Economic experiments interact with economic theories in various ways. First of all they are used to test economic theories. However, they can neither confirm nor falsify them in a strict sense. They rather inform us about the range of applicability, the robustness and the predictive power of a theory. Furthermore, economic experiments discover and isolate phenomena and challenge economic theori...

Economic theories of voting argue that party popularity and vote are heavily influenced by the performance of the economy. Research supporting these theories typically employs crosssectional data, however, making inferences about causal direction questionable. This paper evaluates the micro-foundations of economic theories of voting and party popularity using extensive panel data. We explore th...

This paper develops new methods for testing structural hypotheses based on tests for parameter instability. It is shown that when the structure is of a particular type and its parameters change, predictable patterns of stability and instability in certain empirical relationships will result. These empirical characteristics are contingent on the type of structure involved. The paper develops dif...