Historical natural experiments: bridging economics and economic history

Abstract

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Persistence studies: a new kind of economic history?

“…Thus, in this approach, history is interesting mostly, if not exclusively, for its long-run consequences rather than in itself; in the felicitous expression by Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2017), 'history casts its long shadows over the present'. Indeed, Cantoni and Yuchtman (2021) distinguish these '[natural] experiments to understand contemporary outcomes' from 'experiments to understand history' (i.e., the re-vamped and re-named "traditional" cliometric history (Cioni, Federico and Vasta 2021a)) and from 'experiments to understand economics', which use historical data to test models or to estimate parameters such as the very successful paper by Broda and Weinstein (2006) on the positive effects of the increase in product variety in the United States imports on economic growth.…”

“…Other scholars have studied different outcomes and events, but the inspiration has remained the one introduced by these seminal works. In the following years, this approach has attracted a lot of attention among economists, as shown by the proliferation of survey articles, which cover exhaustively the scientific achievements of PS (Nunn 2009(Nunn , 2020Spolaore and Wacziarg 2013;Ashraf and Galor 2018;Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2020;Cantoni and Yuchtman 2021;Voth 2021).…”

The Federal Reserve’s Response to the Global Financial Crisis and Its Long-Term Impact: An Interrupted Time-Series Natural Experimental Analysis

“…Although monetarist studies, which determine the impact of monetary policy by identifying historical exogenous variations in money supply, may be characterized as "historical natural experiments" (Cantoni & Yuchtman, 2021;Sims, 2010; see also Friedman, 2005), they are not natural experiments in the sense of the definition provided above. This is because counterfactuals of monetarist studies are specified only implicitly by the studies' identifying assumptions, not explicitly by the existence of observable control groups.…”

The Role of Cliometrics in History and Economics

“…Other studies have explored historical questions with more traditional experimental economics techniques (Wilson, et al 2012). Cantoni and Yuchtman (2020) provide an overview of the intersection of economic history and experimental economics.…”