Essays
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The Experimental Approach to Studying Employers' Hiring Behavior - Gërxhani, Klarita
This essay advocates the use of experimental methods to study labor demand. Experimentation contributes to a better understanding of employers' hiring behavior by establishing what is cause and what is effect in observed behavior and allows for a better grip on the mechanisms underlying the hiring process. Given the difficulties in obtaining information from employers, experiments offer a fruitful alternative route to collecting information about the hiring process. The limited existing research provides a basis for new and promising steps into the future. To address research questions related to employers' hiring behavior, I propose combining experimental methods; implementing cross‐country experimental designs; conducting experiments on online labor markets; and using experimental control to explore the interaction between social context and biological factors. Setting these steps will give employers' decisions the attention they deserve when it comes to the important role that hiring plays in generating labor market (in)equalities. -
The Rise of Experimentation in Political Science - Rogowski, Ronald
Experimental research has expanded markedly in political science over the past 30 years: the number of experimental articles in the American Political Science Review has almost quintupled since the mid‐1980s. The main reason is intellectual: most scholars by now agree that random assignment of cases to “treatment” provides the most (perhaps the only) convincing evidence of causation. The second reason is technical advances that permit kinds of experimentation that, before about 2000, hardly existed: field, natural, and survey experiments. These have grown, while laboratory experiments have receded. While concerns remain about the external validity of these experiments, both journals and funding agencies will likely move increasingly in this direction.