Experiments Outside the Laboratory as a history of Econometrics

Abstract

On the one hand, macroeconometrics and the Cowles Commission (CC) approach have been judiciously analyzed by historians of economics. On the other hand, microeconometrics, applied economic fields and experiments outside the laboratory have just recently started to be dealt with in the history of economic thought community. As a consequence, the history of experiments in econometrics, up to the present moment, relies on the narratives of acting researchers or incipient works of historians - most based on bibliometric data. The result is a hodgepodge of disconnected narratives, suggesting that experiments have been imported from foreign disciplines and, since then, are conquering econometrics. However, the period from the 1970s to the 1990s is widely overlooked in these narratives. As a result, the storytellers have been implementing ad hoc assumptions rather than historical evidence to ensure coherence to their expositions. A review of the blind spot of the narrative exposes at least three connections between experiments outside the laboratory and pre-1970s econometrics: instrumental variables, "measurement without theory" and external validity. Thus, the history of experiments in econometrics should be reconsidered as a history of econometrics.