New research points to a substantial shift in the focus and methods of economics scholarship. Work by Prashant Garg, a postdoctoral researcher at Bocconi University, and Thiemo Fetzer, economics professor at the University of Warwick, finds that causal claims in the economics literature have risen sharply. In 1990, 7.7 per cent of the claims made in the literature were causal; by 2023, that figure had reached 32.6 per cent.

The research further suggests that papers containing more causal claims are more likely to receive citations and to appear in the discipline's "top five" journals — a widely used term for the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies.

The direction of travel is one the discipline has been debating for decades under the label of the "credibility revolution" — the turn, dating to the late 1980s and 1990s, toward quasi-experimental designs such as natural experiments, difference-in-differences, and regression discontinuity, which are intended to isolate cause and effect rather than correlation. The label was popularised by Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke, and the approach's standing was recognised in 2021, when the Nobel memorial prize in economics went to David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.

The subject matter of the field appears to be changing as well. As a proportion of the literature, research on econometric theory, monetary policy, and corporate governance has slumped, while papers on development, crime, and gender have increased. The growth of development research runs alongside the prominence of randomised controlled trials in that field, recognised by the 2019 Nobel memorial award to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. Possible explanations include changing intellectual interests, or demand-side pressures such as policymaker priorities and external funding.

The stakes of these shifts extend beyond methodology. Publication in the "top five" weighs heavily in hiring and promotion in academic economics, a centrality that critics including James Heckman have argued gives those journals outsized influence over what research gets done. The methodological turn has also drawn criticism of its own, with economists debating whether the pursuit of clean identification narrows the questions asked and the generalisability of the answers. By quantifying trends that have largely been discussed qualitatively, the new study gives that debate firmer numbers to work from.

The findings were reported by Harvey Nriapia at the Financial Times. The item was published by Marginal Revolution, the economics blog, under the title "How economics is changing".