These five lectures were originally delivered in a short course for the Netwerk Algemene en Kwantitatieve Economie (known by the acronym NAKE and rendered into English as the Netherlands Network of Economics). Twice each year the Network, which is a consortium of economics departments of Dutch universities, invites three or four foreign economists to teach students from the various member universities in five-day courses on subjects close to their own research and to consult with graduate students on the students' research. I was privileged to be invited to deliver lectures on methodology at the University of Nijmegen on 8–12 December 1997. This volume is a lightly edited version of those lectures.

These lectures do not aim to be a systematic treatise on methodology. Seven hours of lectures could hardly be that. Instead, they aim to introduce the economically sophisticated student (and I hope the professional economist), who may never have consciously reflected on the methods of the discipline he or she practices, to a few of the most pressing issues of methodology in a single area of economics – empirical macroeconomics. Although these lectures are explicitly concerned with empirical macroeconomics, I hope that they nevertheless prove of interest to economists working in other areas as well.

Most economic methodologists divide into two camps. On the one hand, they regard traditional methodology as prescriptive, directing the practice of economists on the basis of philosophical first principles.