Causal Parameters and Policy Analysis in Economics: A Twentieth Century Retrospective

James Heckman

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2000, vol. 115, issue 1, 45-97

Abstract: The major contributions of twentieth century econometrics to knowledge were the definition of causal parameters within well-defined economic models in which agents are constrained by resources and markets and causes are interrelated, the analysis of what is required to recover causal parameters from data (the identification problem), and clarification of the role of causal parameters in policy evaluation and in forecasting the effects of policies never previously experienced. This paper summarizes the development ofthese ideas by the Cowles Commission, the response to their work by structural econometricians and VAR econometricians, and the response to structural and VAR econometrics by calibrators, advocates of natural and social experiments, and by nonparametric econometricians and statisticians.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (211)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/003355300554674 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Causal Parameters and Policy Analysis in Economcs: A Twentieth Century Retrospective (1999)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:115:y:2000:i:1:p:45-97.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().