There's plenty of disagreement about the value of economics research. Skeptics say that economists have predicted eight of the last five recessions, or zero of them. Economists and their fans point to supposed economic achievements such as stable, low inflation and (often) steady growth. In this blog post I'll use simple data science techniques to attempt to measure progress in economics research.

There are many potential ways to measure progress in research. For example,…

Econometrics is fundamental to many of the problems that data scientists care about, and it requires many skills. There's philosophical skill, for thinking about whether fixed effects or random effects models are more appropriate, for example, or what the direction of causality in a particular problem is. There's some coding, including knowing the right commands to interact with statistical programs like Stata or R, and how to interpret their output. There's the intuition to know which…