Curriculum How Economists Know Things: Evidence & Experiments
How Economists Know Things: Evidence & Experiments
The toolkit economists use to separate cause from coincidence - randomised trials, natural experiments, cutoffs, forecasts, big data - and the pitfalls that come with each.
- Theory and Evidence: How Economics Tests Ideas How economists move from theories about behaviour to evidence about the real world, and why finding causes is the hardest part. 📄 Read-aloud
- Randomised Controlled Trials in Economics How economists borrowed the randomised trial from medicine to test policies, and what the 2019 Nobel prize-winning research on poverty found. 📄 Read-aloud
- Natural Experiments How economists find situations where chance or policy quirks create something like a randomised experiment, and the famous studies that used them. 📄 Read-aloud
- Difference-in-Differences, Explained in Words A widely used method that compares changes over time between an affected group and an unaffected one, and the assumption it depends on. 📄 Read-aloud
- Regression Discontinuity: Learning From Cutoffs How rules with sharp cutoffs, such as test score thresholds and class size limits, let economists compare people just above and just below the line. 📄 Read-aloud
- Instrumental Variables in Plain Language A method that uses an outside factor to isolate the part of a variation that behaves like an experiment, illustrated by the Vietnam draft lottery. 📄 Read-aloud
- How Economists Know Things: Checkpoint 1 Quick checkpoint - five questions on counterfactuals, randomised trials, natural experiments and other research designs. 5 questions
- Laboratory Experiments in Economics How economists test theories with controlled experiments in the lab, what Vernon Smith's market experiments showed, and the debate over how far lab results apply. 📄 Read-aloud
- Why Economic Forecasts Often Miss Why predicting recessions and growth is so hard, how forecasts should be read, and what economists learned after 2008. 📄 Read-aloud
- Replication and Publication Bias Why some published findings fail to hold up when repeated, how the bias toward publishing striking results distorts evidence, and what reforms are helping. 📄 Read-aloud
- Big Data and New Ways to Measure the Economy How economists now use satellite images, online prices, card transactions and tax records to measure things traditional statistics miss. 📄 Read-aloud
- Will It Work Here Too? External Validity and Scaling Up Why a programme that succeeds in one study may not work elsewhere or at a larger scale, and how economists try to judge when results travel. 📄 Read-aloud
- History and Case Studies as Evidence How economic history and detailed case studies complement statistical methods, and what they can reveal that experiments cannot. 📄 Read-aloud
- Machine Learning in Economics How economists use machine learning to measure poverty from satellite images, predict outcomes and find patterns, and why prediction is not the same as causation. 📄 Read-aloud
- Synthetic Control: Building a Comparison From Many How economists create an artificial "twin" of a place from a weighted mix of others to estimate the effect of a policy or event when no single good comparison exists. 📄 Read-aloud