Daughters, Diplomats, and Death

A collection of eye-opening natural experiments, showing how economists uncover cause-and-effect relationships and reveal insights about our world.

Does having a daughter change how a congressperson votes? How did a nineteenth-century doctor help discover germs? Is it better to go first or second in a penalty shootout? Why don’t diplomats pay their parking tickets? Do leaders really matter? These are all questions economists ask. Some of these questions are serious, others less consequential. But all are interesting—and can be answered by way of the natural experiment.

A natural experiment is an event in the real world that neatly divides people into a treatment and control group—and it is one of the greatest tools in the economist’s toolkit. In Daughters, Diplomats, and Death, Patrick Gourley discusses why and how economists have leveraged this powerful method to answer questions that were long thought unanswerable.

In the vein of Freakonomics, Nudge, and The Tipping Point, the book takes the reader on a lively and engaging tour of some of the most fascinating natural experiments, explaining how they work, how they help social scientists answer questions, and what conclusions they reached. The experiments illuminate a wide range of timely issues in health, education, reproductive issues, and the environment, lending rich and much-needed nuance to the complex debates that shape today’s headlines.