I very much liked one of ECONJEFF's posts last week, titled "Epistemological Irritation of the Day".
The bulk of it reads:
" "A direct test of the hypothesis is looking for significance in the relationship between [one variable] and {another variable]."
No, no, no, no, no. Theory makes predictions about signs of coefficients, not about significance levels, which also depend on minor details such as the sample size and the amount of variation in the independent variable of interest present in the data."He was right to be upset - and see his post for the punchline!
Amen. I'd like a dollar for every time I've made this comment.
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