Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences

Thad Dunning is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University and a research fellow at Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He has written on a range of methodological topics, including impact evaluation, econometric corrections for selection effects and multi-method research in the social sciences, and his first book, Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 2008), won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association.

• 1. Introduction: why natural experiments?; Part I. Discovering Natural Experiments: 2. Standard natural experiments; 3. Regression-discontinuity designs; 4. Instrumental-variables designs; Part II. Analyzing Natural Experiments: 5. Simplicity and transparency: keys to quantitative analysis; 6. Sampling processes and standard errors; 7. The central role of qualitative evidence; Part III. Evaluating Natural Experiments: 8. How plausible is as-if random?; 9. How credible is the model?; 10. How relevant is the intervention?; Part IV. Conclusion: 11. Building strong research designs through multi-method research.

'Dunning has produced a useful and remarkably accessible guide for social scientists of all sorts. I especially like his guide to discovering natural experiments.' J. D. Angrist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology