The price of the Swedish Bank has been awarded to three of the founding fathers of methods for experience, to assess the effects of public policies in employment and education.
53 e “Prize of the Swedish Bank in Economics in the memory of Alfred Nobel”, awarded Monday, October 11 in David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens, three researchers working at United States, act The failover of economic science, from the 1990s, in a “new spirit”, to resume the term Yannick Horty, professor at the University Gustave-Eiffel (Paris-Est): the one of a science dominated by the theory to a science based on experimentation, more in line with the model of so-called “hard” sciences such as physics or biology.
In other words, rather than constructing theoretical models of explanation of economic phenomena (such as the “theory of general equilibrium”, the “theory of contracts” or the “theory of incentives”, etc.) and of Confront them with real behaviors and terrain, the experimental approach tries to find, either in reality or in a reality created for the needs of the experience, lands on which economic measures are experienced as an increase (or a decline) of income, qualifications, training, taxes, labor, etc.
As for the test of a medicine medicine, the application of this variable on the experimental ground is compared with a “control” ground where it has not been applied (the “placebo” in the case medicine), which makes it possible to measure relative effects. This method is particularly useful for assessing public policies, whether to measure the effects or to try to predict them by conducting prior experiments.
“Natural Experiments”
David Card’s best known experience has been measuring the effect of the massive influx of Cuban refugees in 1980 on the job market in Miami (salaries, types of employment, unemployment) in Comparing the latter to employment markets from other cities having initially the same characteristics as Miami but did not have such an influx. In this case, this massive immigration had neither reduced wages nor gets unemployment.
It was in this case a “natural experience”, as Marie-Claire Villeval explains, professor at the University of Lyon-Saint-Etienne, that is to say two terrain having really existed. However, as M me Villeval, “natural experiences pose formidable methodological challenges because by definition, and unlike laboratory and field experiments, they are rarely reproducible.”.
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