Assessing causal economic explanations

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in causal realism in the methodology of economics. Some of this literature reflects a strong scepticism about the existence of sharp event-regularities or 'laws' in the economic realm and, accordingly, about the prospects for the covering-law approach to explanation that dominates modern economic theory. This paper outlines an alternative, causal, approach to economic explanation and attempts to answer an important question often asked about it: how should causal economic explanations be assessed?