... and the expertise they possess. First documenting their growth bibliometrically, this article aims to illuminate the origins, content, and contexts of quasi-experimental research designs, which seek natural experiments to justify causal inference. To highlight lines of continuity and discontinuity in the transition...

... the framework to discuss “Nature's experiments” and will allow us to discuss measurement outside the laboratory more generally. Aldrich, J. 1989 . Autonomy. In History and Methodology of Econometrics , edited by N. de Marchi and C. Gilbert, 15 –34. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1994 . Haavelmo's...

... primitive probabilities based on experience of statistical evidence, and primitive a priori probabilities based on a more general and less precise kind of experience, inherited by the human race through evolution. Given primitive probabilities, no other devices than the rules of calculus of probabilities...

... of the transfer experience itself.” Tendler’s lucid analysis of the nature of this “augmented deŒnition” of development knowledge, as she calls it (10), pointed to the very rationale for development assistance when the assisting actor’s Œrst move should be in fact to admit that it knows as much...

...Daniela Parisi This essay focuses on Francesco Vito (1902–1968), one of the most important Italian economists and a contributor to an extensive, thorough debate in Catholic social thinking, a debate at times accompanied and followed by exacting and solid experience in the real world, in an effort...

...) for development economics. Beyond RCTs per se, Matthew T. Panhans and John D. Singleton (2017) have documented the rise of quasi-experimental approaches using natural experiments over the last several decades. As they argue, this represents a shift in primacy from [a priori] models to methods (130...

... as a sequence of moves made by agents in response to various interests outside nature. Pickering attempts to reconstruct the temporal process of science in which agents, equipment, and ideas, nature, experiments, interests, colleagues, laboratories, accounts...

... on the recent history of economics, such as examining the rise of natural experiments (with Matthew Panhans) and a history of the Committee on the Status of Women in Economics (with Cléo Chassonery-Zaïgouche and Beatrice Cherrier), he studies school choice policies and the economics of school boards. John...

... . Lavoisier. In Nature,Experiment, and the Sciences , edited by Trevor Levere and William Shea, 207 -23. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Maas, Harro. 2001 . Mechanical Reasoning: Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics. Ph.D. diss. , Amsterdam University. Machamer, Peter. 1998 . Galileo's...

... . 2005 . “ A Natural Experiment in Monetary Policy Covering Three Episodes of Growth and Decline in the Economy and the Stock Market .” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19 , no. 4 : 145 – 50 . Friedman Milton Friedman Rose . 1998 . Two Lucky People—Memoirs . Chicago : University...

... Osterman calls this aspect of Myth “a damning indictment of how labor economics has been practiced over the past three decades” (1995, 839). Card and Krueger offer their own empir- ical approach—“natural experiment” and “model-free empiricism”—as evidentially superior to earlier econometric studies...

... of experiments that Nature is steadily turning out from her own enormous laboratory, and which we merely watch as passive observers. (14) In case of the first class of experiments, to isolate a selected set of fac- tors, x1, . . . , xn, from the other influences,x n + 1, xn + 2, . . . , we first...

... variables whose legitimacy may be argued on substantive grounds. This search parallels the popularity of identifi cation of natural experi- ments in microeconomics, which as shown by James Heckman (1996) is a form of instrumental variables estimation. One famous example is Daron Acemoglu, Simon...

... as shared between the prince and the common man, Schröder came to differ on the issue of labor-saving technology and its use in manufacturing workhouses. Despite championing absolutism, Schröder related studies of natural science, technology, and society in more integrated and less hierarchical ways than...

... to two well-defined methodologies. One involved “emphasizing the lessons or maxims that could be drawn, more or less systematically, from historical experience, the other concentrating on those constant ‘springs’ of human nature, those psychological propensities that seemed not to vary greatly across...

... Autonomy and Relevance: Economic Sciences in Berlin—a Natural Experiment .” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 51 : 22 – 32 . Düppe Till . 2016 . “ Koopmans in the Soviet Union: A Travel Report of the Summer of 1965 .” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 38 , no. 1...

... for a postwar Europe, for example. If disguised unemployment was a theory falsely supported by gradual substitutions of other inputs for agricultural labor, Schultz needed a kind of natural experiment that was much more sudden, so as to exclude 36 Paul Burnett confounding factor substitutions. A true test...

... was the growing ability of empirical economists to recognize and properly analyze situations in which “human institutions or the forces of nature” had created “informative natural or quasi-experiments.” Many economists, however, see in Angrist and Pischke’s credibility rev- olution not only a change...

.... Kuznets was president of the American Statistical Association in 1949. 118  Marcel Boumans and in social science and its consequence for the reliability of the sta- tistics: in natural science, “where controlled experiment is possible, the experimenter produces his own data—in accordance with his...

... celebration of raw experience: “It is about nature that I am going to write,” Diderot announced, and to do so properly, “Iwill let the thoughts flow from my pen, in the same order in which the objects present themselves to my reflection.” He identified his subject as “that phenomenon that seems to occupy...