Causality and Exogeneity in Econometrics

This Special Issue of the Journal of Econometrics contains a selection of papers presented at the 12 th (EC) 2 conference on " Causality and Exogeneity in Econometrics " held in Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium in December 2001. (EC) 2 stands for European Conference of the Econom(etr)ics Community. The (EC) 2 conference series was established in 1990. The meetings are small-scale conferences, organized around a particular theme, and taking place over 2 days. An important feature of these conferences is that there are no parallel sessions. Participants contribute in the plenary programme or the poster sessions as presenters of papers and as discussants. The main purpose of the (EC) 2 conferences is to provide a forum where European researchers in Quantitative Economics and Econometrics can meet to discuss the results and progress of their most recent research. In particular, the intention of the (EC) 2 conferences is to promote and foster interaction between the junior participants and the senior invited researchers. The participation of younger researchers is encouraged by their presenting papers either in the plenary sessions or through the poster programme. Such poster sessions are scheduled during the main programme to provide an opportunity for younger researchers to describe and discuss their work directly with both senior and junior participants. Overall, 4 invited and 14 contributed papers were presented in the plenary sessions and more than 25 papers in the poster sessions. The meeting was attended by approximately 100 researchers. The Programme Chairs for this meeting were Jean-Pierre Urbain and Peter Boswijk with Luc Bauwens acting as Local Organizer. The theme of this conference and this Special Issue is " Causality and Exogeneity in Econo-metrics ". The novelty of this 2001 meeting was to bring together econometricians approaching this theme from various backgrounds such as macro-time series but also microeconometrics. This led to exchanges on these fundamental issues from leading researchers working in fields of econometrics that are usually quite separated and that also have accordingly fairly different views on the concepts and meanings of causality and exogeneity. The range of topics covered by the papers presented in both the plenary and poster sessions reflected this broadness. It is important to emphasize that this Special Issue is by no means a proceedings volume. Many more papers were presented during the conference than those that were accepted for publication after a reviewing process. The Editors first of all chose the papers on …