Time and Causality in the Social Sciences

Guillaume Wunsch, Federica Russo, Michel Mouchart and Renzo Orsi

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: This article deals with the role of time in causal models in the social sciences, in particular in structural causal modeling, in contrast to time-free models. The aim is to underline the importance of time-sensitive causal models. For this purpose, it also refers to the important discussion on time and causality in the philosophy of science, and examines how time is taken into account in demography and in economics as examples of social sciences. Temporal information is useful to the extent that it is placed in a correct causal structure, and thus further corroborating the causal mechanism or generative process explaining the phenomenon under consideration. Despite the fact that the causal ordering of variables is more relevant for explanatory purposes than the temporal order, the former should nevertheless take into account the time-patterns of causes and effects, as these are often episodes rather than single events. For this reason in particular, it is time to put time at the core of our causal models.

JEL-codes: B41 C01 C18 C30 C40 C51 E71 H30 J10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://amsacta.unibo.it/6511/1/WP1155.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Time and causality in the social sciences (2021)
Working Paper: Time and Causality in the Social Sciences (2020)
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:bol:bodewp:wp1155

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna ().