Not-so-Natural Experiments in History

Christian Dippel and Bryan Leonard

Journal of Historical Political Economy, 2021, vol. 1, issue 1, 1-30

Abstract: This paper compares the role of cliometrics — broadly defined to include economics, political science, and other social sciences — before and after the "credibility revolution" of the late 1990s. The contributions of cliometrics that led to the 1993 Nobel Prize were due primarily to a combination of quantification and economic theory with in-depth historical knowledge. After the credibility revolution, much of cliometrics shifted toward "natural experiments," especially in papers published in general-interest journals. We argue that this shift comes with certain trade-offs between statistical and contextual evidence, and that the refereeing process currently makes these trade-offs steeper in historical settings than in other observational-data settings. We also argue, however, that historical settings offer particularly actionable ways of flattening these trade-offs to ensure the "clio" in cliometrics stays alive and well.

Keywords: Cliometrics; natural experiments; empirical methodology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jnlhpe:112.115.00000001

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