phenomena.
The program is primarily directed at graduate students and junior researchers in philosophy of science and economics as well as empirical economists at policy institutions (eg, central banks) but the organizers also encourage applications from people in all stages of their career and from fields other than economics that apply advanced econometrics.
Application form and further information:
https://summerschool-ivc.univie.ac.at/application/
USS-SWC operates under the academic supervision of an International Program Committee of distinguished philosophers, historians, and scientists. Its members represent the scientific fields in the scope of USS-SWC, make contact to their home universities and will also support acknowledgement of courses taken by the students. The annual summer school is organised by the Institute Vienna Circle of the University of Vienna.
https://wienerkreis.univie.ac.at/
Find information about our exchange programme with Duke University (North
Carolina) here:
Inquiries:
Administrator:
Zarah Weiss
Institute Vienna Circle
Alser Straße 23/32
1080 Wien
Scientific director:
Georg Schiemer
Institute Vienna Circle
Alser Straße 23/32
1080 Wien