If you don't know STS, it's a remarkable field that does empirical work to understand how technologies are created, how they affect society, and how society affects them.
The way you do empirical work is very debated nowadays in economics, so I won't express my own preferences on this.
"We say if you can't measure it, it's not a very good resolution because vague goals beget vague resolutions," says John Norcross, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Scranton, who has done empirical work evaluating resolution success.
His work had some influence on the deveopment of early modern science, though he cannot be said to have been doing empirical science, his work being much closer to mathematical analysis.
Many economists have since done empirical and theoretical work on how organizational governance can lower contract costs.
We do need to do careful conceptual work in order to provide a non-trivial definition of strength that is different from either the animal or rational definitions; but we also need to do careful empirical work in behavioral psychology in order to determine if people do, indeed, always act on the strongest of motives in the sense of strength that we develop.
However, not until Lazear's (2004, 2005) work did empirical tests directly confront the unobserved entrepreneurial ability that drives the models of Rosen, Schultz, Murphy et al., Romer and Lucas.
The estimation methods should also control for factors such as selection on unobserved variables and endogeneity". This paper is a tour through Behrman's amazingly interesting research and, at the same time, a lecture on how to do good empirical work.
Why Do Empirical Legal Scholarship?
