I asked a stupid question when meeting with a professor. I said, "Is it possible to publish something without empirics." In empirics, I meant testing the theory with real world data. It is of course possible, but not when you are just a graduate student.
My stupid question came from my frustration of locating data when doing my econometrics project. We social scientists are not like natural scientists: we rarely can run experiments on our subjects. All we can do is have nature do the experiment for us. The downside of it is we usually don't know where nature stores its experiment results.
No matter how elegant your theory is, it is nothing without empirics backing it up. Seeing the difficulty, many economists do it backward. Instead of constructing a model first and testing it later, some get a hold of a good dataset first and then figure out a way to use it.
I don't know which way suits me better, but let me tell you one thing: if I can have access to a really good exchange rate dataset, I will for sure beat it to death.
(Picture: The University of Edinburgh)
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