It&#x27;s my understanding that your right that Chicagoan&#x27;s are known for their love of math but not necessarily their love of empiricism.  However they almost exclusively use  RBC(real business cycle) models which are created based on stylized assumptions about human behavior(always rational, lives forever, always able to borrow) and then the parameters are played with until it fits some data in the real world(usually the parameters are completely unrealistic).  And they make pretty terrible predictions.  To my knowledge they aren&#x27;t ever used to actually make any predictions about the economy.  People who do predictions like the(CBO, FED, IMF etc..) use old school Keynesian-style aggregate models of the economy.<p>Larry Summers said of RBC models<p>1. RBC models use parameter values that are almost certainly wrong,<p>2. RBC models make predictions about prices that are completely, utterly wrong, and<p>3. The &quot;technology shocks&quot; that RBC models assume drive the business cycle have never been found.
(They assume that during recessions we just forget how to be efficient.)