Natural Experiments — When the World Randomizes for You
Sometimes you can't run an experiment, but the world runs one for you. A policy change, a lottery, an arbitrary cutoff, a quirk of timing — these can assign a "treatment" in a way that's effectively random, letting you recover experimental-grade causal evidence from observational data. Natural experiments are the most ingenious tools in causal inference, and the quasi-experimental methods built on them (instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity) are how economists and data scientists establish causation when a controlled trial is impossible.
Sometimes the world runs the experiment for you — a policy change, a lottery, an arbitrary cutoff assigns treatment as-if-randomly. The three canonical designs (instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity) that recover experiment-grade credibility from observational data, and their assumptions.