Traditionally, students of economics have often been told that it is a non-experimental science. Using a quantitative and qualitative analysis of introductory economics textbooks, we track the historical evolution of this rhetoric from 1970 to the present day. We find that anti-experimental...

Traditionally, students of economics have often been told that it is a non-experimental science. Using a quantitative and qualitative analysis of introductory economics textbooks, we track the historical evolution of this rhetoric from 1970 to the present day. We find that anti-experimental...

Traditionally, economists often argued experiments play little or no useful role in our science. This paper employs a novel approach to track the historical evolution of this doctrine from 1970 to 2019, by constructing a dataset of 278 introductory economics textbooks. Quantitative and...