http://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/minnesota#post-78016

Minnesota Macro started off with Prescott, Sargent, and Neil Wallace in the 1980s. Prescott used to be affiliated with Carnegie-Mellon University, which was the place where Kamien and Schwartz started disseminating math econ related to dynamic-programming applications in the late 60s and throughout the 70s. Bob Lucas was at CMU, too.

At CMU they insisted about promoting rational expectations due to Lucas in the 1970s, and because of their close connection to Rochester (Barro and McKenzie were there), they started caring about putting general-equilibrium elements in macro models, what people today call micro-foundations. With micro foundations there is a theory of value in the model, which derives the value (competitive price, or shadow price) of each good through the model's fundamentals. This element, topped with rational expectations, would mean that economic decisions reflect an economy's deep parameters (preferences and resource constraints), since economic agents make no systematic errors.

In the 1980s Kydland and Prescott wrote their first applied business-cycle model along these lines (their 1992 paper) and later Bob King and Plosser in Rochester launched a whole crusade regarding RBC models. Meanwhile, Prescott and Sargent in Minnesota, started a very intense teaching of such models and of of recursive methods at the PhD level. That training (one should look at Sargent's books throughout that period, and also books by Lucas, including the Stokey-Lucas book), led to an army of students from Minnesota, who started dominating in the 1990s and who, eventually, took key editorial positions (Randy Wright, Victor Rios Rull, Krusell, are just three examples, there are many Minnesota graduates along the RBC line of research in the 1980s and the 1990s).

Minnesota student rise to editorial influence and some extreme views such that "estimation does not matter", are two categories of reasons why Minnesotan macroeconomists are hated by many. Nevertheless, many Minnesotan macroeconomists are glorified RAs, too, which gives more food for attack. Finally sticking too much to the neoclassical paradigm and its extensions (even to Aiyagari-Huggett type extensions), still led to some dead ends and frustration.

Since that approach became popular in the 1990s and still was so in the beginning of the 2000s, and since powerful editors were in key positions, macroeconomists working in central banks had to pretend that they used micro-foundations. So, the whole applied macro crowd looked for intellectual leaders to point the way of doing their business-cycle analysis while looking at output gaps and propagation mechanisms with assumed price frictions, etc.

Those "gurus" who took away the frustration were definitely Woodford and Gali. They inspire dozens of thousands of people who work in central banks. The way this mixup of microfoundations with ad-hoc assumptions about frictions in price time series has evolved, is a mixup of models that are often not understood even by their own creators, and a mixup of editors and referees who are quite confused about which camp to follow, what is a good strategic stand to take, etc.

Ironically, Bob King, who is a leading editing figure of the JME since decades, gradually allowed for this mixup in approaches. With Bayesian estimation of models, black-box modeling keeps evolving to black box of black box. Nowadays we have a very confusing every-day life of macro research and practice. Legitimately, this invites criticism by other subfields in economics about macroeconomists. But macroeconomists have never been able to convince about solid scientific approach or discipline.

发表几点看法

1 一个思想上的创新真正能变成学派，必须通过按照一条思路训练大批学生才能实现，学生开心吗？没人知道；
2 宏观模型不喜欢ad hoc的假设，但也离不开ad hoc的假设
3 不管宏观怎么变，VAR以及SVAR还是必须要会，因为预测总是非做不可的。