Economic Theory and Causal Inference
HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSPHY OF ECONOMICS, Uskali Mäki, ed., Forthcoming
THE HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, Dov Gabbay, Paul Thagard, and John Woods, eds., Elsevier/North-Holland, Amsterdam, Forthcoming
47 Pages Posted: 18 Sep 2006
Abstract
The article explores the relationship between the main approaches to causality in economics dividing them into reductionist and structuralist accounts. The approaches of the Cowles Commission, Granger-causality, causality as invariance under interventions, and graph-theoretic approaches to causality are considered with special attention to how they relate causal inference to economic theory.
Keywords: causality, causal inference, economic theory, econometrics, Cowles Commission, graph theory, invariance, Granger-causality, exogeneity, superexogeneity, structural vector autoregressions, Lucas critique
JEL Classification: B41, B16, B23, C10
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation