Daughters, Diplomats, and Death

How Economists Use Natural Experiments to Decipher Our World
A collection of eye-opening natural experiments, showing how economists uncover cause-and-effect relationships and reveal insights about our world.

Does having a daughter change how a congressperson votes? How did a nineteenth-century doctor help discover germs? Is it better to go first or second in a penalty shootout? Why dont diplomats pay their parking tickets? Do leaders really matter? These are all questions economists ask. Some of these questions are serious, others less consequential. But all are interestingand can be answered by way of the natural experiment.

A natural experiment is an event in the real world that neatly divides people into a treatment and control groupand it is one of the greatest tools in the economists toolkit. In Daughters, Diplomats, and Death, Patrick Gourley discusses why and how economists have leveraged this powerful