Strange, I thought I answered the spirit of the question. You asked what defines the current "thought" of the field, and how it views empiricism, no?
Or are you really curious about how undergraduates are taught, despite the distinction between the undergraduate curriculum and the professional researcher's view? My introductory economics course used Mankiw's textbook. If I remember correctly, it didn't even use calculus. Imagine a university physics course doing that. I think of that more like high school level. Come to think of it, AP Economics probably would have let me skip that class.
Looking over at my bookshelf, I see Wooldridge's "Introductory Econometrics". That's a pretty good one, with plenty of empirical work. I can't spot my macroeconomics textbook, but I remember it evaluating each model by how consistent its predictions were with observed behavior.
... it occurs to me that someone ought to update Wooldridge's exercises for R-language or Python ...
Or are you really curious about how undergraduates are taught, despite the distinction between the undergraduate curriculum and the professional researcher's view? My introductory economics course used Mankiw's textbook. If I remember correctly, it didn't even use calculus. Imagine a university physics course doing that. I think of that more like high school level. Come to think of it, AP Economics probably would have let me skip that class.
Looking over at my bookshelf, I see Wooldridge's "Introductory Econometrics". That's a pretty good one, with plenty of empirical work. I can't spot my macroeconomics textbook, but I remember it evaluating each model by how consistent its predictions were with observed behavior.
... it occurs to me that someone ought to update Wooldridge's exercises for R-language or Python ...