The titling study’s appeal was methodological as much as substantive

Evidence

Economists who praised and publicized the study of the effects of the property titling program in Peru found it valuable not only for what it discovered about property rights but for the way in which it made the discovery: by using the titling program to carry out a sophisticated natural experiment (Krueger 2003). A study that merely compared the hours worked by people who had formal ownership of their houses with those who had not received title could not produce convincing evidence of the effect of formal ownership on employment. The extra hours that formal owners worked might be due to any number of unobserved factors. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1937

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Field’s titling study results may reflect political context rather than property effects — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1929; Methodological difficulty justifies rather than excuses studying personality and politics — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1200

Broader Connections

• Methodological difficulty justifies rather than excuses studying personality and politics #corroborates (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1200