The model described in the post isn't really an econometric model, for a couple of reasons. First, the underlying theoretical model simply throws the kitchen si

The model described in the post isn't really an econometric model, for a couple of reasons. First, the underlying theoretical model simply throws the kitchen sink on the RHS of the equation, with little to no economic motivation given for why the chosen independent variables were hypothesized to explain the variation in the dependent variable. Secondly, only a tiny fraction of economists today actually use any statistical learning methods. Economists still don't do much prediction -- as in "predicting tomorrow, today", or even "predicting today, today" -- both of which differ from forecasting. On the other hand, microeconomic fields like game theory, labor and industrial organization often use models that are extremely rigorous in terms of the underlying economic theory, as well as with the econometric analysis, and interpretation of the results. (see: Microeconometrics) So to the blog poster that just hired an econometrician: you didn't, you hired a statistician or computational learning fella, which from the sounds of it is working out great. So my apologies for being a stickler here, but the post didn't have any real economic theory behind it. Just some data and the results of computations on that data.