Statistical vs. economic significance in economics and econometrics: further comments on McCloskey and Ziliak

Abstract

I comment on the controversy between McCloskey and Ziliak and Hoover and Siegler on statistical versus economic significance, in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology. I argue that while McCloskey and Ziliak are right in emphasizing ‘real error’, i.e. non-sampling error that cannot be eliminated through specification testing, they fail to acknowledge those areas in economics, e.g. rational expectations macroeconomics and asset pricing, where researchers clearly distinguish between statistical and economic significance and where statistical testing plays a relatively minor role in model evaluation. In these areas models are treated as inherently misspecified and, consequently, are evaluated empirically by other methods than statistical tests. I also criticize McCloskey and Ziliak for their strong focus on the size of parameter estimates while neglecting the important question of how to obtain reliable estimates, and I argue that significance tests are useful tools in those cases where a statistical model serves as input in the quantification of an economic model. Finally, I provide a specific example from economics – asset return predictability – where the distinction between statistical and economic significance is well appreciated, but which also shows how statistical tests have contributed to our substantive economic understanding.