The value of case studies is the subject of some controversy among social scientists, particularly when they are used to test general theories. This has been a fruitful debate inasmuch as it has encouraged us to think more carefully about our methodological choices. However, I argue that the...

The on-going degradation of global public goods such as biodiversity and climate regulation due to the loss of natural tropical ecosystems has generated demand for evidence on the effectiveness of alternative policy instruments for environmental conservation. Economists initially responded with...

Recovery of causal relationships in data is an essential part of scholarly inquiry in the social sciences. This chapter discusses strategies that have been successfully used in urban and regional economics for recovering such causal relationships. Essential to any successful empirical inquiry is...

Armstrong et al. (2022) review the empirical methods used in the accounting literature to draw causal inferences. They document a growing number of studies using quasi-experimental methods and provide a critical perspective on this trend as well as the use of these methods in the accounting...

An introduction to data science or statistics shouldn’t involve proving complex theorems or memorizing obscure terms and formulas, but that is exactly what most introductory quantitative textbooks emphasize. In contrast, Thinking Clearly with Data focuses, first and foremost, on critical...