This article summarizes a conceptual framework and simple mathematical methods of estimating the probability that one event was a necessary cause of another, as interpreted by lawmakers. We show that the fusion of observational and experimental data can yield informative bounds that, under...

Causality is a notion that occurs often in economics. In using the words ‘cause’ and ‘effect,’ economists seek to distinguish causation from association, recognizing that causes are responsible for producing effects, whereas noncausal associations are not. The identification of causes is...

We welcome Professor Pearl’s comment on our original article, Dawid et al. Our focus there on the distinction between the “Effects of Causes†(EoC) and the “Causes of Effects†(CoE) concerned two fundamental problems, one a theoretical challenge in statistics and the...

Law and science share many perspectives, but they also differ in important ways. While much of science is concerned with the effects of causes (EoC), relying upon evidence accumulated from randomized controlled experiments and observational studies, the problem of inferring the causes of effects...

Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme is among the largest social protection programmes in Africa and has been promoted as a model for the continent. This paper analyses the political drivers of the programme, arguing that elite commitment can be understood in the context of shifts within...

In this paper we consider four factors that shaped the development of migration policy intended to protect the rights of vulnerable migrant women. They are: the role players in the policy change process, the debates that shaped the policy change, the role that research played and the political...

Brandstätter, Gigerenzer and Hertwig (2006) put forward the priority heuristic (PH) as a fast and frugal heuristic for decisions under risk. According to the PH, individuals do not make trade-offs between gains and probabilities, as proposed by expected utility models such as cumulative...

It has been repeatedly shown that in decisions under time constraints, individuals predominantly use noncompensatory strategies rather than complex compensatory ones. We argue that these findings might be due not to limitations of cognitive capacity but instead to limitations of information...

This study pursues two main objectives. Firstly, we sought to unravel the key factors at the origin of the educational crisis in Cameroon. Second, we sought to identify the major causes of the mismatch between educational attainment and the job market. The study reveals the educational sector...

We use process tracing to test the hypothesis of a specific strategy in the process of discussing and enacting a policy agenda. Our case study is Colombia, where the trace of events and milestones allow us to detect the strategy followed in implementing neoliberal reforms during the 1980s-2000s....