Harry G. Johnson, The Monetary Approach to Balance-of-Payments Theory, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 7, No. 2, Supplement: Outlook for the Securities Industry (Mar., 1972), pp. 1555-1572

One of the most vexing areas of business finance is empirical validation of theory. Many problems arise that the investigator cannot avoid. The purpose of this paper is to define a class of problems that can be avoided but that have caused many previous investigators difficulty, even though they may not have realized it. In what follows, the concept of dimensional analysis, borrowed from the physical sciences, is introduced. Then dimensional analysis is extended to the interpretation of estimated regression coefficients.