Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Steven N. S. Cheung and the New Empirical Economics

I have mentioned Steven N.S. Cheung as deserving a Nobel prize in my previous post. I would argue the case for Cheung not only because of his contribution to the economics of contract and property rights, but for his instillation of a new sense to the term "empirical economics"that has long been treated as equivalent to econometrics to most economists.

What is this new empirical economics that Cheung creates?

Starting out with the simple premise of constrained maximization, and the simplest economics tools available (doward sloping demand curve), Cheung urges fellow economists to go out to the real world to examine exactly what the real world contraints are in affecting peoples' choices.

Indeed, he has written an extremely important piece on how economists should go about conducting research on real world constraints. The paper is entitled "A Theory of Price Control," Journal of Law and Economics, 1974. If you have access to JSTOR, you can read it here. If not, you can wait for Steve's forthcoming collection of essays that is due out in October.

1 comment:

賴港華 said...

The problem is mathematics has become the language of our science. If Cheung does not speak in this language, he just cannot communicate with the "mainstream" economists. I do agree that his works are more meaningful than some other "important" works in the field, say, solving for equilibria for some strange games. But again, if he does not prove his results in terms of mathematical theorems (like the two propositions in "A Theory of Price Control"....by the way I like this paper a lot, no doubt as he said it is his best), people in the field will be skeptical about it on the ground of rigor. When it comes to "empirical" economics, I think another Steve who got the Clark strikes a very good balance between techniques and real-world.